PC Introducing Nimbus For Train Sim World®

Sorry, but the drug analogy is, in my option, a gross over exaggeration of the situation. Instead of going on a vigilante crusade , just wait and see how DTG reacts.

. I am sure making a profit windfall from a weekend announcement of a product hoping to make sales before DTG responds on Monday is not the developer’s business plan. Anyway, there are a multitude of situations to get one’s dander up…. But for me, this isn’t one of them.

Best

 

You’re making it bit heavy… It was meant metaphorically, nothing to react so dramatically to. And about that weekend story that was meant very differently than how you’re framing it now. It was more about the fact that it was an unfortunate coincidence and that DTG simply isn’t responding, nothing more. Nothing against the creator of the mod.Honestly, I think your reaction is hugely exaggerated and pretty theatrical.

 

You do make me laugh sometimes Jesper... They can't get tail lamps on trains properly.... If we get DTG Live weather before they fix that age old bug then something is clearly broken in the DTG priority lists.

 

LeadCatcher,
I couldn’t agree with you more. After all, this plugin isn’t due to be released until 7 August anyway.
So the developer certainly didn’t intend to post about it at the weekend just so he could sell it over the weekend.

 

I mean, until you put it that way, I found the idea pretty dubious, but now you've convinced me it's probably the #1 headline feature for the next TSW.

 

The implementation itself wasn’t what I was talking about just that this is low‑hanging fruit for DTG, which makes it an easy way for them to score points. I genuinely think DTG is going to use this as a “unique selling point.” Whether it will actually work well remains to be seen indeed.

 

Yeah its very obvious that they will do that and its easy going advertising im afraid.

Besides that its ram friendly so they can claim it will not reduce you're game experience.

 

With all due respect, can you not edit your posts to combine them into one moving forward? Spamming posts because you're too lazy to edit just causes your point to get lost in a sea of your own making.

 

Sorry... obiously I would have made that choice if it were possible only adding a quote can only be done when you write the message for the first time, so adding it afterwards isn’t possible. It’s a forum limitation, and I only saw that post from Princes Ebtrapta afterwards. So sorry if I didn’t do that, but it wasn’t intentional.

 

You can copy a quote into a post already posted if you take the time to stop and think about it .

 

This is, at least, misleading. As the user might get the opinion that you can get data only every 15 minutes, or even an hour. Which is not true.

As you're taking data from NOAA, you're playing the same limitation game, as all the apps using public api... That is, what's the temporal resolution of the data, this is the 15 minutes interval (or more often than not, 1hours). It's cool that nimbus updates every seconds, but it can only take the data points and interpolate between them... which is what the free apps do...

That quotas affect updates during long sessions is a straight up lie. The limit for open meteo is 10.000 calls / day or 5.000 calls / hour or 600 calls / min... good luck exceeding that....

Which is less than what you can get by quering the local meteo services, i.e. ECMWF for Europe.. where you can get up to 1km resolution... Which is normal if you use aggregated services, who do the job of combining the models for you (ofc, you cannot base a commercial app on the free tier API they offer).

I'm all for offering a better service to the player, and I have no objections to having the service paid (people often don't realize how limiting it is to do things free, and how expensive frameworks that would help with development actually are)... But, correct information should be provided to the user, so he/she can decide what is sufficient for their needs... and your description has a lot of things about the competing apps just plain wrong.

final note

is wrong, yes, ice doesn't evaporate, but it sublimates... so it should disappear in time..

 

Yes, the API count restriction being a limit is a false claim. 10.000 calls / day means that you can query the service every 8 seconds... forever, 24/7/356, and never exceed the call budget... There is no need for throttling, as you try to suggest.
Also

This is false...
"Nimbus returned 60 different temperature readings across 60 polls"
Every interpolating app will return 60 different values for 60 different polls. It will returin 1000 different values between 1000 different polls... Becasue that's what interpolation is... The limiting factor to resolution is, and always has been, the temporal resolution of the weather data..

When your weather provider only provides top on hour weather points, and someone ask, what is the weather 7:25AM?... The only thing you can do is look on the 7AM point and 8AM point, and interpolate the values at 7:25. Which is what free apps already do. No app is sitting on the 7AM data point of a hour, and then after 8AM, it will try to quickly transition to that data point. Which is what you try to suggest to the user.

 

Sorry, this might be a silly point... but when it's 7:25, it's impossible to know what the weather will be like at 8:00, one can only guess.

 

All these apps work on forecast data. They don't work on real - observed, weather. So the weather forecast for 8AM ;-)

This is a direct quote from your website:

This is a factually false statement. No throttling is required.

Once again, direct quote, where you're describing how other app treat the data

This is factually wrong.

