I have a standalone weather python script I wrote several years ago for my solo offline races. I run it before a race. I choose a track. Then set the practice, qualifying and race start times and duration. It uses openweathermap and grabs the daily weather reports from one of the last five days and creates a wet file. You would need an api key free from openweathermap to run the script (insert the key in the script at the appropriate place). It's not fancy at all and does little error checking if you type something wrong or out of bounds (like putting in a race start time of 26:00). Some of the ratings in the program are very subjective. It's a very manual thing that doesn't have a plugin or anything that runs alongside RF2. Delete the .txt at the end of the filename; the extension should be .py but you can't upload those kinds of files here.
It's great that for years talented people have been creating scripts or plugins. But this no longer corresponds and should no longer correspond to the needs of the majority of rFactor 2 users in 2023. rFactor 2 deserves a complete solution, integrated into the software in the UI and also ergonomic. That's just my opinion.
I'm not sure, pilAUTO. My opinion is that I'd rather they focus on the core elements of the game to make the driving experience more true to life and better. I know they don't have a huge staff of programmers. There's a lot of people who want them to focus on things that would be important if this were a sim about sightseeing--the billboards, trees and things like that--things you don't have time to focus on when you're racing. I would ask that they open the tools and hooks so that people who are interested in furthering those elements of the game can do so. And I think they've done a good job of that with the developer tools and the mas editor and the various configuration files. This effectively adds to their programming "staff" by allowing talented programmers, designers, etc., to make the game more interesting while they focus on making the core better.
My personal priorities for the sim are physics realism, updating the entire cars physics level, and overall performance and VR. Nevertheless the weather, such as the "random" or "partially random" functionality seems to me to be something important. No one wants an rFactor 2 anymore whose developers would frequently rely on modders to do important things they haven't been able to do in 10 years.
Could not have been less specific IMHO - sorry to say that, but I get tired of hearing and reading that. My 40 year old sports car has been maintained for 40 years so I expect it to perform like nowadays sports cars of the same class - no. rF2's engine is more than 10 years old; in information technology this is like the cretaceous - from my point of view if you would like to compare it to e.g. AMS2 or Forza or whatever (I do not know that titles) it requires a major rewrite. Also in the beginning there was VR support (I think native) but they dropped it for some reason and so we have to live with how it is (and it is not that bad, but people discuss it to be bad) if you are using openXR instead of SteamVR e.g. A native weather plugin would be fine, but as most weather services require a registration this would be hard, at least if the services API is changed ... Kind of modularity brings advantages in some cases.
I understand,the crux real weather data causes additional cost, but a nice alternative could be a real time event as weather is randomly calculated from time and date.(summer,winter,spring,autumn weather)
It was "overall performance" I was referring to. I have to say I have no problems running triple screens with 2560x1440@144Hz each at high / full detail settings even in night scenes or if rain comes down ... Posted some pics of a Spa night race some days ago and I think graphics have improved over time without demanding more power than other simulations.
The problem of poor performance optimization is proven (excessive) when the sun is low, at night and in the rain. Really. But I didn't intend to debate it, that's why I said overall performance. And we can necessarily gain performance on many aspects, it is desirable : this is what I meant by "Overall performance" and to be extremely clear : It is up to S397 to establish what they can and must do (IN NO CASE TO THE END USER, even if the latter can of course say that something is wrong), and it is of course up to S397 to find solutions, of course. Hence the fact that I do not want to discuss or be much more specific in speaking of "Overall Performance". It's normal to lose FPS when the sun is low or during rain, but there the loss is excessive.
I agree. The problem I foresee with all internet services is that they don't last and, in this case, there's no compelling business reason for S397 to be in the weather business. However, what I suggest as a solution is implementing a static weather database having only a few years of statistics rather than using a live database. Randomize which year is pulled from the database and randomize the date within a week or so of the requested date and you'd have a decent snapshot of realistic seasonal weather per latitude/longitude. I've no idea what sort of storage requirements are required, whether we're talking MB or GB size. Certainly if it is in MB, then it could be added permanently to the game.
One source of historical information (if you're driving F1 tracks) is to look at one of the F1 stats sites. They will tell you what the weather was for the race. https://www.f1-facts.com/stats/weather . You might be able to build a reasonable static database from that. I'm not sure if other race organizations maintain that kind of information.
