mtasa-betterweather

Better Weather is a script to create a basic semi predictable weather system in MTASA

Description

I've noticed that most weather scripts seem to be a bit basic in that they just randomly change the weather at a fixed time. Sometimes they go one step further and change it at a random time. What this script does is attempt to mimic weather patterns by setting today's weather but also pre-defining potential weather for 2 days ahead, for both the day and night weather.

When the weather updates each day it's based on these pre-defined "predictions"
As with real weather, it's not 100% accurate - sometimes the weather prediction can be wrong for the days ahead when we actually get to tomorrow or the next day :)

It is also a little random in that it won't change at a set time every day/night

Day time changes come into effect between 7am and midday. Night time weather comes into effect after 8pm, but before midnight.

Editing the optional.xml file

The BetterWeather system as provided will display a reasonably nice report for the next few days when you hit F5.

If you wish to change the key mapping because it conflicts with another resource, you can do so by editing the appropriate settings in the optional.xml file. You may even want to disable the report altogether, if you have another resource to handle the UI for the weather reports -
e.g. to make your existing server branded UI show weather reports, as an example, or if you want to use weather reports in your server to influence player actions in other resources. To do this, just modify the WeatherReportsEnabled setting to false.

Or you can delete the appropriate lines in the meta file and delete the optional files altogether if you want it to be even cleaner :)

Export Functions For interacting with other resources

In all cases:

WeatherOverNight is nil unless it's between midnight and 7am. WeatherOverNight and WeatherToday are both nil if it's between 8pm and midnight.

Get stringdescriptions of the weather if you want to display it when the user logs onto the server:

<export function="GetTodaysWeatherDescriptions" http="true" />
returns WeatherOverNight, WeatherToday, WeatherTonight 

If you need to identify upcoming weather for use in resources, return the numeric weather Ids:

<export function="GetTodaysWeatherIDs" http="true" />
returns WeatherOverNight, WeatherToday, WeatherTonight

Get a longer set of weather descriptions for both today and the days ahead:

<export function="GetAllWeatherDescriptions" http="true" />
returns WeatherOverNight, WeatherToday, WeatherTonight, 
WeatherTomorrowDay, WeatherTomorrowNight, 
WeatherDayAfter, WeatherDayAfterNight

As above, but get the numeric ids for use in resources:

<export function="GetAllWeatherIDs" http="true" />
returns WeatherOverNight, WeatherToday, WeatherTonight, 
WeatherTomorrowDay, WeatherTomorrowNight, 
WeatherDayAfter, WeatherDayAfterNight

Given a valid weather id, it'll return the description suitable for daytime weather:

<export function="GetDayWeatherDescription" http="true" />

As above, but for night time weather descriptions.

<export function="GetNightWeatherDescription" http="true" />

Known issues

• Deliberately ignored sandstorms - they're not relevant outside of the deserts and you can't restrict weather to a particular region yet, so it is safer to just ignore it completely for now.
• I don't mind if you find any further issues, it'll help to improve this script!

Future improvements

• Maybe tweak the randomness to reduce the random weather events a little.
• Add a html interface to view the weather reports on a server running this resource.
• Please suggest some :)