It still request a forecast for the coordinates, wheter it has to go to the weather service, or stops on your backend because youre caching the world state is just semantic. I mean, it's cool that each point can be geo-accurate... But you still are working out of those two data points, for each grid, than any other app...
And I have to wonder much of a difference there trully is between you having geo-accurate every data point, albeit with 25KM grid resolution (which can skew the date quite a big in more complex terrain), vs an app querying a weather provider every 2km traveled by the player, getting high resolution data (up-to 1km grid), and thus having more accurate data for that particular point...

But that doesn't really matter, that's is for the user to judge.. and that is not what I'm arguing... My main issue is your misrepresentation of functionality and limitations of other apps

 

Yeah, well... I´m very happy with Winzartens App.

 

Forgive me if I'm misunderstanding, but it seems like you're both talking about different things. He's saying that quotas exist but are irrelevant due to the way his plugin works; you're talking about the unlikelyhood of tripping the quotas. Where is the "straight up lie" or "factually false" statement there? If the quotas don't exist in the first place, then it would be false.

 

Leaving aside the claims made by OP as I'm not sure on their validity or truth compared to the free apps, I think the elephant in the room is what's the benefit of having super-accurate weather?

Aside from rain/sleet/snow I don't really see what the point of ultra-realtime weather brings to a game like TSW. It obviously makes sense in the Flight Sim community as the slightest drop in temperature or change in wind can affect fuel levels, landing conditions etc. but whether it's 20.2 degrees C, or 19.7 degrees C in TSW is irrelevant to driving a train.

The only time weather is a factor in railway operations is strong winds possibly bringing trees down onto the lines or extreme temperatures where tracks could bend or freeze over, none of which is simulated in TSW anyway.

If people want to ensure the rain starts at precisely the same location that it does in real life, that's fine, but I'm happy to see it simulated a minute or two early/late for free by continuing to use the well-supported and maintained Route Annotations app as the benefit doesn't outweigh the cost using Nimbus.

 

I smell something...

 

Personally, I don't use mods for TSW, but that might well change as this thread has reignited my interest in improving the weather system...
To help me make my choice, could you tell me what these Route Annotations correspond to ?

 

I don't see what the big deal is about this utility costing money. Paid external tools such as this have existed for Train Sim Classic and in other simulators like Flight Simulator for years. And considering any live weather utility has to query an API, it's not like it's a pure money grab scam. I'll personally probably stick to the free utilities for now, but I don't see a problem with products like this existing.

 

He's' saying that free APIs tier provided i.e. by Open-meteo, which is used by other apps, will affect the user, because there is a limit on how many requests you can make on the free tier. To quote his website:

This is false, the quotas exist so apps don't missue the free tier, but is never the issue for normal small apps. Having 10 000 calls limit per day is not a restricting factor in app usage, contrary to what he tries to suggest.

 

There's a trick to that which I use. I simply click the reply button, copy all, delete, then hit the edit button and paste.

 

Sad, only Windows :-\

 

No thanks a bit to much work... When DTG asking to that they have to deliver a proper solution.

 

first impressions:

 

Thanks to you, Train Sim Society

I’ve watched your video.
And I have to say, this app plugin isn’t what you’d expect.

The transitions from cloudy to clear alone are extreme – they’re so bad they’re worse than TSW’s own weather.

I’d rather stick with Winzarten’s free app.

 

Fair play to TSS, normally can't stand their videos, but this one is good and deep dives into both apps far more than I could myself. It confirmed what I already thought, but provided the actual facts to back this up rather than my own assumptions.

As I almost exclusively play with historical weather, this product just isn't for me. Even if it was, some of the transitions were very bad. So money saved for now, but still interested in how it develops.

 

Wow! Thank you for such a detailed look into our weather utility and weather for TSW in general.
Thank you for the bugs you found and the suggestions, they are taken on board.

Just some points that I would like to address:
- You are right in that the precipitation is quite coarse. It is very much the aim to try and move to higher resolution global models and regional models if licensing and cost allows.
- The issues you saw with transitions and snapping for fog and around thunderstorms will be fixed before release.

Happy Driving

 

I want to mention that the concept of users paying a one time fixed amount of money for software that requires a server that has a monthly cost forever usually does not end well.

I guess you guys have made your calculations, but in this kind of matter what is on the paper will usually not match reality in the long run.

 

Watching TSS' video, and looking at the store page, the store page description reeks of ChatGPT text. Emdashes, the comparison shtick (its not x, its y), and bullet pointed lists with emojis are all dead giveaways. This is a lazily developed vibe-coded product that is an affront to those who develop these things themselves without AI assistance FOR FREE. The fact that this is releasing at $13 USD with so much heavy reliance on AI code just makes me so angry that I can't put it in words. The "developer" should be ASHAMED that they're trying to make a quick buck off of this community by throwing together trash that undermines the sanctity of the TSW modding community.

 

Shocking that mods haven’t come around to clear this up.

Either way though, AI reliant content needs to stay well clear of TSW, thanks.

 

I mean, what did you expect when all their forum posts are also written with it?