[edwardk]

Although OR will eventually break from MSTS; it would be great if OR took advantage of the MSTS's env files and so far it appears that OR may not be using these files. The overall sky and weather conditions are currently hardcoded. The current code under weather.cs file is quite basic.

Edward K.

[Coonskin]

Wind, trees, noise, etc:

Further studies have been conducted on the theory of whether or not a tree falling in the forest actually produces noise, or only silent sound waves. This time the study involved human participation and possible scenarios. The study was inconclusive. Basically, the study pondered this scenario:

"If a man speaks in a forest, and there is no woman to hear him, is he still wrong?"

[gpz]

edwardk, on 07 November 2013 - 04:24 PM, said:

The overall sky and weather conditions are currently hardcoded. The current code under weather.cs file is quite basic.

It would be a great project to improve it for any "unemployed" coder.

[Csantucci]

A first "easy" small thing would be to allow players to vary the "intensity" of rain and snow. The parameter is already in the code, I think only a key allowing to modify it is needed (without forgetting passing the change also to MP clients), analogously to what is available for fog. And maybe increasing the intensity also the volume of the rain sound could be increased... and maybe the adhesion could be reduced... so as to see that weather is not something unlinked from train operation...

[Genma Saotome]

Csantucci, on 08 November 2013 - 12:36 AM, said:

A first "easy" small thing would be to allow players to vary the "intensity" of rain and snow. The parameter is already in the code, I think only a key allowing to modify it is needed (without forgetting passing the change also to MP clients), analogously to what is available for fog. And maybe increasing the intensity also the volume of the rain sound could be increased... and maybe the adhesion could be reduced... so as to see that weather is not something unlinked from train operation...

A key change is fine for player fiddling... how about something formal for Activities? If the game checked every, oh, 10 minutes, and we added an weather file for each activity, we'd have something. Something along these lines:

ORWeather (
	NbrOfChanges ( 7 )
	ChangeWeather (
		ChangeWeatherEvent ( 1 )
		WeatherTime ( 13:50 )
		CloudCoverChangeRate ( +2 )	#value is change per minute on a scale of 0-100
	)
	ChangeWeather (
		ChangeWeatherEvent ( 2 )
		WeatherTime ( 14:30 )
		RainChangeRate ( +2 )	#value is change per minute on a scale of 0-100
	)
	ChangeWeather (
		ChangeWeatherEvent ( 3 )
		WeatherTime ( 14:50 )
		RainChangeRate ( +10 )	#value is change per minute on a scale of 0-100
	)
	ChangeWeather (
		ChangeWeatherEvent ( 4 )
		WeatherTime ( 16:10 )
		RainChangeRate ( -5 )	#value is change per minute on a scale of 0-100
	)
	ChangeWeather (
		ChangeWeatherEvent ( 5 )
		WeatherTime ( 16:20 )
		CloudCoverChangeRate ( -5 )	#value is change per minute on a scale of 0-100
	)
	ChangeWeather (
		ChangeWeatherEvent ( 6 )
		WeatherTime ( 16:30 )
		RainChangeRate ( -1 )	#value is change per minute on a scale of 0-100
	)
	ChangeWeather (
		ChangeWeatherEvent ( 7 )
		WeatherTime ( 16:40 )
		CloudCoverChangeRate ( -1 )	#value is change per minute on a scale of 0-100
	)
)

[markus_GE]

Something like an additional .ENV file to set up a weather "schedule"? Hmm, have experiences with this in another sim (ski Region Simulator 2012) and I can say, I like the Idea!

Would be cool to have something like that for OpR too. :)

Cheers, Markus

[James Ross]

Genma Saotome, on 08 November 2013 - 08:30 AM, said:

A key change is fine for player fiddling... how about something formal for Activities? If the game checked every, oh, 10 minutes, and we added an weather file for each activity, we'd have something. Something along these lines:

I'm not sure we'd add that to pure MSTS routes, but for OR content we should certainly have weather timelines. :)

[JorD1]

I have to say I like the rain sounds in de latest experimental. Only snow sounds very bad, it sounds more like rain.
Maybe the volume of the rain can be turned down a bit.

[Genma Saotome]

James Ross, on 08 November 2013 - 12:00 PM, said:

I'm not sure we'd add that to pure MSTS routes, but for OR content we should certainly have weather timelines. :oldstry:

We could do [ActivityName].weather and if it is there, use it and if not it's unchanging.

As an alternative idea (replace... or supplement), instead of WeatherTime() we could have WeatherTimeRel() and WeatherTimeAbs() where the former is a period of time relative to the activity start and the later is fixed to a specific time of day.

It might also make more sense to do [ CloudCover | Rain | Snow ]TargetAmt() and [ CloudCover | Rain | Snow ]TargetTime()as a means whereby the Activity Designer can indicate "get me to this value". The same result can be obtained the way I wrote it earlier but this way would have the game to calculate the rate of change and I think that might be more understandable to anyone reading the data.

WRT adhesion, perhaps we do the change between dry and wet according to some arbitrary threshold of rate and then wait some fixed unit of time to represent the accumulation of moisture on the railhead. Something like once a precipitation rate rises above 10 wait this amount of time before changing Adhesion(): Delay( 30 - PrecipitationRate ( value )). Once could also change Adhesion() incrementally. Something similar going the other way to represent drying out.

[railguy]

Varying weather by time is a key idea, but also being able to vary it by location (e.g., lat-long) is also key. In my example from above using Seligman, the weather variance would be triggered both by passage of time and also by change of location. Apparently, the people programming the FSX flight simulator weather engines like REX have figured out the "time-location" because the program "orders up" the weather based on the time of where a weather a condition is occurring in any given spot that the plane is located. FSX even adds a third dimension, that of altitude. Doing dynamic weather for a train sim should not be nearly as complicated.