Unpopular Opinion - The Lighting In Tsw3 Is Worse Than Tsw2.

For starters, everything is just too washed out. I was just driving Mainz - Koblenz, you’d think a nuke had been dropped just ahead. It’s utterly terrible.

It’s even noticeable in the cab of some trains; the 323 is god awful on the inside, and I’ve noticed the PZB/sifa lights on the 103 are nyon impossible to see.

The evening colours just don’t make sense, things are lit up wrong and the colours are inconsistent. Not to mention the FPS hit when playing in the evening. I just don’t see the appeal, I think it all looks bad.

And I also despise the eye adaptation. I think it’s making things looks even worse. And coming out of a tunnel is just wrong. Your eyes would have adjusted long before you’re leaving the tunnel mouth (going back to Mainz - Koblenz, it’s genuinely impossible to see what the signal is showing directly after a tunnel). It makes for an unpleasant ride.

Other than maybe at night, I never had a problem with the lighting in TSW2… And what happened to the sweet lighting we had on Riesa - Dresden? Has that ever made a return? When I drive the older routes on TSW3 I find it far less jarring and can actually enjoy it.

maybe its just me, but I really don’t like the lighting in TSW3…

 

Agreed

 

One of the biggest things that has me almost considering the Niddertalbahn is the fact that the grass doesn't look like someone got their l and r sounds mixed up when assigning its material properties, and the fields on the stream weren't blinding me with their reflective surface, thanks to all the foliage, but said foliage still looks washed out and lacking in proper realistic areas of shadow.

But yes, the lack of decent shadowing and ambient occlusion mean there are really dodgy lighting results as a consequence, especially with the interiors of cabs, and the tunnel entry flash on routes with the new lighting is actually painful. I honestly might be able to tolerate it if we were given a basic pair of brightness and contrast sliders where I could dial the former down and the latter up, as long as they did something about the tunnel flash. As it is I mostly play TSW2 for now.

 

There are moments when the lighting looks really good, but a lot of the time, it does seem too bright with everything looking washed out. The white of the ICE 1 on Kassel is often so very bright it looks terrible.

 

From what I've seen of Nidd so far it doesn't seem to have that extreme and horrid washed out lighting effect. So it must be something certain route authors are doing but it is quite horrid and ruins the experience. DTG need to exercise a little less arrogance in the matter and allow us to dial it down, or off.

 

Agreed. There are certains moments when it looks really good, and sunset/sunrise times of the day look very lovely, but in overall it looks worse in daylight. Everything is way too bright and washed out, especially when driving towards the sun.

There are a few improvements in certain areas, like headlights/cab lights not casting visible light at day, but do so at night. But in overall it's a mess, things are either too bright or too dark and the tunnel lighting is more broken than ever.

 

100% disagree. I love

I'd rather it be a little bright than covered in ink-black shadow like TSW2 is most of the time.

And unplayable at night on most routes. And those skyboxes....ugh.

Goes to show it's all subjective, though.

 

I think I’m taking the middle ground on this.

In many ways and I would say it’s an improvement to TSW2 lighting but there are times where I think it does look odd.

some parts where it gets bright it looks quite realistic when the sun is on a certain spot in reality but other times it looks too bright.

 

Are the lighting parameters set individually in each route? I'm wondering if it's just a matter of devs needing to acclimate to the new system, kind of like audio engineers had to learn to work with CDs.

 

Once again I'm gonna be an evangelist for RTGI, to get a more natural look with more bounce lighting that doesn't white everything out, and retains proper contrast and black levels where it should be, but of course that would absolutely be impossible on TSW3 in its current state on console. The performance impact would be too great. Even with a solid FSR/DLSS implementation.

So we really need a good ambient occlusion option and a way to dial that brightness in a bit as a compromise..

 

Honestly just to accept that there's a wide range of displays people are using, and what looks great on a cheap LCD might look awful on a top of the line OLED or vice versa, so more settings are required.

