Hi all I know there has been some dialect on the forum about night time lighting (me inclusive for clinchfield with the Film Noir filter) but I was just curious who signed this service off? I played it tonight and it was genuinely the most pointless one I've come across so far. It's with the Gronk on NTP. Playing it with the cab light off as I tend to (maybe that's the issue) these are genuine internal and external screen shots I took. It was a waste of time with the lighting as it is being in the game.....
It's NTP, not TVL but I know exactly what you mean with those early morning shunt moves. I had exactly the same issue on PS4. Couldn't see a damn thing.
And RSN, MSB along with the old NEC. Meanwhile we have some ultra bright lines like SFJ as far as I can remember.
Play those services in summer and ensure no or little cloud cover as it's lighter, same for any route where you want to play a service very early in the day or later in the evening. I chose to use the earlier hours even though they're pitch black in some seasons because things needed to be spread out a little and normally those types of services are even earlier than that - so I found a compromise so that if you ran it in Summer it would lighten it up enough to make it playable, and yes, I have played them all multiple times. Unfortunately re-working the lighting on the route wasn't an option when the Heavy Freight Pack DLC was being made, so this was the best option.
I think Matt had a good point there, there is no need to mock him. Those services actually happened at night with little light. Night lighting is far from perfect and I'd love too see it improved, but sadly it's quite difficult to do realistically.
I'm not mocking Matt. I'm mocking their reasoning behind making that decision. It's not a fix, it's a bodge job with a "it'll do" attitude.
But why went the entire night lighting downhill? I play a daily HRR trip with the BR101 and every night with every cloud-pattern is playable. Munich, no problem at night. What I observed: I start a service, it's pitch black, keep driving for some minutes, all of the sudden the entire world is lighted and you play like a cat with infravision. Same in winter setting: All of the suddon the scenery becomes black and white and you can see again.
I don’t understand why TSW struggles with night lighting so much? In countryside and rural areas it should be naturally dark, perhaps made a bit lighter by moonlight if it’s a clear night. In cities it should be lighter due to light pollution and light sources from buildings and street lamps. TSW has always lacked light sources. I’m not sure why there is such resistance to add more light sources on routes? Even if it’s just a few street lights dotted around rural areas, as well as on buildings, it makes all the difference.
The biggest issue with the pitch black start is trying to remember where the light switch in each of the trains are...so you can at least see something. that is main reason for being late. Hunting the blinking switch. There is a similar Gronk move on GWE Diesels, you cant see nought until you reach the depot. Its quite disorientating.
I'm not a massive fan of the step changes in light too. The first time it happened to me I thought I'd pressed a switch in the cab
That will be auto HDR. Its the same as on PS5. It makes it playable and works great. But if you don't have auto HDR then it remains pitch black throughout.
So when I could set HDR from auto to always on, the problem is solved? Was auto HDR introduced by an driver update (Nvidia)? I haven't fiddled with anything for a while ...
It must be very dark at night up there in the north. Seriously: this is the reason I never play night services. Because you see absolutely nothing.
It’s not HDR making the sudden change, it’s in the game and happens for everyone. Why it happens isn’t clear, there are several different lighting systems going on at once in TSW and sudden changes in lighting do happen, but it’s not Auto HDR.
Living in Gloucestershire for most of my teens I would say that in rural areas (ie outside of towns and villages) street lighting was very very rare back in the day. Walking down the back lanes from the A48 at night left you with very little light with only the occasional house (normally set back from the road) to highlight the fence you were almost walking into. And that's roads... Look up the line between Westbury-on-Severn and Over in Gloucestershire. There are about four buildings close to the line in about 15 miles!
I don’t disagree with you on that, as rural areas can be very dark. Though I think build up areas need a lot more dynamic lighting than they currently do.
I don't disagree with this, but it's "how?" I suppose a natural lighting gradient could be applied to the floor when in a built up area that gets dimmer as you get further from a conurbation, and this could be applied as a setting of the track. It would mean that the person creating the track bed would be able to set the ambient brightness when the sky is dark so that as you say in places where there is a lot of ambient light the track is never actually that dark (And correspondingly the lights on the train have less ambient effect unless you're directly in front) but when there's little or no ambient light the train itself has a much brighter ambient effect but there's little outside of this limited sphere Of course this would mean updates to the core, each route, each consist and reconfiguration of the lighting scheme throughout the entire game, so should we give them a month or five weeks?
