Daylight Savings Time change

[johannesl]

This isn't an issue at the moment, but will come up again in March. Is there a way to get FSX to recognize the change to and from Daylight Savings Time since congress changed it a couple of years back and now there is a gap between the real world and what FSX thinks? I'm sure it's some simple tweak and, yes, I can hear you people in Hawaii and Arizona saying you don't have this problem.

[johannesl]

I guess this must either too simplistic a question (everyone knows how to do this) or the fix is tougher than I thought.

[Sieggie]

I guess this must either too simplistic a question (everyone knows how to do this) or the fix is tougher than I thought.

I think it's a matter of no one has thought about it and are now trying to figure it out. I did not even realize that FSX knew about DST.

Dave

[Meshman]

...I'm sure it's some simple tweak ...

...or the fix is tougher than I thought.

Which is it?

I am not aware of any simple tweak. And I do believe it's more difficult than you thought. It's buried in the program and not some .CFG file that can have a line added. I don't doubt some adventurous soul could go in and find the correct .DLL file and then hack it with a hex editor, but why?

And there are parts of Arizona that do deal with DST and the time changes.

[fsafranek]

That would certainly add one more element of realism if you were flying
but the time switch is at 2am on a Sunday morning. Surely there must
be more interesting things to do at that time of day?
:ernae:

[johannesl]

It's not so much the 2 AM Sunday morning I'm thinking about, but the couple of weeks either side of DST. During that time when I sit down to do a little flying FSX says it's night time, but I look out the window and still see I have an hour of daylight left. I know I can manually change the time, but wouldn't be nice if the computer could figure this out on its own, maybe sinc it to the system clock or something along those lines. Just a thought.

[Naismith]

I have no clue as to whether or not it works, but I recall there was someone a year or so back who released at Avsim a prog which adjusted FS to real time, there were oodles of updates hang on I will endeavour to find it ...... tic tic

I give up, searched and for the life of me cannot find it.

[johannesl]

I found an FS 2002 utility at AVSIM that appears to work outside the program. I don't know if thats what you had in mind.

[aeronca1]

Not really knowing for sure and jumping in anyway, most if not all software simply reads your system time. FSX should be no different. M$ made patches available way back to adjust Daylight Savings time to the new dates and times. Have these been installed on your system?

[johannesl]

I'm running Win 7 (64) with all patches and service packs so yes it's up to date. As far as I can tell FSX does not get the word about DST it just shows the sun setting at the wrong time.

[keatles]

For Win 7:

1. Does your system clock automatically change to DST? If not, enable Windows Update.
2. Make sure you have set FSX to use the computer clock for Free Flight (Go to Settings...General... and tick the box for "Use system time for Free Flight")

More info at:

http://support.microsoft.com/gp/cp_dst

Works for me (in New Zealand, anyway)

[johannesl]

My system is set up that way so that's not the problem. When FSX was published DST ended in late October and started in late March (in the USA) and FSX would change to DST based on that schedule. Then a few years back congress changed the schedule so that DST ended in early November and started in early March. The problem is that FSX still recognizes the old schedule so during those weeks between the old schedule and the new one the sun sets in FSX on the old schedule meaning that in FSX's world it's night while in the real world its still daytime. This can be a problem if you were planning a late afternoon VFR flight and your check points are no longer visible. I'm coming to the conclusion that the only way to fix this is to do something in FSX itself to have it recognize that a change has been made, but that may be more work than anyone would really want to do if it can be done at all without tearing it the guts of the program itself.