I will say though they really need to go back and look into what they're getting wrong with bringing old maps into the new lighting system because some textures do NOT react well to it, like the mortar in the brick walls in boston-providence, where in a like for like comparison of TSW2 and TSW3 side by side, the mortar is a soft, matte texture that looks shadowed and recessed into the wall in TSW2 whereas in TSW3 it's shiny and reflective, and ends up looking like it extrudes from the wall instead of being recessed, as though the bump mapping is inverted or something.

 

Agreed, as said above, sometimes it will look really good, but most the time it looks really quite terrible. It also hasn’t really solved one of my biggest problems - occlusion on board trains, they are all still lit like a hospital corridor.

 

Seeing all the 'agrees' here, I'd say the OP can rename the title of this topic to "Popular opinion". My opinion? TSW3 lighting looks ok at certain times of the day, but agree with most of the posts here that the majority of the time it is too washed out.

 

Yes the lighting does look overly bright on some routes. And certain textures look terrible in this lighting.
At times it looks so bad I feel like I'm playing trainz.
There's a couple of mods that fix some of this thankfully.
Luckily we can still chose what time of day it is.

 

I'm still on TSW2 and like it so far. I've found no serious issues. I have reasons not to upgrade.

The lighting is a complex thing in TSW. The main thing is the cloudiness - the diffuse light is calculated on this. If I don't like what I see I adjust the clouds a little.

Images say more than words - note the huge difference in diffuse light between 90% and 100% (where direct sunlight is disabled)

Clouds 0/10


Clouds 9/10


Clouds 10/10

 

I prefer TSW3 lighting.

 

I also prefer the TODv4 system. Imho it looks better in majority of situations, and also handles transitions between day and night and various weathers much better. Night is finally pitch black, and no longer does overcast feel like judgement day is upon us (like it does on Ruhr Sieg Nord), and shadows are finaly shadows, not localized black holes.

The issue is that in the condition people play most - clean day, it can looks worse, desaturated, overexposed and details get lost.
It also makes other deficiencies more obvious, like lack of ambient lighting in cities.

 

To me, clean day looks like I'm being blinded by the sunlight, which is fairly realistic. Signals are notably harder to 'read' in clear sunlight, as they should be.

 

My opinion is that with TSW 3 they took a step in the right direction in terms of lighting, but that they still have a lot of work to do to improve it. It's certainly not DTG's strong point and it's a very important area where they should invest if they want the game to improve significantly.

For me personally what bothers me the most are the light signals because I play without hud and I have a lot of difficulties to see them in the distance and anticipate my driving correctly. I don't understand how when implementing the new lighting and seeing this consequence they could leave it like this, because it's not that it's more or less beautiful, it's that this directly affects the gameplay. What's in the heads of the people in charge who saw that the red traffic lights looked pink and decided to do nothing to fix it? Were umbrellas and baseball caps more important?

 

Is there a train?
Lighting in "compatible" is cognitive confusion. The sun is fake.

 

It's a well known fact that UE4 specular doesn't work well with landscape textures and in general makes them look wet. Best thing the devs can do is to set specular o the landscape material to 0.

As for the grass, there is a trick where you paint a dark gradient on the roots of the grass texture and it looks just as good as dynamic shadows at least if you are looking from more than 2 meters away.

At least for me, using RTGI to achieve a more pleasing visual feel is total overkill. Sure it works but it also does the job with brute force, which isn't that great when there are other options, mostly related to color balancing.

 

I think it depends what weather and time of day you choose tbh. As I have always tended to avoid clear weather in TSW2 and TSW3 (because in both cases the brightness makes the limits of the loaded assets much more obvious and then makes the pop-in and shadow draw distance stand out a mile), and midday runs (emptiest part of every timetable), I don't really see the washed-outness that is apparent every time DTG stream something in clear weather.

Evenings and early mornings whatever the weather, overcast, rain, thunder, fog, mist, all look better in the new lighting. Light clouds seems moreorless the same, except the skybox is better.

