Weather data should optionally be loadable from a file

[jecollins]

Prashant writes:

I have run into issues with the weather service not being available or me not having web connectivity when I was trying to run the server. Would it make sense to be able to configure the server, for testing purposes, to load the default data from a local file deployed with the server? I understand that the datasets can get huge, but if it's for a single date/location, it shouldn't be too big? If it really is unreasonably large, we could make it an optional download for server developers?

[govertbuijs]

There is a related problem : when during a game the call to the weather server fails, the game is ended prematurely. But it still reports as 'success'.

For repeatability of games we also need to have the same weather data.

[govertbuijs]

This is fixed, both for command line and visualizers games. Input can be an XML file or state file. The XML can be generated via create_sim_weather.py (powertac-weather-server/scripts). The state file can also be an URL.

The XML file is about 8MB.