There's a few things to take into consideration with a system like this.

Firstly, like bbman quoted from himself - if you only get to race at the same RL time every day, you don't want to always be racnig in the evening. So time would need to be scalable.

Secondly, not every track should have the same weather at the same time. Fern Bay and Blackwood are on opposite sides of the Atlantic, so the odds of them having the same weather at the same time are fairly small. So a global weather system wouldn't work.

Thirdly, every environment shouldn't have the same weather at the same time. If every server running BL GP had the same weather type, it'd give players zero choice if they wanted to race in different conditions.

So while I think that LFS should have in-game conditions somewhat tied to real life situations, too much of it would be silly. Here's my suggestions:

+ Have realistic climates for each track environment
So Blackwood could have a lot of rain, Westhill could have a lot of wind (there's only open fields around it), ice patches in South City, etc. Each one could run either using real weather reports and forecasts, or using a rotating 365-day programmed climate

+ Make the weather system optional for server admins
So you check a box if you want to join the live weather system

+ Add server options to run weather and time on a faster scale
Like SimBin's options of time scaling, from realtime to like 25x or 50x - that means leagues could have 24h races and pick-up races could have a day/night cycle of about 15 minutes. This scales back to the climate, where the server continues to cycle the climate even if there are no races actually running

Quote from Dajmin :

Firstly, like bbman quoted from himself - if you only get to race at the same RL time every day, you don't want to always be racnig in the evening. So time would need to be scalable.

Fully agree. There is no easy way of creating a dynamic time of day. Even scalable, chances are, it will still be the same at the same RL time of day every day.

Quote :

Secondly, not every track should have the same weather at the same time. Fern Bay and Blackwood are on opposite sides of the Atlantic, so the odds of them having the same weather at the same time are fairly small. So a global weather system wouldn't work.

Global weather system as I would understand it is each track would have it's own weather patern and would be different from each other. But globally, all servers running Blackwood would have the same weather, all FE servers would have the same weather, etc. They way you wrote that, seems that you are thinking that every server and every track would have the same weather and the weather would just be random throughout the day.

Quote :

Thirdly, every environment shouldn't have the same weather at the same time. If every server running BL GP had the same weather type, it'd give players zero choice if they wanted to race in different conditions.

I think that is the whole point in having a global weather system (as I've described it above). It keeps people from racing in perfect weather all the time. If one server running Blackwood was raining, everyone would leave and seek out another Blackwood server that was currently in ideal weather. Forcing all BL servers to have the same weather makes it more interesting, real, and fun.

Quote :

+ Add server options to run weather and time on a faster scale
Like SimBin's options of time scaling, from realtime to like 25x or 50x - that means leagues could have 24h races and pick-up races could have a day/night cycle of about 15 minutes. This scales back to the climate, where the server continues to cycle the climate even if there are no races actually running

Now I read your "time scale" thoughts. I don't know if I would like the time scale being that fast. I log onto LFS as if I am going to a track that day at that time. Setups would change due to day/night transitions and to have it that rapid of a change would mean constant adjustment of setup race to race. When I log on to a server, I start out knocking the rust out of my car (out of my racing skills since I don't race as much anymore). After hanging out for a race or 2 getting back into the swing of things, I'm ready to race. But like many, I have limited time to race, so once I am set for the evening (an hour or 2 of racing), I want to just race. I don't mind having the time of day change from log on to log on, but I don't want all the changing during my limited time on a single evening of racing.

Quote from mrodgers :

Setups would change due to day/night transitions and to have it that rapid of a change would mean constant adjustment of setup race to race.

Typical hotlapping mindset, exactly the thing we want to get rid of with forced weather...

Quote from bbman :

Typical hotlapping mindset, exactly the thing we want to get rid of with forced weather...

Not my mindset, which is why I responded about weather to Dajmin's post the way I did.

On the day/night, I just don't want it changing constantly all the time rapidly. I have no problem with entering a server, and it gradually changing to evening after an hour or so. And joining the server the following night to find it is actually completely night time on the server. I just don't want one race day, transition to night the next, then back to day, then night, then day, then night, blah blah..... in the course of one evening (hour or 2) worth of racing.

Join today, great, the race is daytime. Join tomorrow, awesome, now it is night time. That is perfectly fine.

Again, weather, should be set somehow to gradually change slowly just as it does IRL. You could log on and it looks like rain. It may never rain, it may rain in 10 minutes, or you may race for an hour and log off before it starts to rain. You would never know.

MSFS has a very nice way of downloading real weather. Set each individual track of LFS to a specific point in the world, and allow the weather to change according to real world weather data at that specific location that the track is based on. Blackwood for every server would have Blackwood weather, Westhill in every server would have Westhill weather. That would be ideal and keep people from leaving and hunting down another server with the same track, but perfect weather, per what the hotlap mentality racer woudl do.

