PC Are There Any Improvements To Eye Adaption In The Works?

As the title states, are there any improvements to eye adaptation in the works?

In more detail, I often find certain areas of TSW 3 looking way too bright. Particularly in cabs of trains (looking at you Class 323). It seems dynamic range is lacking and the game can only focus on one thing at a time. So unless your directly looking at something, everything around it will be over exposed.

The only weather settings I’ve found that works with light to medium cloud is when I have full snow cover on the ground. So it seems the game really struggles to balance out the exposure between dark and light simultaneously (ground and sky). This is only an issue during the day, however.

Also, as nice as the new cloud visuals look, I find during light to medium cloud cover, they cause the whole scene to look incredibly over exposed and washed out. Pretty much the complete opposite of what should be happening.

Finally, I find the eye adaption when entering and exiting tunnels to be way too slow to adapt to the changes. When entering a tunnel, one would expect immediate darkness within the cab. However, it often takes a few seconds for the game to adapt to it, causing a slow fade from light to dark instead of a sudden change. Similarly, the opposite happens when exiting a tunnel. You’ll have a slow transition from dark to light.

I’m not sure if it’s linked to the baked lighting in the tunnels and dynamic lighting on the outside world but surely there’s an improvement which can be made to this?

 

Regarding the speed of the light change from light to dark and visa versa it looks like it’s literally just changing some values but, as always, only DTG can do it.

https://docs.unrealengine.com/4.26/en-US/RenderingAndGraphics/PostProcessEffects/AutomaticExposure/

Something is still just fundamentally wrong with the lighting in this game. Nothing is connected, like everything is at the same party in the same room but listening to different songs at the same time. The sky is doing one thing, the train another and the environment something entirely different again. It’s an improvement on TSW2 some of the time, but how much of that is down to the better skies and how much is down to the actual lighting it’s impossible to tell. I stand by what I said when TSW3 first released, if this is the result of ripping it up and starting from scratch then I think they perhaps need to do that all over again.

There really isn’t much you can say to this, the pictures speak for themselves.

 

JetWash I believe this is an issue with the 323 itself. It's by far the worst when it comes to adapting to day time lighting as the cab appears way too bright.

I've made a post about it here

 

I wouldn’t have said so. Every unit / loco in the game suffers from the same problem. Yes, it’s about as bad as it can be on the 323 but is certainly not unique to that unit.

You could pick any traction on any route and take pictures like those I posted above. That is something fundamentally awry with the lighting system.

As an aside (because you can just see it in the windscreen in the 3rd and 4th images), the 323 also has really low res reflections of the sky on the upper drivers window. That is another perfect illustration of how the cab is not a sealed unit from a lighting point of view. In reality those reflections would never happen because the cab super-structure would block the light, yet here they are in the game. In the last image, not only would the cab block the light, but the train is in a tunnel FFS.

Again, where are the beta / QA people reporting this sort of thing?! Checking spelling on cats name-tags presumably.

 

If I look towards the sky in cab veiw the lighting looks better. I think this is the eye adaption effect causing this. Obviously we can't all drive around looking at the sky though.

 

This is one of the major negative points about TSW3 new lighting. I had a theory if its that these models were originally started development in TSW2 before the changes and haven't been improved much during the change over period. To me the whole route looks to bright and washed out, especially UK routes. I can only hope this is improved in the future.

 

I think you hit the nail on the head. Like the trees on sehs. They don't fit the new lighting system well.

 

Oh wow, those shots look terrible with the insane and unrealistic bright cab *shocked*

 

It’s not just the cab lighting.

The first shot is inside the ‘showpiece’ station on the route. I’m trying to find a word other than ‘LOVE’ to describe that. Why is it like that? Why is that the result of having ‘ripped up the lighting and started again’? Can DTG not see how poor that is? I simply don’t believe that is all that UE4 is capable of.

In the second shot look outside…everything is totally flat and dull. The walls on the left are painful to look at, completely clean with no shadows or occlusion at all. There is no light and dark, everything just looks fake. A picture of constituent parts with zero cohesion and utterly lifeless.

In the third shot the cab is straight up ridiculous and again everything outside is flat, overblown and washed out.

Finally the 4th shot. I mean seriously, there is literally nothing you can say about that is there? It’s like an Alpha build of a game where no lighting techniques have yet been implemented. Instead it’s the first proper standalone DLC released for the 5th iteration of a now pretty mature game with a newly built route and rolling stock. Different door but very much the same street.

