Gimpy,

In my experience, setting WeatherRndInterval to 2 or 3 results in weather changes that at least approximate real-life weather changes. Sometimes you get clouds and rain for three or four days straight, and sometimes you have clouds in the morning but clearing by afternoon. So far, I have not seen any wild or unrealistic weather changes using my settings.

My advice is to give my suggestions a try and see if they seem realistic to you. If not, you can easily use SH3Weather to change all of the weather settings except WeatherRndInterval to values you prefer. To change WeatherRndInterval, just go to your SH3/data/campaigns/campaign folder and change the three files mentioned earlier in this thread.

Good luck and let me know how it works out!

Hi all--Just an update on my weather settings. In general, I'm still happy with the settings I listed in the first post in this thread. I still get some really long periods of bad weather, but I guess that is life in the North Atlantic for you! ;) Most of the settings seem to work pretty good, but I still go back and forth on WindRand and WeatherRndInterval. WindRand is particularly tricky, and I'm re-thinking my recommendation of using a setting of "2" with that variable. "1" seems to work better, and I'm even considering trying a setting of "0"! As far as WeatherRndInterval is concerned, a setting of "2" or "3" seems to do the trick most of the time.

I've also found some interesting weather settings in the scene.dat file, located in the SH3/data folder, but I'll have to learn hex-editing before I can make any headway with those variables! :stare:

Please let me know if you have any good or bad experiences with these settings!

I'm predicting bad things will happen if you set it to 0. From what I can gather, the variable is set in hours, so setting it to 0 hours will result in one of three things (my guess of course):

1) It will take to doing a check for random weather constantly, which would overload your CPU causing a massive slow down, and possibly crash SH3.

2) That variable might be used elsewhere in the weather calculations, and you might end up dividing by 0 or something, which would result in SH3 crashing.

3) It will never check for weather.

I agree with the above. Don't go to zero...

Hi, guys.
I think you can set all of the values to zero except for the WeatherRndInterval setting. In fact, I have set several of the other values to zero at various time without ill effects. For instance, even though we have been told that setting any of the xxxRand values to zero will result in no changes in that variable, that is not true. Fog will still come and go, rain will still occur, etc. Instead of "none" it's more like "a little bit"

I wouldn't set WeatherRndInterval to 0 though, although it wil probably still work. The game would probably just use a default value.

Hmm must these numbers be integers I wonder-would perhaps "1.5" work best for WeatherRndInterval setting say...

I've been playing with the above settings for a while now. My first trip out, I ran into a crazy storm that lasted for about two weeks or so. This current trip however seems to be staying calm and I havn't seen a heck of a lot of weather change yet. Wind has increased on me from 3 to 7 knots, a little fog rolled in, but that was it. It's been smooth sailing so far. But We'll see what happens.. I'm still less than halfway through the tour. I'm just reaching my patrol area northwest of Shetland and have like 11 torpedoes left (and I never return until they're all gone).

After the patrol of my assigned grid, I plan to slide down the west coast of England and linger off the coast of Ireland for a bit where all the convoys come out. Hopefully *knocks wood and tosses a horseshoe over his shoulder* the weather will remain nice while I'm hunting down there.:sunny:

Well, Subtype Zero, I regret to inform you that your weather mod didn't work for me-at all. 5 straight days with the exact same weather AND wind direction! I am running GWX 2.0 with SH Commander, if that makes any difference; perhaps there's something in there which is "co-opting" your modifications to the campaign.mis files. As for me I'm stumped.

Hi,

First, I don't consider my settings to be a "mod" as I have not permanently altered any of the game files. It's more like minor tweaking of some of the text files. Second, I can't guarantee results! :D The way the game handles weather is too "mucked up" for me to do that. Instead, these are just some suggested settings that I have found to give me, on average, more variable weather over the course of a patrol. Third, even if you get rain and wind for 15 straight days does not mean you are guaranteed to get sunny and calm the next day. This is known as the gambler's fallacy. With any random event, say like tossing a coin, the chances that a coin will land tails is always 50-50, even if the coin has been heads the previous 15 times in a row (unlikely, but possible)!