The eye adaption is odd, in general I think it works ok going from dark tunnel to light outside, textures don't seem to be massively problematic and the gradual transition is covered with a bright white light that generally seems OK when its in that direction, but in reverse, from light to dark, it seems to be difficult to get right. I don't quite get why the weird blue flash is a thing, it seems like a texture that appears to manage the transition, but it's not supposed to be visible and yet in many cases it's the only noticeable thing you do see when transitioning from outside light to a dark tunnel.

I cannot agree about evening colors, they are easily one of the best things about the game now. Taking a run on any route with TSW3 lighting at 6pm with light clouds in May is basically my default first run every time a new route releases, it just looks stunning, whether or not the colors are strictly accurate, it's 100x better than the weird chemical yellow dusky skies they used to have.

 

I much prefer the new TODv4 TSW3 lighting in general, although it's clear there's some work to do still with regards to making other light sources (signals, headlights etc) work properly in this environment. Reflective signs would help for night driving too especially as it's now actually dark at night.

I find it quite hard to go back to playing non-upgraded TSW2 routes.

 

To me, overall I rather the old lighting system. As others has said, it's too bright and washed out during normal conditions and it only looks good at dawn and dusk.

The old system was the opposite but better overall imo.

 

Curious, what monitor do you have?

 

Unless they optimize it really well which is probably lots of work. Metro exodus uses rtgi i believe which runs really well and looks great.

 

Exodus is a FANTASTIC example of it done right.

 

Quick run on West Rhine last night and yes, the shiny reflective track/ballast textures in full swing. Ruins the experience of what is otherwise a fine looking route and loco. The only other situation I encountered a similar effect is in Trainz, where painting certain textures on the ground then rotating the view relative to the sun source gave the same horrid shiny, plastic effect. That was largely overcome, if not completely, by the move to PBR textures which one would hope is what TSW routes are using.

 

Tsw3 looks washed out and not natural looking. The trees and surrounding areas look like cartoons in places. I'm on a 65inch oled c2. When I fire up tsw2 the difference is amazing beautiful deep colors the trees and fields look real 4k looks better as well. Fire up northern trans pennine or tees valley or even West Somerset and the detail is so much better. Country side buildings trees fences chimneys the list goes on. More attention to detail was definitely better in the early routes.

 

Yeh, the desaturation in TSW3 is one of the first things you see, which on an OLED, designed to deliver true to life vibrancy to colours, is going to be even more noticeable.

 

There are also many differences in lighting between each route. As an example, this weekend I have been alternating between my last two purchases, niddertalbahn and Linke Rheinstrecke, and every time I switched from one route to the other I had to reconfigure on the TV the settings for brightness, colour, contrast, blacks level...
After a few times it gets annoying.

 

I much prefer TSW3 lighting overall. On occasion there are one or two funky situations, but as somebody who hops between older and newer routes, I'm always glad of the newer lighting. One thing I've found is that if the world outside the cab looks too bright, I use the sunblind and this improves things.

 

Lol love that

 

Same for me, i dont agree that tsw should go back to tsw2 weather and lightening.

Dtg rather should solve the bugs occur since the change. Cars drive through closed crossing gates & the passenger behaviour.
The bakerloo line was the first route i tried after the jump to tsw3. It was highly disappointing to see empty tubestocks allover. Clearly messed up since the update. Bakerloo is my most played route noHud because my self created line documentation and the new timetable, so the broken passenger behaviour i noticed about after 5seconds.

In tsw 2 the train was so full, people were even standing on certain spots, really like that feature. I guess tsw3 was the first "rushed out" release followed by what came after. At least with mainz koblenz the first time since tsw3s start a dlc looks kind of complete and polished.

 

Except it doesn't. Because the game's light isn't path traced. It's a minor cosmetic thing which doesn't change the flaws with the lighting and shadows, it just covers up part of what you could see. The light remains as blown out as before.

 

If you change where the blind is, it literally changes the lighting intensity. Move it down until you can just see the track and a bit more. Leave it 10 seconds, then move it all the way up. The lighting changes.

 

It doesn't properly adjust the light realistically, by making the washed out cab interior better shadowed, since the in-cab shadows are not complex enough for that, all it does is make the outside look a little more washed out because you can no longer at least get some semblance of realistic contrast to the scenery shadowing, making blacks actually look realistic, by angling your view up high enough that the centre reticle is pointing at a patch of sky.

