thanks guys,
I think chrome is partially right.
I did a few hours of just sitting in a lounge and messing w/ settings, and some driving with Crow to pass the time.
Two things can affect how long rain lasts. Where you start, and how fast you ask it to change.
If you start at Weather 0-25%, it is unlikely to rain very soon unless you have the changability factor raised to at least 4.
We have to keep in mind that the starting position of 25% means that it could either go up or down and then the chagne factor decides how quickly.
If you start at 50%, you're actually saying "make it look like it will rain" and with a change of 0 you are saying "make it stay that way."
If you start with 75% or more, you're asking for a certainty of rain right at the start. Problem with that is, you want people to be able to do laps and hopefully ahve the race start before the rain. Resetting wipes the lap times.
So starting somewhere low is preferable for a race start. The question is, how do you get it to rain some but not really heavy and not for most of the race?
With this setting, we did see heavy rain for a while but then it stopped after around 2 laps.
Weather = 25%
Change = 5
So that shows that perhaps a higher change makes it stop raining at some point.
Think of it this way. Weather % is a slider. If you ask it to change, it could go up or down. If it goes down first, it will probably go all the way toward 0% and then travel back up again. The amount of time it takes to start the rain could vary as a result. If it starts sliding up toward 100%, it could go all the way up, and then all it can do is go back down. The change factor will decide how quickly that can happen.
But all of this is a probability game and we don't know all the equations. If we did, then so would PD's competitors.
What does seem a bit broken, unless it's just part of the "probability" feature, is that as Fried said, the reset of a room seems to drastically affect how likely it is to rain.
I tested 50% w/ 0, and it never rained. But the first time I switched to 50% I had it at change = 5 and that indeed made it rain immediately. I wonder if in that case it slid over toward the 51% range right away and that is what makes rain. Weather of 51% or greater??
But yea the rest of the track seems to make the rain less predictable.
When I'm done here, I'll either fully understand this sytem and have something really neat to share with the community, or we'll know for sure whether it's broken and I can make a post about that for MasterGT to report to someone.