Tick boxes in M.E for Random Weather, Time of day, month of year; game randomises on load mission.

[Elphaba]

And when the game engine loads the mission, it creates a random setting for each of those ticked options. 
 

You really need to allow mission creators to build missions for replay-ability because it can take so long to make a good mission that randomness in many factors will give it a longer life.  

[Elphaba]

I seriously cannot believe there are no upvotes... that's just crazy to me. 

[Limaro]

Hi @Elphaba,

I get the idea of your suggestions. But I believe that this wont work out for many missions. In my case, all missions are very strict to time, weather etc. especially with the designed workloads, briefings etc.

I guess it would just be nice for some PVP missions. And even there, you might not want all possibilities of randomness. Imagine WW2 and getting darkest night and bad weather.

I think it's just not enough use cases for that feature.

But dont be sad, there is not much feedback in this forum section anyhow. Mine are also very lonely. You're invited to check them
I still like writing them. It maybe gives ED an idea what and how people work with the ME.

[Elphaba]

20 minutes ago, Limaro said:

Imagine WW2 and getting darkest night and bad weather.

That would actually make things way more fun and challenging. You don't not fly IRL because the wx isn't CAVOK. You deal with the muck as it is. Something DCS pilots should really be doing too. 

[Schlingel mit Kringel]

4 minutes ago, Limaro said:

Hi @Elphaba,

I get the idea of your suggestions. But I believe that this wont work out for many missions. In my case, all missions are very strict to time, weather etc. especially with the designed workloads, briefings etc.

I guess it would just be nice for some PVP missions. And even there, you might not want all possibilities of randomness. Imagine WW2 and getting darkest night and bad weather.

I think it's just not enough use cases for that feature.

But dont be sad, there is not much feedback in this forum section anyhow. Mine are also very lonely. You're invited to check them
I still like writing them. It maybe gives ED an idea what and how people work with the ME.

Imho it depends on how granular the randomness can be defined.

If there was just a checkbox to either have fixed user set values or a completely random mix of clouds settings, time, season, fog, rain, each time, i would agree - most missions work well in a certain environmental setting and withiing certain limits. Flying CAS in an 80s jet with fog and a cloud layer at 800m just does not work.

But if you had chance to define the randomness more precisely, in smaller steps and with certain limits, i'd definitely support that idea. If you could set the time to be random between 0800-1800 for example. Or set wind random from SSE to SW with speed variation between 2-9m/s. Give limits of min and max cloud denstity and altitude. This would indeed be a great thing to have and give a slightly different experience.

[Elphaba]

3 minutes ago, Schlingel mit Kringel said:

Imho it depends on how granular the randomness can be defined.

If there was just a checkbox to either have fixed user set values or a completely random mix of clouds settings, time, season, fog, rain, each time, i would agree - most missions work well in a certain environmental setting and withiing certain limits. Flying CAS in an 80s jet with fog and a cloud layer at 800m just does not work.

But if you had chance to define the randomness more precisely, in smaller steps and with certain limits, i'd definitely support that idea. If you could set the time to be random between 0800-1800 for example. Or set wind random from SSE to SW with speed variation between 2-9m/s. Give limits of min and max cloud denstity and altitude. This would indeed be a great thing to have and give a slightly different experience.

That's all down to implementation, and I agree with almost everything you said - that's EDs job to actualise. 

My overall point was that after all the effort that goes into a mission or campaign design, having to remake the whole thing for each different type of wx to fly in (or day/month/time of day) is a waste of time and disk space. 

Having the ability to run a mission and not know the wx and time of day or season, brings another level of challenge and replayability to our missions/campaigns. 

[Dzsekeb]

I've made mod that does something similar. It only works in singleplayer, but it saves and restores mission time and date, so you have time progression between sessions, and it picks a semi randomized weather preset, including temperature and wind, each time you start the mission, based on a table of probabilities depending on month the mission is set in.

You can find it here
 

You can probably tweak it to have fully random date and time along with weather if you wish.

Edited February 23 by Dzsekeb

[Elphaba]

On 2/23/2024 at 6:32 PM, Dzsekeb said:

I've made mod that does something similar. It only works in singleplayer, but it saves and restores mission time and date, so you have time progression between sessions, and it picks a semi randomized weather preset, including temperature and wind, each time you start the mission, based on a table of probabilities depending on month the mission is set in.

You can find it here
 

You can probably tweak it to have fully random date and time along with weather if you wish.

 

thanks, but SP is of no use to me. MP or nothing. 

