Weather mods & workarounds

[Robert Fulton]

Perhaps some veteran captains can summarize the current state of the weather in SH3.

I have read several older threads and it looks like Stiebler & SubZero's RealWeatherFix http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showthread.php?t=130147 either stock or with NYGM or GWX supermods is the state of the art. Rubini's StopTheRain is also an interesting workaround. But I have not found much discussion of this topic since about March of '08.

And I cannot find RWF at Stiebler's TeddyBear Filefront site for downloading. The excellent .pdf WeatherReport is there, but not RWF. Or am I blind?

Even without having used mods, I am indebted to all those who invested so much time and skill in researching the weather problems that plague SH3. Going an entire patrol with no deck gun usage possible and days on end with 300m visibility is still very annoying, but knowledge of the hows and whys make it somehow more bearable.

A big thank you from an AOTD veteran who is very late getting to SH.

[Stiebler]

The reason the 'RealWeatherFix' mod is no longer available from the NYGM/Teddy-Bar website is that unfortunately use of it on what was then the latest variant of GWX broke the scenes.dat file and caused some unfortunates to lose their current career patrol. (It had been tested on an earlier version of GWX).

Obviously I had to withdraw the program after this problem, although subsequently I provided a tested, safe variant to the GW development team for private use only, so that it could be added to all later versions of GWX. However, the RWF program was never made publicly available again, in case it broke some other unforeseen mod.

Robert Fulton: you say that you are new to SH3, so I presume you are playing with stock SH3. Instead of messing around with a series of unrelated mods, I suggest you adopt this strategy:

1. Complete one career with stock (unmodded) SH3 so that you know just what you are getting with the unmodded program.
2. Then try all of the top supermods (NYGM3 - naturally, since I am one of the team; GWX3 - certainly the most popular supermod on this forum; or War Ace - with its own distinctive features). Give each several patrols, one each in (say) 1940, 1942 and 1944, so you get the full flavour. You can install several supermods separately by making multiple installs of the original SH3 game (preferably on different partitions of your hard-drive).

By using a supermod, all the work of integrating various small mods is done for you.

Good luck, anyway.

Stiebler.

[Nedlam]

The reason the 'RealWeatherFix' mod is no longer available from the NYGM/Teddy-Bar website is that unfortunately use of it on what was then the latest variant of GWX broke the scenes.dat file and caused some unfortunates to lose their current career patrol. (It had been tested on an earlier version of GWX).
Stiebler,

This might be a silly question... It's still incorperated in the latest NYGM, right? I don't have the readme file in front of me.

[Stiebler]

@Nedlam:

Concerning the Real Weather Fix:
It's still incorperated in the latest NYGM, right?
It certainly is!

Stiebler.

[Robert Fulton]

Thanks, Steibler. Good suggestions. I do plan to explore both NYGM and GWX, as well as other mods and tools.

A question, though. Cannot you continue to provide RWF for stock users? While it is evident to me that most of the active posters here are using a supermod, I offer the conjecture that there are still thousands of stock players who would benefit from RWF.

It does after all address the single greatest failing of SH3, at least in my opinion.

Whether or not you decide to do this, I repeat my thanks to you, SubZero, Rabini and the others who researched, tested, diagnosed, and mitigated the weather phenomenon. I learned much from reading the old posts.

[Nedlam]

I just noticed something tonight. I've been plagued with poor weather the past few patrols that stinks of stock SHIII weather. I'm running the latest, greatest NYGM which was rather dishartening because I have played a few previous patrols with it and the weather almost felt real.

My Campaign files (all of them) look like this:

[Mission]
Title=
MissionType=0
MissionDataType=1
Year=1938
Month=1
Day=1
Hour=12
Minute=0
Fog=0
FogRand=0
Clouds=1
CloudsRand=1
Precip=0
PrecipRand=1
WindHeading=59
WindSpeed=8
WindRand=1
WeatherRndInterval=11

The pristine NYGM Campaign files look like this:

[Mission]
Title=
MissionType=0
MissionDataType=1
Year=1938
Month=1
Day=1
Hour=12
Minute=0
Fog=0
FogRand=0
Clouds=0
CloudsRand=0
Precip=0
PrecipRand=0
WindHeading=0
WindSpeed=5.000000
WindRand=0
WeatherRndInterval=5

I hate to blame programs because the creators tend sometimes get a little upset. The only think I can think of is I ran the SH3Weather which announces it changes the RND, LND and SCR files. Might it change more that the wind speed, direction and cloud cover?

I like SH3Weather I do. Give the choice though I'll take vanilla weather upon starting a patrol over weeks of fog, high winds and rain.

[Piggy]

Aye, weather in SH3 is frustrating....

Edit: sorry for a long story, but I cant help myself..:wah:

Just last night I was on patrol, got a convoy report that was about 100km away from me, weather at this time was 4m wind speed, visibilty unlimited (well 16km)... plotted my course and hit compression.

About an hour into my intercept (not real time of course) I decided to head to the bridge as the sun was about to set and I was heading right into it (very pretty), weather was still the same but I hit 32X compression to speed up the sunset and then it just switched, heavy rain, high winds. What was odd about it was I was still looking at orange sky, it was raining cats & dogs. Behind me I couldnt see much past the stern but in front it was great visibilty despite the heavy rain.

Of course as soon as I swtiched stations and went back to the bridge is was as expected... I could barely see the bow....

I tell you thats really frustrating, I was so close yet I may as well have been a world away...

Dont know what to suggest, Ive used the weather fix mod in GWX2.1 but havent tried it in 3.0.

I thought GWX3 had a revised weather thing going? Well so far it seems to be okay, no endless 2 weeks storms but they do still last quite a while. The biggest porblem I have isnt the rain but the wave heights... which only seem to drop after Im out of eels :damn:

Sorry for the novel...:oops:

[harzfeld]

does anyone know how to get rid of rain out of game files? I mean no rain ever. maybe a mod that would load thru jsme?