That being said, I think the game tends to default to 15 m/sec winds, either by design or by accident. Since I am from the USA, I can't say for sure, but I believe that 2 week storms are not all that rare in the North Atlantic. Also, I've noticed a bug in the program. The longer your patrol, the longer it takes for your weather to change from one setting to another. See this thread for a more detailed explanation for this and other problems with SH3 and weather:

http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/show...eather+control

Stiebler and I are working on a mod to adjust some of the weather settings found in scene.dat, but we have found that without access to the SH3 SDK, it is very difficult to make any changes that have any profound effects on the weather in the game . :x

Mind, no flames intended or implied. :cool:

Just trying to get to the bottom of all this. My other hunch is that weather never updates during high time compression, tho, given the apparent fact that the weather timer "resets" when you reload a save, I tried slowing TC down to 1x every two hours on the exact minute when I made the save (actually one minute before). I'll try setting wind and weather changes from 2 to 1 as you mentioned in one of your earlier posts next. Just really porks the immersion when the weather never changes...

DiFool2, or may I call you fool? :lol: No offense taken, no offense meant. I understand your aggravation, the weather system in SH3 is aggravating.

Interesting observation about the weather not updating during high TC. In my testing, I have found that the weather updates according to a fairly regular schedule: within 32-34 hours after leaving port, even under high TC. This interval lengthens by one hour for each subsequent change in the weather, resulting in longer and longer intervals between weather changes. As a result, by the time you are near the end of a four week patrol, your weather does not change from its last setting for a period of at least 48 hours or so. To add insult to injury, when the weather does change, it may only be a change of one parameter, like wind direction, while all the other variables remain the same. Thus, 3 steady weeks of heavy rain, fog, and 15 m/sec wind! :stare: Furthermore, at high TC's of 1048 or above, (while the other weather variables can and do change), wind speed sometimes gets "stuck" and stays at 15 m/sec. Recently, while testing at a TC of 2096, I had a run of 30 straight days of 15 m/sec wind!!! :doh: It was only after I dropped to a TC of 512 that my wind finally died down to "only" 7 m/sec. :roll:

Finally, as you and others have noted, when you save and reload a game, the "timer" for weather changes resets to zero. So, if you save just before the weather is scheduled to change (say, 42 hours after the last change), after you reload the game, you will have to wait another 42 hours for the weather to finally change, for a grand total of almost 84 hours between any weather changes at all!! :arrgh!:

In conclusion, to avoid getting stuck with long periods of unchanging, lousy weather, you must avoid high TC for long periods of time AND avoid saving IF you think the weather is about to change. After the weather changes in some way, go ahead and save to your heart's content (note: as long as you are not submerged, near land, or near any sinking ships--did I leave anything out)? :damn:

P.S. Remember, you can get a rough estimate of when the weather in your game is about to change by 1) keeping track of the number of weather changes that have already occurred, 2) take the number found in step 1 and add 32-34 to it, 3) estimate when the weather last changed in your game, and 4) add the number found in step 2 to the time of the last weather change you found in step 3. For example, say you have been at sea for one week and have noticed approximately 5 weather changes. Add 5 to 32 and 34 for a range of 37 to 39 hours. If your weather last changed at 0300 hours on June 1, then you can expect the weather to change next time sometime between 1600 and 1800 hours on June 2.

I'll try this right away. Because on my last patrol after sucessfull hunt, attacking a task force and later a convoi scored about 90000 tons but didn't had any torpedoes left. I met so many lonely C3's and C2's but i was inside a storm, which lasted almost a week and that's not all I also rammed my VIIB while trying to dock, because of the heavy fog :damn:

Good luck and let me know how it turns out! :up:

I must apologize to Subtype Zero: when I ran his changes the first time I was in mid-patrol. After I got back I redid his changes again, and two patrols later I think it is working. I got the impression from SZ's posts that I would be seeing weather changes 1-3 times a day, and wind changes 2-6 times a day. Well while I've had nothing so drastic, weather does seem to change significantly once every 5 days or so, and wind once every day or two more or less. Visibility once every 3 days perhaps.

On my most recent patrol I got out of port with the usual balmy skies, then ran into a storm for a week off Norway, then sailed west, got clear skies with 15 m/s winds for 3 days, then the wind speed dropped to 11, then 7 and now 0 (tho I think it picked up to around 3 in the last day or so). Had no clouds whatsoever tho for 2 weeks now. This is with WindRand & WeatherRndInterval both set to 1.

Go for it. Weather is one of the most annoying things in SHIII (way too much storm and too little calm weather) and balancing the weather will earn you a place in the annals.

I say this because imo only a change to either the dat files or the exe will make a difference. Fiddling with the mis file has been done for years and no balance could be achieved.

I wished someone from the devs would read this and offer an inofficial solution. If you have access to the source this thing could be done in hours or days, while the community has strived for it for years.

Thinking in to the future, it would be great if the dat files could be randomized outside of the game, because then even weather forecasts by radio would be feasible.