I think it would be nice to have a real world weather option. For example, if you are driving on the Great Western route, it would then get the weather and apply it in game. It could also include updates so weather could possibly change along the route. This would make it very interesting. It would also make it different every time the player does a drive. Please upvote this if you would like to see this, then Dovetail will see its something that the users want!
MattP mentioned on a stream that you can add weather change events to scenarios, so the machinery is there—I haven’t seen a scenario where it’s used as yet.
Wouldn't that only work with services that match the time you were playing? So you wouldn't be able to operate a late night service in the game if you were playing at midday or would it use the forecast for late night?
Could work like flight simulators, that it sets to real world weather no matter what time in-game your playing at. A lot of users like to play at the current time, maybe a set time option to current time would be good .
You could also have an option to have real weather where the route is set or real weather where you are playing. I tend to manually set the conditions to how the weather has been locally to where I am.
Just having an occasional random change in the weather would be good. If you're playing in service mode it's a little eerie that the weather continues absolutely identical all day—especially on British routes!
Scenarios could have programmed weather events like that then. Then service mode could have the real world weather option.
Matt mentioned on a stream that using real-world weather feeds for commercial purposes is actually quite expensive.
There are open source/free solutions, maybe not the most accurate but its better then nothing for a train sim. So I don't think cost is the issue. A train simulator should have realistic weather, other simulators have it so why not this one?
I suspect the reason this feature has not yet been included is not that it's not a nice feature-there are thousands of nice features that could be added to TSW. And that's the problem. Which do you do first? Logically, those which are the most valuable to the most people, for the time, effort, and money it takes to develop them. (Even the simplest-seeming feature has endless ramifications: everything interacts with everything else. What's the UI for this? How do you localise the player? How does it relate to the time of day? And so on.) I find it hard to believe that accurate, real-time local weather is high up this list. TSW is a train simulator. (This also explains the otherwise curious reluctance of DTG to implement things like passenger luggage, realistic crashes, asteroid strikes, and so forth.)