Thunderstorms

[Bananarama]

Considering the weekend and that RSC may be busy with addressing concerns about the update, might you be premature about not receiving their help?

[_o_OOOO_oo-Kanawha]

There are a couple of new binaries in the /weather folder of Sherman Hill. You can de-serialize them and study the xml. Find out which one uses the lightning, rainbow, etc.

Probably quite a few parameters can be tweaked to create some new weather effects if you save the xml out with different file names and serialize that into new binaries.

[_o_OOOO_oo-Kanawha]

How bad is the weather supposed to get? I am running across the Wyoming plains for over an hour or so and it is chucking it down now, a couple of miles out of Cheyenne.

According to the dispatchers it is supposed to be really bad, but there is hardly any thunder and lightning.
At least not as severe in "Up the Alleghanies - Storm" when my desk rattles with the thunderclaps and the whole sky lights up with bright flashes.

[_o_OOOO_oo-Kanawha]

Some testing is in order also, to use that same weather in another route or another scenario. I doubt the weather is actuated by the trains actual position, but one never knows, these type of environmental scenario events could certainly be possible.

I managed to get Sherman Hill installed on an older TS2012 which has the COARW, so will swap the weather between both scenarios as see what it brings.

Doc said he is alwo working on thunder and lightning, but hasn't progressed beyond the beta stage. The skydome needs to get really dark and realistic forks of lightning have yet to be drawn as a shapefile. I suppose in Wyoming it can get pretty intense during severe thunderstorms, which could be quite spectacular in TS2013 if done right.

COARW uses Tom Boswell's old weather pack available from the RWA file store. His severestorm.bin is a static weather, i.e. it starts, stays and ends pitch dark. Also, the raindrops are a bit on the large side. There are new and smaller shapes available. The flashes and thunder are awesome IMO, his thunder loop is 8 min 30 secs and contains several different claps and rolls over its duration. As you know, scenery audio effects are looped, though they can be synchronized or triggered by scenario markers.

Sherman Hill's weather is dynamic, different layers of clouds move in different directions, the sky actually changes. There are two lightning sounds and five thunder rolls. Still, I found it to be rather tame. Perhaps some good HiFi thunder recordings can be found on the web, the kind that makes the windows of your game room rattle when played loudly over a decent sound system. Flashes of lightning make no sound of course, but just like with scifi movies in outer space, without sound effects we can hardly be fooled into immersion.

A good effect would be to have more menacing clouds develop, like real big cumulonimbus before the sky closes and it gets pitch dark and the storm falls over us. Followed by random thunderclaps of different type, like rolling distant thunder, chinese firecracker high up in the clouds thunder and cannonblast close strikes. Plus we need random lightning forks and blinding flashes. After say 10 minutes maximum weather should clear up again and that peaceful rainbow appears.

All in all, with some effort I think this can be achieved using the means available to us now.

[_o_OOOO_oo-Kanawha]

I glanced over the weather binaries in the Sherman Hill folder and learned that the weather in scenario #6 is indeed probably triggered by the scenario itself.
There are several triggered weather events defined using the flash and thunder audio events plus visible lightning bolts (which I didn't notice on my only completed run of this scenario so far). These events have a set location in longitude and latitude, so should occur at the same time and in the same place on each run.
IMO one should darken the sky more during the height of the storm to make it more dramatic.

Somewhere in that scenario the triggers are hidden. RW_Tools has difficulties opening such large binaries however, so I cannot tell right now.
This probably means that that particular weather can indeed only be used on the route it was designed for.
Flying over the route in the world or scenario editor will probably reveal the location of the triggers and which events are triggered where.

Hopefully Doc will come up with a weather asset pack sometime, when he gets tired of engine hacking.