Diversify the track locations all of LFS customer base. Put Blackwood in the UK, or somewhere in Europe. South City is in UK, Westhill would be suited for a North American track. Kyoto is definitely a Japan venue. Stick Aston in Australia. Another easy one, Fern Bay is of course in the Caribbean. Spread them out around the world and get a world's view on weather.

Dynamic time scaling is the only way to avoid people racing at the same time every day. Take Blackwood, for example. The only time I'd get to race there would be from about 6pm until about midnight local time - every day. Evening-night. Evening-night. Evening-night. Forever. Yawn.
Add a 10 or 15x scale and the game days pass faster, meaning that each day I log in will be a different time, meaning more interesting races.

Likewise, I don't like the idea of every instance of every track sharing the same scale and the same weather conditions. Sometimes you want full conditions, but sometimes you just want to do a bit of casual racing without the pressure of slippery roads or decreased vision.
Of course the flipside of that is that I can imagine a serious population drop when difficult conditions appeared on a server. Heavy snow and thick fog could just drive people to a server running Day/Clear. So I guess there's a bit of an issue here.

I'm all for spreading the tracks across the world and using realtime weather for them. I think I suggested something like that months ago. And the idea of moving some of the current England tracks somewhere a bit further apart would help that as well.

Last time I played MS Flight Simulator, you could set the weather yourself, or tell it to grab real-world current weather.

So, have that as the option, in any offline mode. Set it to custom, or have it ping a weather beacon for that track's real-world location counterpart.

I would think that it would be best to force online servers to take real-time weather conditions, so if it's raining in Kyoto, Japan, it's raining on KY National REV, for instance.

Regardless, I think that Time of Day (NOT weather conditions) should still be selectable for things. Especially event servers. If it's a race on Kyoto Oval, it can be held at night under the lights (Oval should get full lights. ) and can be set to start at anytime, and the lighting will change based on "Local Track Time of Day", not real time of day, but it still simulates time progression, just shifted around to fit common usage schedule. For instance, at peak traffic times, a server could be set to have the peak hour start at 6pm Track Time.

But if it rains on oval, ya can't race until the track is dried...so maybe another future feature needed would be jet dryers to help speed up track drying ? Or clean up massive amounts of debris after a big smash ?

But +1 to this suggestion.

And by the way, I made the racers in the Kyoto 500 grow a pair and race with low wind on, and Cloudy Morning. And they did fine. I'm evil. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHH ! :-p

d

Quote from Dajmin :

Dynamic time scaling is the only way to avoid people racing at the same time every day. Take Blackwood, for example. The only time I'd get to race there would be from about 6pm until about midnight local time - every day. Evening-night. Evening-night. Evening-night. Forever. Yawn.
Add a 10 or 15x scale and the game days pass faster, meaning that each day I log in will be a different time, meaning more interesting races.

I am thinking about going the opposite of your thoughts. Instead of speeding the day/night transition with 10x, make it something like 0.7x or something like that. That way you are less likely to get a dramatic swing back and forth in one evening worth of racing.

I don't know, I could be thinking it all wrong mathematically. At your particularly stated 10x, we would be seeing a day/night transition of 2.4 hours. Even quicker with 15x. That is what I don't want to see, a transition being that quick. Perhaps a factor of 3x would work well enough.

My examples were extreme and may actually be a little excessive. I've been playing GTR2 (the 360 pad works better for it) and it goes up to 60x, which is definitely way too much.
But see 10x (or a 2.4 hour day cycle) would be good for servers who want to keep casual pick-up races going and still notice a changable time of day. The majority of LFS users aren't in leagues where a 24-hour race is the norm. It's a big change and everyone should experience it, from the "I have half an hour to play" guys right up to the "I've been here for 2 straight days" guys.
Also, remember I'm talking about the time on the servers continuing to advance even when there's no race actually in-progress.

But I think going slower than realtime would be a mistake. Nobody would want it to be night-time in their game for like 3 days

Quote from mrodgers :

Not my mindset, which is why I responded about weather to Dajmin's post the way I did.

On the day/night, I just don't want it changing constantly all the time rapidly. I have no problem with entering a server, and it gradually changing to evening after an hour or so. And joining the server the following night to find it is actually completely night time on the server. I just don't want one race day, transition to night the next, then back to day, then night, then day, then night, blah blah..... in the course of one evening (hour or 2) worth of racing.

Join today, great, the race is daytime. Join tomorrow, awesome, now it is night time. That is perfectly fine.

Again, weather, should be set somehow to gradually change slowly just as it does IRL. You could log on and it looks like rain. It may never rain, it may rain in 10 minutes, or you may race for an hour and log off before it starts to rain. You would never know.

