Random Weather! Add that to a new build and I'm happy as Larry, scripting weather just isn't the same as you know when it's gonna change....well they didn't have rain radars in the 60s did they!?...no they didn't, do you never knew when it was gonna rain! I remember someone from ISI saying it was taken out before the first beta build due to issues, just hoping it comes in soon....that is all!
Adjusting rain probability does kind of do that already I think, re running races with lower probabilities of rain have made it somewhat random when I tried it. Id like to see real world weather update via local circuit weather on servers too, would make getting a dry run at the top gear track pretty rare though lol. Also wind and more realistic live track not as accelerated as it currently is will be nice to have.
I would rather see weather support added in plugin architecture. Then we would be free to write plugins to control weather including getting data from weather sites or so.
Yeah that's does go some way to helping but it's not totally random, obviously live weather would be amazing!
That's always been a personal wish of mine. One of the stumbling blocks I see with live weather though is that you'd need to race in the rough timezone of the real location. An extreme example would be racing in the Sahara desert. If you live on the other side of the world and race at noon your time, you'd get very cold temperatures, which wouldn't make sense if you set the starting time for 14h00. With temperatures playing a big role in the dynamic mix, you might get unexpected results. Or typical afternoon monsoon conditions in Malaysia would happen in the simulated morning. A possible solution would be a 24h database so you can relive the past day depending on the session start time, but then it wouldn't be unpredictable anymore, would it ?
hi ,I dont like to make comments on a friday night cos ive usually had a few ,,but,cant the conditions be grouped differently then played in random so to speak ,like media player might do with music, beer talking
But is a real world weather simulation not exactly about racing in the weather conditions just present in the current track chosen? But please if we ever have that, make it an option beacause otherwise we have to race with penguins and spikes during the wintertime....
Still predictable If there were enough time varations for each weather condition and they could be linked randomly then maybe this could be tied to real time conditions translated from a weather site and into real time weather ,,geez i'm a bit ahead of myself i think
No that would be awesome,Tim! Edit. OhI understand b/c don't want people to be able to gain unfair advantage by looking up weather or just knowing because local so that would ruin intense decisions about tire changes etc. but I would choose to be ignorant but other woukdn't or couldn't. Yeah this is much more complex than meets the eye. Lemme think on this one.....
No I don't think you are ahead of yourself. There are just variables to work out. For example if you want locally appropriate weather for the time of year and time of day then wonder if can just do random selection from past years for that location and timeof day? Fairly large database of course. Edit should have said random selection of weather data for location, time of day and time of year ( and time of year could be exact date or random selection from range of dates from random year. Another edit because still doesn't sound clear. Pseudocode would be... Select from [weather data table] where zip code = track location zip code and begin time = selected race start time and date = random date from selected date +/- 15 days and year = random year from past 15 years (or even 5 years may work)
What about the posibility to query an online weather service ? then just apply the params to rf2. I remember one of the precursor of this feature was Microsoft Flight Simulator. And taking into account the Q&A posted here that says ... Then with lat/lon information on the track definition's file you already have everything you need to query an online weather service. Plus you will have an EXTRA reason to have an active internet connection for opening rf2 & LAN sesions.
hmm, these are some complicated (although interesting) ideas for random weather. I've always been interested in REAL weather; if it's noon here and I want to drive Spa, give me what the weather was at noon today in Spa. Or hell, what was the weather like at noon on September 21st, 1966? Here's a really simple solution I thought of: a media player version of "Shuffle" for weather. When pick up my iPod, I can shuffle my entire library. Actually, I always shuffle all songs when I drive in the car, and I get a completely different mix every time. Crucially, this mix is not created "on the fly"--it's made beforehand. Now apply that to weather in a game. Your "music library" is actually a list of all possible weather scenarios--attached to an amount of time--for that location--in other words, everything that could realistically happen in a day (for example, it often switches back and forth between pouring rain and sun at Spa within minutes, but that's quite a rare event at Laguna Seca, where the weather is more consistent and slower changing). Then, you "shuffle". Before the session starts--not during it--there's a scripted weather sequence based on a randomized sequence of events. In real life, weather happens whether you exist or not, and no matter what you do, so actually a pre-selected (albeit random) weather pattern is realistic. Maybe depending on the year, we can get different weather forecasting tools! Like some really high-tech stuff if you're racing modern cars, or some really basic radar if you're in the 60's. Right now there are only five weather sections, which means four changes of weather per session. That would be another part of the randomizer--variable length chunks of weather. If I do a 60 minute session at Spa and set the first section to Rain and the second to anything except rain, it will ALWAYS stop raining near the middle of my second lap. It would be much more interesting if there was some variance to eliminate predictability.
Agreed 100%! Cleverly implemented, this would give endless options and take the sim to new levels of realism!
Before we get random weather we need real road working as it should. Currently it works in accelerated rate which is way too high for actual racing. It's only good for testing and showcase of what it works like. It would be nice to get control over this rate (in ini file) as a temporary solution while we wait for real road to start working as it should. We're way past 6 months since release, so I guess we could get something raceable for a change No need to make drying line so obvious anymore. Although I do realize rF2 wasn't released for actual racing, but rather for modders to have a head start and purchase system to be tested, such additional parameter in ini file wouldn't be much work.
so the admin of your league that sets up your races will know exactly when the weather is going to change and no 1 else with the way its set up now ? or will ppl eventually work this out? if so the weather will be to predictable, bring on random weather..
If the weather is controllable via a plug-in, someone could write a weather application that either generates random weather, or picks up live weather from any real life location and feeds it into the game. What would be even cooler would be if that application would be able to generate forecasts and weather radar images to the teams. There are bright minds out there, so I'm sure someone would be able to do just that.