As with any TSW DLC since day 1 it is possible to get shots that look absolutely stunning. It looks like that perhaps 20-30% of the time. For 40% of the time it looks ‘ok’ and for the other 30-40% it looks utter bobbins. I really hoped that with TSW3 this was a thing of the past but sadly it’s worse than ever. It really is beyond a joke.

ps I haven’t gone looking for, or ‘set up’ any of those shots. They are all taken from the first 5 journey services on BCCL and are using ‘Ultra’ Settings.

 

The tsw2 routes look better.

 

Yep, seriously, looking at this I'm pretty happy I haven't jump on TSW3. One of the few improvements of the new game, looks like half done.

But you could deduct something is not right with new lighting just looking at a threads where people were posting snapshots from TSW3. Most of them were taken at dawn/dusk, while very few in the middle of the day.

 

DTG Matt is there any way to fix the lighting in TSW3?

 

Brightness, contrast and gamma settings might help but it's not gonna solve everything.

Ps my name ain't Matt! Sorry Matt.

 

Not going to do anything with my monitor settings, the problem is TSW3

 

Started off okay but then came to this, where I then had to quit the game because personally I find it so immersion breaking. Its clear that the eye adaption is working way too hard to try and keep dark levels out of the cab (which is unrealistic as its supposed to be dark when going in dark areas)

I think there needs to be an update to the way eye adaption works, so it doesn't automatically expose the scene to the highest exposure possible.

Weather: Light cloud
Month: January
TOD: 13:38

 

Jeebus

 

The reason cabs and coach interiors appear so washed out and overexposed is because DTG don't apply shadows from internal light sources or any ambient occlusion.

 

Yeah. Even though they keep talking about light baking a lot, and they certainly use them on certain places, but on many areas it's just completely missing Many engine sheds, station interiors and coach interiors are incredibly bright and cartoonish looking because of this.

 

Yeah, the lack of ambient occlusion really shows when they upped the peak brightness of everything.

It reminds me a bit of when they updated the lighting in Elite: Dangerous a few years back and everyone noticed you'd see shadows being cast in your cockpit in front of your chair when your ship was flying away from the sun, but if you turned around to look behind your seat all you could see was the solid bulkhead behind you. So where exactly was the light casting those shadows inside the cockpit coming from?

 

They really need to add ambient occlusion to the train, even if it’s only in the cab. It just looks incredibly flat without it. Hopefully they’ve seen how flat it looks without it and will add it to future DLCs.

Regarding the eye adaption, it’s clear it’s still in ‘beta’, if that’s what you want to call it. The light levels are way too extreme when the game tries to gain exposure in dark areas. It makes everything look far too bright, resulting in everything looking washed out and unnatural looking.

 

Having just experienced a run on SKW and all its tunnels for the first time since TSW3 launched, I'd definitely adjust the speed of the adaptation to last about 12% as long as it currently takes. The overexposure though, that's another kettle of fish to fix.
On console maybe at the very least a gamma slider I can dial back to 30% might help a bit? But a big part of how the trees look so fake right now on the newer routes, I think comes down to how all the shadows on them are a light grey colour like the world has zero contrast.

 

I also took the external cam and looked under the train, it's like there's a floodlight under there, it's so brightly lit up. There's just no shade anywhere. Not even right up inside the bogies.

I can get stuff looking vaguely passable in the cab, if still heavily washed out and flat looking on stuff like the trees if I knock the brightness on my monitor down 40% and the contrast up 20%, but that would mess with EVERY other game I own and make them unplayable for the sake of a game with not even a basic brightness slider in the options menu.

 

Playing around with external cams which are also influenced by the effect really helped me nail down why it's so "off".

The moment the game detects that the camera, be that the player character perspective or the exterior free cam, is in any way positioned such that a shadow is being cast on it, it hammers up the camera's exposure level to the umptillionth degree, bathing everything in light, even all the corners that should be completely black silhouettes against a light source you are looking at positioned directly behind them. This is why it feels so unnatural to look at, and honestly aside from turning the camera exposure effect off, I think reducing its exposure values can only somewhat lessen the problem, and would need a decent ambient occlusion system to compensate for it, while only a raytraced global illumination solution would make for a truly realistic appearance to light and shadow with the adaptation enabled, which DTG have no plans for and which would be quite a performance hit.