MSFS has a very nice way of downloading real weather. Set each individual track of LFS to a specific point in the world, and allow the weather to change according to real world weather data at that specific location that the track is based on. Blackwood for every server would have Blackwood weather, Westhill in every server would have Westhill weather. That would be ideal and keep people from leaving and hunting down another server with the same track, but perfect weather, per what the hotlap mentality racer woudl do.

Diversify the track locations all of LFS customer base. Put Blackwood in the UK, or somewhere in Europe. South City is in UK, Westhill would be suited for a North American track. Kyoto is definitely a Japan venue. Stick Aston in Australia. Another easy one, Fern Bay is of course in the Caribbean. Spread them out around the world and get a world's view on weather.

So you mean you don't want a fast cycle... I thought you meant you'd have to change your setup all the time due to the time acceleration...

How about weather/night&day that's set to match the server's current location, rather than the track's?

That's not a half bad idea.

Maybe not for the weather as much (because I still like the idea of weather pertinent to the "real" location of the track), but definitely could be a plan for the time of day settings.

Quote from DeadWolfBones :

How about weather/night&day that's set to match the server's current location, rather than the track's?

Same Problem: Simracing happens mostly in the evening - do you want all your races to be in the evening?

Quote from bbman :

Same Problem: Simracing happens mostly in the evening - do you want all your races to be in the evening?

The argument for this will be, you can select a server that is in a different timezone. Problem with that argument though is, there are only about 3 servers that have enough people to have a race.

More argument premonition: "Just join a server and wait, plenty will show up." That only happens in the dreams of select forum members (the ones that always suggest that) and doesn't happen IRL (or I guess in LFSL - LFS life...). You join an empty server and sit for an hour or 2, then you leave the empty server. That's how it goes for real.

Quote from DWF :

So you mean you don't want a fast cycle... I thought you meant you'd have to change your setup all the time due to the time acceleration...

No, I just don't want too fast of a cycle. I don't want to have it cycle between day/night 15 times (exaggeration) when logged onto LFS for 2 hours. Nor do I want 5 lap public races to cycle from full daylight to night time. It's just too fast of a cycle. I think 3x or max of 5x might work well. It has to be an odd number factor, or you could still be racing at one particular time all the time (example, 2x wouldn't work at all.)

Thinking in time rather than an x factor, a 5 or 7 hour cycle would allow the time of day to gradually move through when you are on the servers for an hour or 2. That would make it more interesting as the time would move through evening as you raced those 2 hours rather than such an abrupt move from daylight to nighttime withing a small time frame.

Quote from mrodgers :

The argument for this will be, you can select a server that is in a different timezone. Problem with that argument though is, there are only about 3 servers that have enough people to have a race.

The only timezone that would have day-racing would be the US-based ones... While not completely bad, I'd rather not gamble with lag...

<------
Nope, US timezones would definitely be night

Quote from bbman :

The only timezone that would have day-racing would be the US-based ones... While not completely bad, I'd rather not gamble with lag...

And I was only posting what the arguments would be and countering them before the arguments showed up.

Can we have weather in LFS before making it forced or what not??

Make it like Flightsimulator, take real Weather stats.

Make a Virtual Track Location. Maybee Kyoto to Tokyo or Blackwood to Manchester, FernBay to Miami, or such places.

That would be very nice and future option for the Racesim.
Real Weather with Day/Night.


Yeah i now we have a problem in Winter
we need more Warm places to race then.

The problem tieing it to real weather is that the info is often too general, which might not matter that much in a flight sim, but it matters a huge deal in racing sims...

If you take Le Mans for example: Anyone who watched the last hour(s) will know that there was quite a heavy downpour at the pits which then moved diagonally across the track... But the whole part from Mulsanne Corner to the Porsche Curves didn't see a drop of water from that raincloud, but I'm sure weather data just displayed rain for the whole area...

I like that idea, what about the server choose what time at the day you start on. Nigth and Day.

Also the server choose Random weather or What you want.

I'll start 00:00 and Choose random

Edit: I Just readed the first post

Quote from bbman :

The problem tieing it to real weather is that the info is often too general, which might not matter that much in a flight sim, but it matters a huge deal in racing sims...

If you take Le Mans for example: Anyone who watched the last hour(s) will know that there was quite a heavy downpour at the pits which then moved diagonally across the track... But the whole part from Mulsanne Corner to the Porsche Curves didn't see a drop of water from that raincloud, but I'm sure weather data just displayed rain for the whole area...

Yes i think your right, the Areas who will upload the weather stats are too big for only one Track. Mhhm damm you right.

+5 - i definatly agree. why should the people running the competitions/servers choose the weather? you cant exactly click your mouse and change the weather outside!

Quote from CrAbStEr DrIfTeR :

+5 - i definatly agree. why should the people running the competitions/servers choose the weather? you cant exactly click your mouse and change the weather outside!

Agreed