OpenWeather [Testing]: A proposal to fix weather issues

[Asturbo]

when i get a few hours i'll knock up a quick SpringBoot application as a prototype and see how it feels

Preparing my donation...

[inthebagbud]

ingenuity is great and you guys who come up with this stuff speak a different language to me …….. but should SMS not just fix the issue

[mr_belowski]

Just had a play with wireshark and I couldn't see any obvious traffic going out to api.openweather.org when starting a single player session with realistic weather. You sure this is what the game is connecting to?

[Asturbo]

In the EXE what I found was api.openweathermap.org (you missed "map")

When you make a NETSTAT -B, you can see that pCARS2AVX.EXE is connected to 192.241.169.168 or 162.243.53.59 (in my case) when RW is enabled.

TCP 192.168.0.10:52925 192.241.169.168:http [pCARS2AVX.exe]

If you connect with a browser to this IP you get openweathermap.org/api. The IP is not always the same, probably by DNS resolution or any internal relay in openweathermap.

If you disable Real weather in-game, this connection is not stablished.

[mr_belowski]

Spotted it in Wireshark:

GET /data/2.5/weather?lat=49.20&lon=16.45&mode=xml&APPID=[...]
Host: api.openweathermap.org
Accept: */*

and

GET /data/2.5/forecast?lat=49.20&lon=16.45&mode=xml&cnt=8&APPID=[...]
Host: api.openweathermap.org
Accept: */*


response is

HTTP/1.1 429
Server: openresty
Date: Sun, 07 Oct 2018 17:54:55 GMT
Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8
Content-Length: 196
Connection: keep-alive
X-Cache-Key: /data/2.5/weather?APPID=[...]&lat=49.2&lon=16.45&mode=xml
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
Access-Control-Allow-Credentials: true
Access-Control-Allow-Methods: GET, POST

{"cod":429, "message": "Your account is temporary blocked due to exceeding of requests limitation of your subscription type. Please choose the proper subscription http://openweathermap.org/price"}




I've created a free API key which, when it's been activated will hopefully allow me to reproduce these requests and understand how to craft the appropriate responses for the various weather scenarios we might want to generate. So it's looking promising I think.

[Asturbo]

You can use mine from this URL:

http://api.openweathermap.org/data/2...c4c417ab3b9920

[mr_belowski]

I wonder if it's possible to respond with more fine-grained forecast data (< 3 hours between data points) to allow the weather to change more quickly in shorter sessions. Lots and lots of possibilities here, lots of scope for experimentation.

I've got a basic service wired up to produce an appropriate XML (or JSON) response. I'll get stuck in properly this week with a view to building something that can be easily customised

[Asturbo]

Great news, mate. It's a new world of posibilities here.

Probably PCARS2 uses the 3 hour pattern and translates it to the 1 hour to make the slots, so if you change the intervals, probably has no effect in game, but who knows, because I've seen that the EXE keeps connected to the webAPI after the initial connection.

I would begun generating all the slots with fixed "electrical storm" or even better, using one of the real patterns from openweathermap (but a not clear one). If you get something different to "clear weather" with the random weather option ingame, you're in the right way.

If the project is viable, we can assing the weights with a CFG o JSON text file to the diferent climates. Not UI needed.

[mr_belowski]

I think it's viable and will make some headway this week. Maybe start with a way to generate basic weather patterns from a config file or something, and take it from there. Eventually it should be pretty easy to have an option to proxy the calls though to the real openweatherapi service with a different API key so a dedicated server owner could use realistic weather with their own known-good key which they could keep secret and manage themselves

[Donnced]

I completely support this proposal! And it would be great if it could be used in the console versions also..