A brief description of what this material is, what it is not, and what a reader may do with it. Written to be read once rather than skipped past.
Reading these pages requires no account, no consent and no agreement. What follows describes the work and states the permissions attached to it.Simulated, partial and cosmetic are judgements arrived at through the tests described on the method page, not measurements read from a game's files. They describe what one tester could establish through repeated observation on an unmodified installation, and a reader who runs the same tests and reaches a different conclusion is doing exactly what this publication hopes for.
The classification is not a verdict on the whole game and is never folded into the score. A cosmetic sky can sit on an excellent game and frequently does.
Cycle lengths, detection distances, drying times and track lifetimes were taken by hand with a stopwatch during ordinary play. They are reproducible within a small margin and they are not precise engineering values. Where a figure derives from a limited number of trials, the trial count is printed beside it so that its weight is visible.
A review score for the entire game: design, writing, structure, options and craft. It cannot be reconstructed from the weather assessment and should not be read as a rating of the sky. Two games in the current file score highly with weak weather systems, and one scores modestly while carrying an excellent one.
Measurements are more useful shared than withheld. Any figure, table or classification published here may be quoted, reproduced or built upon in any medium, provided this publication is named and the method page is linked so that a reader can see how the observation was produced. No permission is required and none would be refused.
Reproducing the written reviews in full is a separate matter and is not permitted. Quote what you need, take the figures freely, and do not republish an article whole.
The images throughout this site were produced for it and are not screen captures from the games discussed. They are thematic accompaniment, they depict no real product, and no observation or classification anywhere on this site rests on them. Nothing visible in an illustration should be treated as evidence for a claim in the text beside it.
Titles and studio names appear for identification in the course of criticism. No endorsement, association or approval is implied in either direction, and no trademark belonging to any party is claimed by this publication.
Every game logged here was bought at retail with this publication's own funds. No copy has been provided by a developer, publisher or platform, nothing has been commissioned or funded, and no article has been shown to anybody outside this desk before publication. There is no advertising, no sponsored content, no affiliate arrangement and no storefront link on any page.
Weather systems are patched frequently and the changes are often absent from any changelog, so an observation that was correct in one version may be wrong in the next. Tests are repeated and reviews are annotated with the date and both results, and where a patch corrects something criticised here the original criticism stays visible, because the behaviour at release was real.
Beyond that, this material is offered as one tester's careful work rather than as a warranty. Anybody making a purchase or a design decision on the strength of a classification here should confirm it in their own installation.
These pages are static files served without a database or an application layer. They may nonetheless be unreachable during maintenance, hosting changes or failures beyond this desk's control, and no undertaking is offered about uptime, the permanence of any address, or how long a given article remains available.
Links on this site point only to its own pages. Where an article mentions a tool, a community patch or a discussion, it describes it rather than linking to it, because we would rather not direct readers to destinations whose content and privacy behaviour we cannot inspect or vouch for.
This site carries no address, no telephone number, no form and no submission mechanism, by intention rather than omission. Nothing can be pitched or embargoed here. Corrections arrive because readers repeat these tests publicly and describe how, which has amended the procedure three times and remains the only channel.
This page may be revised as the publication changes. Any revision takes effect when it appears and is not applied retroactively to anybody's earlier reading, which — since nothing here is agreed to in the first place — is a formality rather than a safeguard.
