I can’t imagine it would be at all difficult to do, but as ever it comes down to time and resources. To be fair, there are other, more pressing things to work on.
I can... collate the weather info for 75 miles of locations for a particular time of day on a particular date and then render that along the route accurately in a manner that people won't just say it's broken etc etc "I remember the 4th of April 2012 and we had a thunderstorm, not showers"...
Which, of course, would cause people to complain about what a horrible and unrealistic DLC it was, how it was completely broken, ruined their immersion, and how much they hate DTG for their laziness and greediness.
Totally. Of course completely forgetting this is a game / sim based on a programming construct so they can;t do everything immediately
It would be easy to do, honestly. Obviously it was probably slightly simpler to do in flight sim as you were working with airfields but all the same, the only difference would be that you’d have to pick airfield(s) for each route. Newcastle or Teeside for TVL, Manchester and/or Leeds for NTP, Heathrow for GWE, JFK for the New York routes, and so on. Take GWE as an example, you would get the free forecast from Heathrow from an online source. Aviation forecasts are in a standard format worldwide with a finite number of ways of showing weather so it would be simple to write a script to decode it. You can download apps from the App Store that will convert TAFFs (forecasts) and METARS (actual) into plain English for those who don’t know how to decode them. All you have to do is tie the finite number of terms to the in game weather options and there you have it. For example, right now at Heathrow you have a light northerly wind, scattered clouds and a chance of a heavy rain shower. That can be represented in game already and I could manually set that weather...bar the dynamic rain shower. It doesn’t have to be any more specific than that. I fear you’re not giving DTG enough credit but I’m sure it comes down to priorities and resource as we’ve already said. I’ve no doubt that somewhere on ‘the list’ is a major upgrade to the weather system allowing for dynamic and changing weather. At that point it’s maybe something they could consider. So much has to be got right first though, lighting for example, as it needs those inputs to function properly
While dynamic and real time weather for a flight simulation is a must have for me, the affect of weather on a locomotive is much less than a light aircraft and unless you are hitting the extremes of the weather envelope are affecting fuel efficiency more than anything else (rail adhesion withstanding). Most light aircraft have a max crosswind component of 15 knots - and the angle of the crosswind greatly affects the landing difficulty. Can say the same for a locomotive. That being said, dynamic weather as can be utilized in scenarios for TS2019 would be most welcomed in TSW, but the need for realtime accurate weather would be a low priority for me. Would much rather see a working Passenger Information System, station and train announcements, Steam Traction, which are all priorities in my book over realtime weather. ( not to mention TrackIR and raildriver support for others).
Commercial use of METAR data does actually attract a fee usually, however I think "realistic" weather (which frankly i always found less than enthralling in flight sim) is less interesting than just having variable dynamic weather.... which is actually already in the game and just needs time to adapt it and make use of it better. If you go play "Powering America Part 2" - which is imho one of the best scenarios on that route anyway - you'll notice that some times you play it the storm keeps going, and other times the storm dies off. It's simple, but it's using the dynamic weather tech. Why is it not used more? Mostly because like any feature, it has some issues and those need to really be ironed out and improved. However one really nice feature is that because we have a truly dynamic sky system rather than using sky dome photographs, when you go from a weather pattern with say 100% cloud to one with 50% cloud you'll see the clouds morph and change to reflect the new weather state over a period of time rather than just fade from one image to the next. Can't remember if powering america did that.... I need to use that as an excuse to go enjoy it again especially with the physics and lighting update on that route Matt.
