This going to sound stupid and dumb and dumb and stupid, but how are all of you setting up your sim to fly somewhere that is significantly outside of your time zone?
I’m in California, so I’m UTC -8. When I sit down to fly, the world is turning dark in Europe and beyond. Subsequently, I have never flown in Europe except when taking off in the dark and flying to the USA or checking out the Discovery flights from the activities section.
I struggle to let go of the concept of live weather, time and traffic. The sun has an affect on weather and the pressure changes and all this stuff and I can’t really let go of changing the time, but leaving the weather alone, or knowing these live flights are flying in real time, etc.
For those of you who are flying around somewhere that would usually be dark when you’re using live time, what do you usually do to setup the sim to fly in daylight? I’d like to maintain live weather, but do you just set the time to noon? How do you maintain the illusion of reality?
I live on the west coast of US, too, and have been flying around Australia. I leave live weather enabled, but change the time to daylight there, since I’m more interested in sightseeing than actual time of day reality.
I’m in the opposite situation. I’m in Europe and mostly fly in California. I just move the slider to something compatible to my VFR experience, set Live Weather if it looks plausible or set a weather theme.
But most of the time I fly in the evening (here in Paris, France) which makes flights in California to midday and later.
In other sims with external weather software that provides historic weather,I would typically set the sim time to match my local time and there have a kinda realistic situation of sorts.
E.g. if it was 11am here in the U.K. and I wanted to fly in Australia I would set the sim time to be 11am in Australia and use the live weather data for what it would have been in Australia at 11am of the same day.
I live in New Zealand and fly all around the would. In order to perform daytime flights I always have to change the time zone. It is a trade off between darkness or weather. I prefer to see the scenery.
It would be great if there was a way to have have the “live” weather based on a time you enter in the previous 24 hrs, based on the time you enter.
I do as you mentioned, set time of day, leave live weather on.
There will be a difference between departure and arrival airports weather, and that is all I need.
Since I fly airliners, the progression of the weather change doesn’t bother me at all, I’m well above that bit of influence in the atmosphere.
I have a similar situation, but a very different circumstance. I live on the East coast, and I usually fly around my side of the country…But… I work night shift, and I keep that same schedule on weekends. What this means is it’s always dark where I live when I fly. The compromise I made is I usually bump the time up to the early morning where the sun is just starting to rise. In my mind, the weather at that time hasn’t changed much yet from the past few hours, and I get to fly in the daylight. Plus I always get a pretty sunrise to look at.
This is something we’ve been asking for since the sim released. It’s even been asked in the live Q&A before. (I don’t remember the response) If anyone reading this hasn’t voted on the original topic written in Aug 2020, please vote here:
Now UTC-7! I know this is a very stupid answer… but if you start flying at 1:00 AM PDT, in London it is 8:00 AM. Okay, not a good answer… I know there have been some group events I’ve wanted to fly but the start times were like 3:00 AM PT. I love flying but I’m not going to get up at 3:00 AM!
There are many times I’ll fly with Live Weather but set a daylight time. Other times I’ll fly the correct time in that time zone but set weather to Clear Skies. Go figure!
I use Live Weather all of the time, but change to the time of day I want to fly in (morning, mid-day, afternoon, etc.). When I prepare the flight I do the following:
Start flight with aircraft at new location and weather set to “Clear”
Set time to Live/Actual
Set weather to Live
Close tool and wait a moment for weather to “populate”
Reopen the tool and change to the time of day I desire
This has worked fairly well for me when flying outside of my area (or Longitude) of the world. The weather has been close to the real world actual, but morphs appropriately as I fly. I don’t know if it stays on current data or is in some way accessing earlier info - it would be interesting to know how it is actually handled in the system when I do this. The ideal for me would be:
Maintain current system for real time with better transitions
Access short-range historical for earlier times
Access short-range future forecasting for future times