 

I much prefer the TSW3 lighting although I agree there have been some instances where it does look too washed out but overall the experience is much better for me. I certainly wouldn't want to go back to TSW2 lighting which often looked too dark.

I play on a fairly old TV not a monitor I guess it depends on what you are using.

Some way of adjusting the settings more comprehensively is probably desireable.

 

Basically the crux of it.
I could in theory get it much more tolerable by setting the brightness and contrast on my monitor to 0 and 100 respectively. But obviously I won't, because I use the monitor for much more than just TSW.

More than anything, what TSW3 has needed since launch is sliders for reining in that overly aggressive exposure adaptation. Let shadows actually be free to be dark again on decent monitors that don't suffer from black crush.

 

Absolutely

 

I wouldn't argue with this, despite preferring TSW3 lighting. It could certainly be improved, or configured to allow users to define according to taste.

 

It does indeed change things, because of the way the new lighting enginge handles exposure (eye adaptation). Hiding the bright sky changes the overall brightness of the scene, which changes the computed exposure desired for the scene, which will change how, in the end, the image will look like.

 

Yes, but it exacerbates the problems rather than fixing them. It makes the stuff look more washed out rather than less.
Ironically, deliberately looking AT the sky is the only way to correct the exposure on the scenery to look more natural.

 

I kinda disagree, yes I can look really washed out in certain conditions but overall I think it just looks more true to life. Looking back at TSW 2 everything just looked darker and more gloomy and let’s not even mention the old sky box. I’m pretty happy with the way things are now, of course thing could be improved but I’d rather have it too washed out and/or bright than how it used to be, it rather them keep the new system and improve it than switch back.

 

Absolutely.

The fact that some say they prefer the lighting in TSW3 because some or many situations look good, not every single lighting scenario, only highlights the issue with TSW3.

Lighting should look great at every time of day, in every cloud condition, across every single route that's produced, no matter the developer. And DTG should set the standard for the routes. It should really be in the core, if not already.

This is a fundamental and basic aspect of the game. I can't think of a dynamic game that doesn't get the lighting right (or better than this) when time of day and seasons change.

There's a serious calibration issue here. Yes, they should ideally give everyone multiple graphics options along the lines of contrast and brightness – but they should still be getting lighting calibrated well from the start.

 

I can't get on board with this assessment. When the grass is white, the trees are white, the brick buildings and their slate roofs are white, it just seems....excessive. Sure, SOMETIMES a day can get that bright when you're at the precise angle where a bunch of stuff reflects it briefly, the view from my window has a particular moment for about 30 seconds in the evening where every tower in the city looks like it's directed by JJ Abrams, but that's not the norm.

I still get the general vibe TSW3's lighting was developed in part with a view to compensating for cheap TVs most console players will be on, which suffer from heavy black crush that lost a lot of the detail visible in TSW2's shadows.

 

Oh yes, I wouldn't want to revert to TSW2 and the deep black sticky tar effect everywhere, either.

 

I suppose it will vary a bit as there are different studios or sub-contractors building the various routes. Can't say I've noticed it myself. I know the light in TSC can be awful on cloudy days even at high noon it looks like 6 am, really doomy gloomy.

 

See, there's where I think it comes down to tailoring it to a specific type of display. For me, on my display, TSW2 shadows are just fine. Dark, but realistically so, with me still able to see all the details within them. Whereas TSW3 looks like there's an overlaid white layer with the opacity set somewhere between 50-90%.

You have shadows that look like they are covered in tar in TSW2, I have shadows that looks like they are under a layer of snow in TSW3.

I'm well aware though even as an exclusive PC monitor user of many years, that a LOT of common mass market LCD TVs suffer from serious black crush, and that's going to have been a lot of people's experience of TSW2, and TSW3 likely compensates a bunch for that and is an improvement to anybody used to that experience.

Letting us tweak settings to calibrate the game for our displays is the logical fix for everyone.