Add os.weather() to see local player's weather

This is a feature request for either roblox studio or the game engine.

Basically if you haven’t noticed, Windows 10 has recently added a “News & Interests” widget on the right side of the taskbar.

image

This displays the local weather based on the PC’s location in the world.

I am requesting/suggesting that ROBLOX adds a function to the “os” Lua code.

For example, we can currently get the OS time using os.time()
Why not add a cool way to see the local player’s weather using something like os.weather()?

I believe it would be very awesome to join a city/town roleplay game and see the same weather happening in-game as it’s happening around you in real-life. Of course this would be localized weather, not server-wide.

However, let’s say you collect the weather of all players in the server, and send the information to the server. You can find the majority weather pattern of all players and base the server weather on the average temperature, or whether or not it will be raining.

I personally believe a feature such as this would open up lots of cool ideas for developers. Although I have not thought about whether it would pose any security risks. I just think this is a cool concept, and I would like to see what others think.

23 Likes

The Windows 10 weather widget runs on MSN APIs, but isn’t a system feature.

You could implement this yourself using weather APIs (OpenWeatherMap, WeatherAPI, etc.), and just ask the player for an approximate location (e.g. country, region or county—or state for US players). It’s entirely possible using the HttpService.

If you wanted to avoid asking users completely, you could either use the location of the Roblox server, or even attempt to determine the player’s rough location based on their language/locale (e.g. en-gb would be United Kingdom).


Edit: For those pointing out that this is against ToS and GDPR/other laws, you are asking for a location, not necessarily the player’s personal location. If the player chooses to use their own location, that’s a consensual and conscious decision—You could always warn users not to use their actual address, but rather inform them to enter a country or region only.

If this is a major concern, perhaps just give a list of countries for the player to select. You couldn’t identify a single player by their country alone.

15 Likes

Why not use their country code as per the localisation service? LocalizationService | Roblox Creator Documentation

5 Likes

This topic was automatically closed 14 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.