This is one for you tim, how will the weather system work, not all mods run single races our league and many of the other dirt/oval leagues run heats instead of one of races, my question is can the weather be set to run with the heats over the race night and not single races, the start of the night could be dry for the first few heats then the heavens might open up for the final etc etc, do you have any idea how this will work.
Individual races can have individual settings and you could simulate things that way by adapting start times and weather settings for the sessions. You can either have it totally random, random within minimal parameters like 'wet random, dry random' etc, or you can program what conditions you would want it to change throughout the session - or set just some. You will see clouds rolling in on the horizon or blue sky starting to peak through and this matches with the change in conditions you will eventually experience on the race track. Lighting and stuff changes quite a bit not only because of time of day, but because of you being in the cloud cover, etc, too. Track temp is planned to be tied to the shadowing also, so cloud cover will reduce track temp and therefore raise the speed you can take a particular turn at. As in real life.
Its individual heats tim but we need it like reallife where the weather can change over the course of the night, if its left to server admin to set it to random it takes the realism out of the weather system. The way rf1 is setup just now after every race the weekend restarts it will go back to the original start time, if we had the option to race heats over the course of the night(something like how the practice and warmup work) it would help us with the weather system to keep it real, for instance our meeting would start at 5pm and finish at 10pm on a dry night with 5 heats to go through the time gets later and the weather could change at anytime, the problem we have is after each heat in rf1 were back to 5pm unless its manual set to 6 but thats defeating the purpose of realism if you get my drift.
By "individual races" Tim is perhaps suggesting that we can have more than one race per "Race Weekend" (i.e. its just one race in rF1), so you have 3 Heats and a final and you'd set the weather like thus: Heat 1 = Dry/Clear Heat 2 = Dry/Cloudy Heat 3 = Cloudy/Light Rain Final = Rain A weather system that you can set for the entire weekend (or evening in this scenrio) would work best IMO, that way its all in place for each practice/qually/race without having to set it for each session/race...if you see what I mean.
Yeah, but this way admin will know what kind of weather to expect, while other drivers will not. If you set it totally random, then you can have heavy rain in Heat 1 and completely dry track in Heat 2. That would make no sense, so it means admin would have to limit the range of conditions for each race. Of course it's not a big problem, because admin can roll a dice just before heat 1 and set weather manually for all heats. He will know what to expect, but in the end he didn't have this knowledge in advance and therefore had no additional time to prepare. Just like any other driver he had to prepare for all possible conditions. But still - if admin would be able to set a schedule for entire race weekend and then set random weather for entire weekend and not just for single race (so random, but continous) it would be great stuff. And speaking of schedule - being able to define a race weekend as any number of any sessions in any order could be usefull. Something like: - Day 1, 10:00, practice, 60 minutes - Day 1, 14:00, practice, 60 minutes - Day 2, 10:00, qualify, 30 minutes - Day 2, 12:00, practice, 60 minutes - Day 2, 14:00, warmup, 10 minutes - Day 2, 14:20, race, 20 laps - Day 2, 16:00, warmup, 10 minutes - Day 2, 16:20, race, 40 laps Like writting a scenario In rFactor you would either switch between these sessions, or store race weekend progress on server (at least weather and scoring) and continue another day.
The changing wheater is one of the things I expect from rfactor 2,Ideally to have the weather is in the real circuit at the time we run, maybe it's crazy what I say and do not know if you can do , will be possible to make some plugging and use the information that proporciene any of the many weather sites there. Sorry for my English. Greetings Tony.
I'd like something more than just completely random vs. random-dry/wet. How about setting % probability of rain, min and max air temp, so that the random weather would work within the set range? This way the admins would be able to set the weather according to the real forecast. It would be also nice to have continuity of weather AND track condition (including marbles, rubber, water etc.) from session to session.
Which would mean you can't drive on any European tracks (or any track in the northern hemisphere) soon because it's snowing on said locations... League races could only be held between something like March and October... Not a great idea if you ask me.
4-5 years ago, when our league used F1Challenge we programmed the weather into a gdb file according to the real forecast... but as our season was like October to March we picked (in advance) a set of corresponding locations in the southern hemisphere with similar climate to what we'd expect from our race venues in March to October The gdb file used to be edited according to the current weather in a predetermined city, and uploaded just before the qualifying or the race. It sounds complicated, but it really wasn't. And it was a lot of fun!
We used to use a similar method in GTR2 when the NAW (New advanced weather) program was released. It featured a little database with weather statistics for specific tracks at specific times in the year. So when the season was held between the years you could simply say that the virtual dates were between March and October as well. Worked just fine and finally introduced changing weather conditions during a race session in GTR2. But that's something totally different than using real time weather data which would simply not work during the cold season of the year..
Thats what i was meaning, if it is set to random but over the nights racing admin wouldnt have control over it.
Robert that would be taken into account when making the schedule for a league championship, there are still very good circuits in areas where snow is almost impossible. Greetings Tony.
It is setup as one race per race weekend, but race weekends can drop every session except the race now, too. Why wouldn't you just use: 1 Dry 2 Dry 3 Dry 4 Random 5 Random 6 Random or Wet If you want to keep the server admin as much in the unknown...
Can track conditions at the end of one session be saved and applied at the beginning of next session?
Well if the raceweekend was configurable to have more races instead of the one it would be fair, heat 1 might rain then heat 2 the track might be drying off, using random wont give us this option and having an admin choose it would give admins advantages setup wise, the track cant go from a soaking wet to a dry in race 2. Just using random isnt enough for us, if you look at world of sprint cars which is about 10 year old it had realistic conditions which lasted the course of the nights heats. Also as the race night goes on more rubber is laid on the track making the racing line more grippy than the outside, dirt tracks wear after each race lines form through the meeting etc etc If isi were able to make the races per weekend configurable it would solve a lot of problems maybe.
+1 I believe this has been asked before in at least the Q&A thread and I know I (alone) asked it at least 3 times with no response. EDIT: Please add heat race support!
I get what you are saying and it makes sense with track condition (as in amount of rubber laid down). However, weather is weather, it's totally random at the best of times. Each 'heat' you speak of is independent of the other heats so I don't see how or why they should be linked weather-wise. Random isn't enough? So you want it to not be random then, which would mean preconceived?
