First of all, hello to all of you! This is my first post, so I want to ask everyone to bear with me as I don't know my way around the forum yet. I searched a bit, but could not find what I wanted to know, so if this has been discussed somewhere, I kindly ask a moderator to point me in the right direction and take the liberty to do whatever he/she sees fit with this thread. Just so you know where I stand: I do not have rFactor2 because I have no rig to drive on. From all I've read and seen, this is the most realistic simulator out there, and playing on a keyboard just would not do it at all. So until I can afford something, I am content to stalk the Studio 397 website and marvel at all the development I see being done. But what I was unable to determine is how the day-night cycle works. Specifically - is the duration of the night and the incidence of the Sun generic, or does it take into account the position of the respective circuit on the globe and the day of the year? As you are aware, that would drastically change things, as for instance circuits at high latitudes would experience near total daylight in summer, or very long nights in winter. That said, does the weather system take into account any of the above? Again, that would hugely influence the weather one could expect when driving. Or, is it possible to use real weather plug-ins to model the in-game conditions at a certain location?
For lighting, sunrise and sunset yes, not generic. Altitude makes a difference to the lighting, unsure if it has a drastic effect on engine performance though as I haven't tested it thoroughly. There are plugins available that access realtime weather for circuits and changes when it does for real. Search for "realtime weather" on the forum. Day to night cycle is in realtime but you can set it to be accelerated up to 60x realtime.
To my knowledge the real position of the track on the earth globe (longitude and latitude) is correctly coded in the track and day- night cycle is calculated correctly for that position. But to my knowledge the day of the year is fix coded in the track too. So the day- night cycle is correct for that day of the year coded in the track.
On the physics side I don't think atmospheric pressure is accounted for. The framework is there, it's just not implemented at this stage.
Interesting. Then if this is the case, it means the framework for the day-night cycle is solid enough to allow for the day of the year to be taken into account as well, in future iterations of the game. Obviously, this looks like a gimmick in comparison to other, more important concerns for development, but when the end goal is realism in the utmost, no aspect is too menial or unimportant overall. Wow, I had not even thought of that. I know that altitude and atmospheric pressure influences the performance of the engine. I was under the simplistic impression that the higher you go, the less efficient the engine gets, but after reading a little on the subject, apparently there are fluctuations depending on engine speed as well. Fuel efficiency also varies, so overall, this looks like a very complex thing to simulate properly.
Everytime you put gases into a system, things gets funny. Modeling gas dynamics is a stuff that need very complex simulation on their own, simplify stuff to fit into a videogame is not a joke when you want your output to be realistic.