[HC_Official]

I just wrote a script that grabs real time METAR data from the internet and injects it into the miz file adjusts the time and then starts up the DCS server

so you never know what weather you might get .... also means it might be un-flyable weather but you gotta roll that dice

[Exorcet]

On 2/14/2024 at 4:53 PM, Elphaba said:

I seriously cannot believe there are no upvotes... that's just crazy to me. 

It's a good idea, but also has some problems.

Namely weather is part of mission planning. Completely random weather can be horrible, making missions unplayable. You're not doing ground attack in a P-51 with overcast and fog or in the middle of the night.

Multiple weather possibilities for a mission is a great request, but I don't think random is the way to do it. I'm not opposed to a truely random option, but I think it's secondary to things like:

-List of preset weather choices

-Random evolution of weather from a given starting point

The difference between random and the other two is that they can weed out extremes that would just result in the mission being cancelled in real life.

[Elphaba]

On 3/9/2024 at 5:33 PM, Exorcet said:

Completely random weather can be horrible, making missions unplayable. You're not doing ground attack in a P-51 with overcast and fog or in the middle of the night.

Sure, but a reload of the mission reshuffles things and you get something you can work with. 

And for modern aircraft, if the mission is important enough, you fly regardless. 

Having flown almost all my time in DCS in MP PVEVP servers, far too many people are lazy and only fly in CAVOK. These aircraft have tech that works in all times and conditions, we should be utilising that and raising the bar. 

 

[Lace]

2 minutes ago, Elphaba said:

 

And for modern aircraft, if the mission is important enough, you fly regardless. 

 

Not necessarily.  Missions often work backwards - there may be a prescribed TOT to fit around other taskings, the weather brief will dictate the weapon delivery and even weapon type (no LASER through undercast etc), the time of day may play a part on the attack heading (attacking out of the setting sun).  All of these things are considered when planning and briefing the flight, not the other way around.  

Of course, things can deviate from the plan, the weather might not be as briefed, or there could be an operational delay, which pushes a TOT back a bit, but complete randomness is unrealistic IMHO.

You don't plan a sortie, then roll the dice on WX and timings, the WX and timings are an integral part of that plan. 

[Elphaba]

4 minutes ago, Lace said:

Not necessarily.  Missions often work backwards - there may be a prescribed TOT to fit around other taskings, the weather brief will dictate the weapon delivery and even weapon type (no LASER through undercast etc), the time of day may play a part on the attack heading (attacking out of the setting sun).  All of these things are considered when planning and briefing the flight, not the other way around.  

Of course, things can deviate from the plan, the weather might not be as briefed, or there could be an operational delay, which pushes a TOT back a bit, but complete randomness is unrealistic IMHO.

You don't plan a sortie, then roll the dice on WX and timings, the WX and timings are an integral part of that plan. 

In reality, that's true, but there are too many missions that are July, CAVOK (Northern Hemisphere) and it's BORING. If the M.E. allowed it to randomise time of year and weather then replayability and how you approach the mission would change and that can only be a good thing. 

[Lace]

6 minutes ago, Elphaba said:

In reality, that's true, but there are too many missions that are July, CAVOK (Northern Hemisphere) and it's BORING. If the M.E. allowed it to randomise time of year and weather then replayability and how you approach the mission would change and that can only be a good thing. 

Yeah, I agree to an extent.  I always try to have a weather and atmospherics element to my missions, as It adds so much more depth.  Some variation is a good idea, I just feel that complete randomness would be a leap too far, and would result in too many scrubbed missions, unless you specified some min/max criteria for each parameter.

 

[Elphaba]

Just now, Lace said:

Yeah, I agree to an extent.  I always try to have a weather and atmospherics element to my missions, as It adds so much more depth.  Some variation is a good idea, I just feel that complete randomness would be a leap too far, and would result in too many scrubbed missions, unless you specified some min/max criteria for each parameter.

 

That's what @Exorcet was alluding to, I believe. 

[Exorcet]

8 hours ago, Elphaba said:

That's what @Exorcet was alluding to, I believe. 

Yes. My position is that weather variation should come to DCS and is an important element in real life flight/mission planning, but we need some control over how much it can vary otherwise we risk breaking missions.

The same can be said for things outside of weather too. At some point ED made random AA missile launch range a default setting for fighters. While I can see the usefulness of the setting, it's rendered almost pointless because the randomness ranges all the way from max range to weapon NEZ, so it results in BVR fighters potentially holding missiles until they're so close that they have no chance of avoiding missiles fired at them. That option needs a slider to limit the range of possible random values.