Well… my, my, my! After all these years, it has finally happened.
Sofly/Skytech has done what I have always wished I could do myself.
That is, they cracked the invisible code and corrected 40 time zone regions that were incorrect. Some were incorrect year-round, some were daylight saving corrections, but the important thing is they got done.
The download (available in the Environment section of the Sim Marketplace), names all the areas, I can’t recall the list at the moment.
This is great news, because local time zones are something that has always bothered me about this simulator. Yes, I know… most people learned to live with it, because to them, there are far more important issues that need/needed fixing. Afterall, as far as airline pilots are concerned, they just live in UTC time, so local times are irrelevant to them. But, for a local flier, it is nice to see them fixed.
Finally, Hawaii is UTC –10. Finally Princess Juliana & St. Barts are UTC –4. You don’t know how happy this makes me. If I knew who was responsible, I’d buy them a beer!
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I made a free version of the time zone corrections back in December, and have updated it over the months to ensure it’s accurate: https://flightsim.to/file/86060/time-zone-correction
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BTW, I only just found out about this now. I don’t know how it compares to the one I made.
Darn it! I wish I had known about it. I guess I spent so much time asking the developers to do something about it, that I didn’t even check to see if a third-party person like yourself had already done it.
Great job. I’m curious without giving away too much of your secrets, how did you approach adjusting them. Is it an .xml file that you found? It’s apparently very well hidden.
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Well, I wrote it myself in XML format, then used the SDK to compile it as a BGL. I had each area in this format. Using Madeira as an example:
<!--Madeira and Porto Santo-->
<TimeZone
latitudeMinimum = "30.0"
latitudeMaximum = "35.0"
longitudeMinimum = "-18.25"
longitudeMaximum = "-14.0"
timedeviation = "0"
priority = "0"
dstStartMonth="3"
dstStartDayOfTheWeek="1"
dstStartDayOfTheMonth="25"
dstStartRule="DST_RULE_ON_OR_AFTER_DAY"
dstEndMonth="10"
dstEndDayOfTheWeek="1"
dstEndDayOfTheMonth="25"
dstEndRule="DST_RULE_ON_OR_AFTER_DAY"
dstTimeDiffDuringDST="60"
dstTimeDiffOutsideDST="0"/>
Admittedly, it can be a pain with regions with curvy borders because the areas are defined as rectangles, and I had to increase priority to 2 to get the time zones to work
Also, for countries like Australia and New Zealand (or the southern hemisphere in general), I had to reverse the DST logic because it doesn’t recognize if it’s DST and the year changes (October to April for example for Australia), so I used dstTimeDiffOutsideDST as a workaround to ensure DST is correct for these parts of the world
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Funny enough, I remember working on this back in April last year. I was considering releasing this, but when Asobo announced they were going to fix the time zones in 2024 as well as 2020, I put it on hold. After it turned out not to be the case after looking at 2024 myself (I don’t have 2024 anymore), I decided to go back to my time zone fixer, cover areas I may have missed, and share the time zone fixes to flightsim.to on December. Admittedly, I may have missed some locations, which I did take the time to fix when I see someone report it to me.
I haven’t tested it for 2024 since I don’t own it currently, but I have heard reports it works for MSFS 2024
How much was this? I’m not on my PC to check.
My fixer is free, but this new one apparently from Skytech (I have nothing to do with them) has it for $5 USD
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BTW, I do plan on continuing updating my time zone fixer if there are any discrepancies mentioned. Earlier today, I updated Iran to have DST removed
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Thank you sir for all your hard work. I tried to copy and paste Skytech’s version from my 2020 Official Folder to my 2024 Community folder, and it does not work in 2024. Perhaps yours does, which would make giving it a try in 2024 worth it.
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Hi, I just tested it in MSFS 2024 myself, and I can tell you that it DOES work !
The two main errors I was most familiar with was Hawaii which is now
UTC –10, which is correct; and the Princess Julianna/St. Barts region which is now UTC –4, which is also correct.
The payware version only works in MSFS 2020. Thank you again for your time, and doing whatever it is you did to make it work in both sims.
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Thanks for letting me know it works in MSFS 2024. I am happy to hear you’re enjoying my time zone fixer!
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Thought I revisit this topic. I now have MSFS 2024 and I can now confirm compatibility with 2024. BTW, I don’t see any difference with how the MSFS 2024 SDK compiles compared to the MSFS 2020 SDK, though my fixer works on both simulators regardless of what SDK was used. Funny enough there was no hanging with MSFS 2024 when compiling the files, whereas there was with 2020, so using 2024 from now on with fixing time zones.
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