Hi everyone I really enjoy trying to make scenarios as close to reality as possible and run them in real-time. I have had mixed success (and failures) with selecting weather in Scenario editor … there so many to choose from. Today I ran down the UK East Coast mainline using AP variable fog 3 , (season set as Autumn) and was blown away how good it looked. Tomorrow (Mon 27th) I’m planning on running Just Trains Exeter to Paddington, setting off at about 1pm. Weather forecast is mainly overcast with dark clouds and a 50% chance of a shower. Would anyone please have any suggested settings to replicate the forecast above? (Don’t think I can use the AP weather pack on this route)
Sorry I can’t t advise on this, but I’m reminded of the ‘real weather’ option on Flight Simulator of old. I never had occasion to use it and see how good it was, but that would be a nice option for TS: though likely hard to implement.
I have MS Flight Simulator and there is quite a few different weather MODS, but even the default real-time weather is linked to accurate weather data. (If it’s foggy, wet and windy at Heathrow then it will be in the game too!) Wouldn’t it be great to drive along the Dawlish Sea Wall in TS with the waves crashing over the line on a wet and wild day! Also in MSFS the real-time AI is linked to flight radar 24 so you can fly live traffic patterns. there are MODs so you can display the planes in the correct liveries. Now a real-time MOD like that in TS, linking to the data in the Real-time trains Data would be awesome, but guess that’s the difference of several millions of £ or $ budget between TS and MSFS.
Real world weather would be awesome for train simulator and actually shouldn’t be too hard to implement relatively speaking. Flightsims have to deal with 3D weather (ie at different altitudes) while a Train Sim would largely only care about surface weather. The bus simulator OMSI2 has had real life weather for a very long time (you could even input your own ICAO airport code to get weather from anywhere in the world).
Make no mistake, It doesn't offer real-time weather in its truest sense of the word, what it does at Quick drive setup within RWE2 it will set the weather based on the current weather of that particular routes start point at that given time, this is of course editable (i.e. time of day and the rest of it) as you would in the QD menu itself, but if you tick the real-time weather and start time it will garner this information and set it (within TS's weather limitations of course) for you.
There might be no weather stations all along Donner Pass or in British Columbia. Speaking of which, what to do about mud floods? Swept away bridges? Tornadoes like in Kentucky? Finicky detail: transition from one weather to another, such as mixed snow and drizzle. It's available with some weathers (old stuff). Another - the default weathers got messed up and don't represent what they should. Posted aplenty about them, might be fixed. Thus I'd prefer route specific 2D. My personal (difficult) wish is gradual transition of seasons. It's super nice when you drive in the North (such as Bergen) and you come down the snowy mountain and it becomes blooming spring. Or to the north and Summer becomes Spring or Autumn (as Winter is longer at the expense of the rest).
I would guess there are indeed weather stations along any railway routes that are close to highways, but even if you just used the closest reporting airport (KTRK Truckee or KRNO Reno for the Donner Pass example) it would provide something.
