Weather or not ...

[OldProf]

First, I want you to look at a couple of screenshots:





What's my point? I took these shots while running "Double Duty," a Steam Workshop by someone who humbly identifies himself as "Bob", and my point is that a scenario writer's choice of weather and time of day mean a lot to the eventual player. Aside from being a very well constructed switching scenario, this features a couple of serious thunderstorms that add a lot to the job.

[OldProf]

I could never figure out the lightning in railworks. How is this done?

If my memory is working today, the thunder storm with lightning effects (donner und blitzen!) came with the Sherman Hill route. It's an interesting weather pattern in that neither the storm nor the lightning always show up during a scenario, so they're on some kind of a loop and as far as I know there's no way to preset a starting point for the loop. This led a lot of those under-the-bridge types to scream that RSC had cheated, lied, stolen, etc. (as usual), but (as usual) they were wrong and (as often) their error arose from their impatience. When these effects come around, as they did for me twice while running this scenario, they're very impressive.

Can a weather type be exported from one route to another as part of a scenario?

[DapperDan]

Tom, I had created a scenario for the NEPA route that utilized the weather from the Sherman Hill route. I'm not sure it was the best way to get the weather pattern to work in a scenario, but it worked for me (still learning this stuff). If you're interested you can check the thread in NERW PA Division Scenarios under NEPA-DAN-002. If you download the scenario feel free to dig into it to see what I had done, and hopefully you'll come up with a better method of utilizing the weather, as I wasn't sure if the various files that are required to create the changing weather could've been copied to another location or not. I'll leave that up to the experts to chime in. Anyway hope this helps, and if there are others that have created any scenarios for other routes using the Sherman Hill weather pattern please let us know if there's a better way.

Regards,

[artimrj]

Doc also made a lightning storm weather that works quite well. It is part of the NERW package he a made for adding lights to a lot of the NERW equipment. It most likely can be added to any route. Been a while since I even thought about it.