[tresspassor]

Awhile ago I was experimenting with building a dynamic weather system. Rather then building a complete weather system in game I tried to go the route of using real-world weather.

So I mapped each city in the game to a specific city that would reflect its weather (a tropical city would receive Key West weather, while a northern city would use Fargo).

Hourly I would query a specific web-site and try and parse out the current weather. I would get results like this:

{
"|1600",
"|E",
"|12",
"|10",
"|43",
"|39",
"|87",
"|Broken Clouds, Rain",
"|EIDW 071600Z 07010KT 9999
-SHRA SCT020 BKN035 06/04 Q1029"
}

And then use those results to determine the weather that was affecting that city.

I was wondering if anyone has tried to go this route? Or has gone farther with it (using doppler or other information to build weather patterns). Or even using real world events in game such as hurricanes, earthquakes etc?

Also, to continue this. What sorts of online information have you used for in-game results? Has anyone tried making a stock market using real-time data? Or news events, etc?

I'd be interested to hear what sorts of online information people have used for what results.

[Rhuarc]

I once worked on a piece of software that needed to realistically simulate real world weather and natural disasters at key cities across the world.  There is a good deal of information that you can find if you dig enough, but here's a few that should be helpful.

Global precipitation data, by city.

NASA Disaster Finder

GeoSpatial Data and Climate Services Group

Those should get you started.

[Favonius]

That idea sounds very interesting to me. I do have a queston though.

What kind of timespan does your MUD have? Do your seasons match seasons in real life? Like if its December right now, is it December in your game? If it's not, I can see you having a few problems with keeping the seasons in sync. One solution is to have a database of say the weather in each city for the past 10 years and use that data in making your weather system.

[tresspassor]

Rhuarc thanks for those links, I've been looking for another weather sever to parse for some time now (the one I previously used had a horrible lag)

NOAA

Was very useful.

Originally Posted by What kind of timespan does your MUD have? Do your seasons match seasons in real life? Like if its December right now, is it December in your game? If it's not, I can see you having a few problems with keeping the seasons in sync. One solution is to have a database of say the weather in each city for the past 10 years and use that data in making your weather system.

The system I was working on was real time, so 1 mud day = 1 real day. Getting a database of the last 5 years is a good idea, that way you don't have to worry about the hourly connection. If the game was real-time (1 mud day = 1 real day) you could even just have 1 year and cycle it. I don't think anyone would notice.

You want to go with raw METAR, not all this decoded crap. Valuable info will be lost in decoded reports. One good way to make this work would be to grab the Aviation Digital Data Service METAR java tool and decompile it and figure out how it obtains its metars, then basically copy the process into your mud.