By my understanding the surrounding city/station lights go OFF (morning) or ON (evening) at the following times in the UK:- Winter OFF=08:00 ON=16:10 Spring OFF=06:40 ON=17:35 Summer OFF=05:00 ON=20:50 Autumn OFF=07:15 ON=18:10 And it also seems that in the evening (say) from Lights-ON to basically night-time is only about 30 mins, which is a pain-in-the-hole, plus it is a not super realistic when the whole surrounding city does a Lights-ON or OFF at the same time. Obviously it would also be useful to have lights ON during the day for Foggy or Dark stormy weather, say. So, does anyone know how this can be changed, especially within a Scenario?
I've never seen a script control that alters it so I suspect that it is buried in the core code. It should be possible to create specific scenery objects that use a switchable lighting system so they can be turned on/off outside of the set night/day parameters but I'd guess that you are probably stuck with what the game does. You might jigger the latitude of the route so that the day/night period changes but I don't think that is what you want. Sorry.
Nodes with names that ends with "_night" and "_day" are controlled by core and can't be scripted. It uses the route template or the time of day blueprints, so the times can be different from route to route. Sadly we do not have any script functions that can tell us if it is day or night. Instead we can use SysCall("ScenarioManager:GetTimeOfDay") and then check seconds since midnight. Using this method will be correct on one route but maybe not on another route. But again, trying to show/hide a node that the core is showing/hiding doesn't work well.
Not sure what you mean by nodes in this context (but I'm a scripting dunce at present), but I get your point I think.
Been playing around and delving into this and it appears the station/city lights on/off are driven by the Route TimeOfDay files and in particular the Dawn and Dusk settings. Lights go off at Dawn. Lights come on at Dusk. Knocked up a tool to look at these and edit the Dawn/Dusk times if required, but saving the original ToD file so it can be easily restored. So, for my AP Variable Fog scenario that runs just before noon for about 45mins, I edit the Lights-Off (i.e. Dawn) to 13:00 to make sure they stay on for duration of scenario. Now these different times (Dawn, Morning, Noon etc.) are connected to RGB values for the ambient sky colours (UpperSky, LowerSky, SunGlare, Sunlight, Cloud etc. etc.) and whilst fudging the DawnBreak duration (to keep the Lights on) and overlapping these others may make a difference in normal circs (to be tested further), running Variable Fog means it doesn’t really matter, as the fog obscures the sky. Now, I could run this scenario without modifying the ToD files by starting it at Dusk (say) with lights on but there is only about 30 minutes or so until the ambient light drops off to almost darkness. Not what I want in this scenario which is over 45 mins, and I want to keep the ambient light up. So anyway, for my purposes – Lights on during day for an AP Variable Fog scenario – it works a treat and is very atmospheric. Can be easily switched back to the original ToD settings by choosing the {Restore} option. Of course, this is all a massive fudge (as much is with TSC) and it can only apply locally, and requires the user to modify their own local ToD files. Obviously, the Holy Grail would be a Scenario Script that mods this on the fly and could be shipped with the published scenario, but it's looking like that's not even remotely possible.Hey ho. Still WIP and still playing around, but interesting nonetheless.
I'm refering to the nodes (mesh) in the 3d model/geopcdx file. https://www.christrains.com/tscdevd...ring-guidelines.html#TOC-Foreground-Buildings I've seen people doing magic with shaders, so that might be a place to look into. Other than that you can script scenery objects. But I'm not sure how big impact that will have on framerates if each building is scripted, even if they all use the same script.
