PC1 Weather in career is scripted?!

Msportdan · Jun 15, 2015

http://forum.projectcarsgame.com/sh...ues-post-patch&p=992127&viewfull=1#post992127

http://forum.projectcarsgame.com/showthread.php?28295-Scripted-weather-in-solo-career

errr well what can i say.....

Andy_J · Jun 15, 2015

Brandon Wright said:
Well, in a real racing career you do each race one time and don't know if/when/where the rain is going to happen, you don't get to keep restarting which allows you to figure out when the weather comes.

Graham had to restart due to the games failures. Read his post.

Blkout · Jun 15, 2015

Random weather would certainly be fine as long as there wasn't a way to restart a race after you started it which sort of sucks for anyone with a life if something comes up while you're racing, that's the tradeoff.

Brandon Wright · Jun 15, 2015

Emerson Fattibaldi said:
Graham had to restart due to the games failures. Read his post.

Well, I already gave up sim racing because none of the sims could exactly match the weather outside of my window which is a total immersion breaker and completely inexcusable.

Andy_J · Jun 15, 2015

Brandon Wright said:
Well, I already gave up sim racing because none of the sims could exactly match the weather outside of my window which is a total immersion breaker and completely inexcusable.

No need for such sarcasm. Not called for at all.
Another for my ignore list I reckon.

Brandon Wright · Jun 15, 2015

Emerson Fattibaldi said:
No need for such sarcasm. Not called for at all.
Another for my ignore list I reckon.

Well, complaining and arguing with strangers on the internets didn't seem to be getting the game fixed so I thought I'd give sarcasm a try!

Graham Laing · Jun 15, 2015

Two things really, and it's not about re-starts, just that the scripting was found because of re-starts.

1/ I think there's 7 racing events in the Formula B season, so not that many. Whatever my position in that career at the end of season one, when I go on to season two, I am faced with the same weather at the same tracks, and the weather starting on the same lap of those races. That's what I am getting at. It just a replica of season one again (weather-wise).

2/ Real weather - It's funny that @Brandon Wright mentions the weather outside his window. Before coming to Race Department I was on the Staff of a Virtual Airline (British Airways Virtual). At BAV and throughout the virtual aviation world, we have used real weather in flight simulators for donkey's years. With the correct software (cheap or free), it regularly interrogates real online weather sources, from the real world, and injects that weather into flight simulator at the position in the world you are flying at the time.

So even though I am not asking for a system such as this, and I personally love sarcasm, it didn't really work in the case, because the weather technology described in jest, actually exists.

Will racing sims ever use such a thing? I doubt it, but keep looking out of that window, one day you just might see a pig flying by

Kyle Pearson · Jun 15, 2015

Graham Laing said:
Will racing sims ever use such a thing? I doubt it, but keep looking out of that window, one day you just might see a pig flying by

pCARS has a slimmed down version of that. They do use "forecasts" for the real weather option in Quick Races. It doesn't continue to sample the forecast but it can build a weather pattern based on a current forecast. I keep using the term forecast as they do use "forecast" and may not know what the actual weather is.. Someone said it was raining in their location (just a few miles from one of the tracks in the game) but it wasn't in pCARS when setting the real weather option. It turned out the "forecast" for the area didn't have rain predicted so it wasn't in pCARS.

Brandon Wright · Jun 15, 2015

Graham Laing said:
So even though I am not asking for a system such as this, and I personally love sarcasm, it didn't really work in the case, because the weather technology described in jest, actually exists.

My sarcasm wasn't directed at the weather system in pCARS but at the fact that people seem to be tripping over themselves to find every little thing to complain about.

William Wester · Jun 15, 2015

It could be that SMS scripted the weather to maintain a level playing field for achievements. If one person runs a career with weather and another turns weather off then achievements don't make as much sense.
Play the career as designed and compare yourself to your peers under the "same" set of rules or create your own race with/without weather, seems reasonable. I don't play career so maybe I don't see the point.

Kyle Pearson · Jun 15, 2015

William Wester said:
It could be that SMS scripted the weather to maintain a level playing field for achievements. If one person runs a career with weather and another turns weather off then achievements don't make as much sense.

This is part of it, yes. Part of the idea was that the career experience would be the same for all.

I'm just hopeful there will be a career creator which can calc the weather auto-magically at the start of the season.

This would be able to provide the randomness that some desire, without having the hack of restarting a race until a driver has his/her desired weather.

Graham Laing · Jun 15, 2015

William Wester said:
It could be that SMS scripted the weather to maintain a level playing field for achievements. If one person runs a career with weather and another turns weather off then achievements don't make as much sense.
Play the career as designed and compare yourself to your peers under the "same" set of rules or create your own race with/without weather, seems reasonable. I don't play career so maybe I don't see the point.

The trouble is if that is true, it makes things worse. It makes this game no better than all the other mediocre games out there. Not concentrating on the 'game' and the potential great racing it may provide, but concentrating on stats, leaderboards, and achievements, all the needless fluff used to stroke the player's ego.

In a singleplayer career my career stats maybe of some interest to me, but why should they be of interest to anyone else, it's not multiplayer?

So I really hope the weather 'thing' is not about a level playing field, but just about simplified coding .......

Dyrgl · Jun 15, 2015

Does anyone even care about these "achievements"? My guess is that it´s a lazy approach aimed to have the AI behaving sensibly thanks to a scripted environment. And they still failed as AI fails to be decent in mixed weather races even if weather is already known.

LacSlyer · Jun 15, 2015

Kyle Pearson said:
There are some who like the scripted weather, and some that do not. I don't believe there is a right or wrong approach to this as you can never please everyone. IMO it would be bad to have drivers just keep restarting a race to get their desired weather. I haven't really done much with career but from what I've read, I do think there is a little too much rain in the career races.

What would be a good alternative would be to be able to create user made championships. Hopefully that is something that will be included a little later.

This sort of points out the other obvious fault with the design of the careers, in that you can restart whenever you want with zero repercussions. So making the weather system non-random in career allows players to know exactly when weather comes in for a race, and therein the option to completely negate the decision making that comes with random weather.

Let's just hope we get some sort of user created championships some time soon. I'm honestly shocked it's not already in the game, especially when a multiplayer version would appeal to a large amount of the more hardcore sim racers I'm sure.