ARuscoe I don’t expect them to make any changes, bar critical lighting changes such as on GCC stations, to any existing routes, however for new routes they could perhaps start trying out a new technique? I believe on some of the newer routes, there’s already some sort of local dimming going on, as if you move the camera around the map, you can physically see it getting lighter and darker. This isn’t from any light sources, but sort of the way the ground and assets react to it. The issue with this is that whilst cities are lighter than the countryside, it also looks odd because you have no physical light sources making it lighter, but instead an ‘invisible’ light making things look brighter. It looks particularly odd when you see an area looking quite bright, but there are no physical lights. Quite a visible example is buildings. They won’t have any light sources however they seem to ‘glow’ like it’s the daytime, at night.
I'm sure it's quite a technical thing to get right and I don't know many other game types that would have this technical challenge. Most can design their own lighting scheme, whereas on this sort of thing because people "live in the world at all times" they want it to reflect all of those times, which is very difficult
Tram Sim, also an UE4 game, looks really nice at night, as they have plenty of dynamic lights. However, I don’t know if their sessions are 24 hours and/or dynamic.
OK, had a quick look at a night scene in tram sim... Go to 1:18 on that and yes there is a well lit scene, but also a heck of a lot of holes in how it's lit. Go to 22:52 and watch the transition from street to tunnel, again a few holes in the lighting So yes I can see that they get the light pools a fair bit better than TSW does and maybe DTG can learn from that (and again it would be a core game thing), but it also shows that it's really difficult to get right
Question: Is this a case of realism vs gameplay enjoyment? What I mean is: how dark would it be out the cab window in a UK train (trash lighting no offense) on a night little moon light (no moon or occluded by clouds)? I know many video games have unrealistic night lighting simply because it becomes unplayable with realistic lighting, and I'm not saying I would be against making the lighting slightly less realistic to improve gameplay aspects, but I think at least a distinction should be made and maybe less criticism of DTG is warranted in this case (can't fault them for making the game realistic, *if* that's the case). EDIT: Go to minute 20 in this video: Now imagine the headlights were of UK variety instead of German
The light is also two bit. Moss Turn Part 6, it was raining and all of a sudden, a light showed up from nowhere and it was super bright during the journey. Its also worse in Cathcart Circle. I played a journey in Cathcart at 17.40 in the evening and it was similar to this. None of the station lights had come on because apparently Scotland conserves a lot of energy during fall and winter by not turning on the lights in stations until later. I wish they would fix the lighting somehow. It is turning me off of almost all night train services.
Night lighting really needs a revamp in the core of the game and certainly if there are any plans to push forward at some stage into TSW3. As a minimum it needs a gamma control so users can up the brightness levels a bit, but at the risk of repeating myself the built up areas on all the routes should be awash with ambient lights. Locations where you are doing shunting such as yards or carriage sidings would more than likely have floodlights overhead. I'm still playing a lot of Snowrunner and while the nights are dark, it's not impossible to see where you are going even with the vehicle headlights off. There's sufficient ambient light to get the job done.
Oooh snow runner…. How I loved that game before they made every mission take the same amount of time as doing all 60services on sand patch
I find on quite a few occasions, yards in TSW are totally unlit when they should either have massive floodlights or smaller lights placed next to/above the tracks. I'm not sure if its because the developers are unaware of this or simply because they ran out of time. ECW is a big offender - totally pitch black sidings and yards and stations aren't even fully lit. No platform lights after the 8 car stop marker at 12 coach length platforms.
I've said this before, but I'm fond of repeating myself so here goes. Sand Patch Grade is the shining light of TSW2. I never have any problem driving that route at night, there are so many ambient light sources, including moonlight, plus there are actual working headlights, tail lights, ditch lights, number lights, platform lights and outhouse lights. Why has this not been replicated in Clinchfield and other more recent routes? Only The Shadow knows.
My uneducated perception is that the developers learn how to do one thing good in what I believe to be the core part of the game. They get it working and then start on the next route, they then improve something else and make this work well forgetting to include what they’ve fixed previously. Adam then has to sweep up. I wish there was more consistency , surely they must have a checklist of things they have improved in other routes (or got right in them) to continue on future. It makes me nervous that we could end up with at route where the train or track is left out ( well we got close to the train being left out on one occasion) Come on DTG, you’re a good group and there has to be more uniform excellence coming
And they do this. Adam's team are implementing PIS on older routes, not always accurately but something. Level crossings and other tech are being rolled out. Skybox... The issue, according to the roadmap stream, has been testing these things to ensure that when they're fixing one thing they're not breaking two others.