REAL WEATHER ENGINE

[sparky209]

You should have a real weather engine like flight simulator that would enhance the game a lot more realistic.

[Axel Slingerland]

You do realize that SCS Software is a little bit smaller company than Micro$oft is, right? Just checkin'...

[TwinShadow]

Also, the in-game default for weather is complete and utter trash for Flight Simulator. I mean, unless you enjoy your aircraft being jostled around violently, then I mean be my guest. (I've logged some maybe 1200 hours into FS2004 and FSX combined at this point) One would need to get a 3rd party program to hook into FSX that would actually do more gradual changes to prevent such violent tendencies. However, such turbulence could still happen since I've had that happen a few days ago flying out of DFW and my aircraft was just violently jostled around actually kicking off my autopilot several times..

Also, ETS2/ATS are done at scale, so weather reports would have to be updated constantly just to keep up unlike Flight Sim which is done in real-time at 1:1 scale. (actually the updates are 15 minutes apart) With this in mind, its just not feasible currently. Plus, I'm actually not really for it either in this case and rather just keep it random as it is now. Though, I would like to see snow during the fall and winter months, with the chances of them increasing the farther north you go. But we're still a ways from that happening.

[Reinhard]

Like TwinShadow mentioned: Map and time is scaled in this game.

Consequences of map scale: in-game weather would change around 20 times faster than in "reality" while you drive down the highway. Would such a fast change of weather make sense?

But even if you put aside that, the time scale is even more problematic: you want the weather that was or would be when? There is no common "now" in relation of game time and real time.

[Axel Slingerland]

There are a lot of things that are possible, and the programmers at SCS certainly could do them. But what would they cost, and would it be practical to do them? Would what those things add to the game be worth what it would cost to make them?

[Mohegan13]

There is no point in setting up a real weather engine until seasonal weather is available in game.

Right now we have summer weather only, while that might not be too bothersome in Arizona, it sure does snow in other states.

If SCS ever develop the weather so that season can be represented affectively, then they could potentially look at real world weather. The game is already capable of sending and retrieving data, it needs to for WoT and Steam.

Adding more code to retrieve weather information from something like Jeppesen, should be easy enough, though they would probably have to pay for such a service. In which case is it financially reasonable for both SCS vs the amount of people who use it.

Then they would need a few options in game not dissimilar to FSX: Real World, Game, State of Change.

State of change would be "immediate, real time, scaled time". The system for state of change is already in the game, if you use the dev console to change weather you can also specify if you want the change to happen naturally over time or instantly.

So a lot of the work is done, yes there would have to be changes and tweaks to suit grabbing weather stats from a server, but it's not likely to require a massive overhaul of the game engine or anything else.

But, as I said, right now there simply isn't enough weather options in game to support a real weather feature. While many weather options can be added with ease, the ones that would take time are wintery prefabs. Everything in the game would need winter versions, either icy or snowy or both. Then there would have to be "in between" phases. You can't go from dry to blizzard. In snowy weather the snow has to realistically and gradually build up.

That brings us to seasons. If we need seasonal weather, we also need true seasons. It would be a bit odd if all the vegetation was ever green, so we also need accurate seasons with vegetation changes were applicable as well as "time of year". Now the latter is already changeable as a mod, so making it dynamic should be possible. However that leads us to another issue.

How do we scale seasons/time of year? If you use game time, then we can potentially get through four seasons within a month. But that would be very awkward with real world weather. The game date and real world weather/date are going to be out of sync. So there needs to be a weather override in place for people using real world weather versus game time. Doable, but a minefield for devs.

Even if they were to start on the weather/seasons right now, I imagine they would be working on it for over a year just for the visual aspects before it would be even close to a testing phase.

Don't get me wrong, it's a good idea, and I personally would love seasons, seasonal weather, and the option for the real weather data to be used. I'm just saying, if it was to be done, we'd be in for a really long wait.

[marcel-dutch]

As SCS had written, the simulation must have possibility to run on older, not high-end modern systems.

I have for example a very old system. I use a traffic mod to decrease the traffic density. Max 15 verhicles at the time.
The framerate is now between 11 and 20 fps, and sometimes it drops to 4.

So, realistic weather is for me not an option.

[Mohegan13]

Updating the weather engine shouldn't harm performance too much, it's just adding more options for weather types.

[marcel-dutch]

That's true. Updating is not an issue.