PC Tsw4 Enhancement | Lighting & Graphic Enhancement V4.7 (inc Lossless Scaling Guide)

It's Germany; like Ireland, there's always some mist.

 

Figured there would be, particularly in the Rhine Valley.

 

Any recommendation for settings to "borrow" for Horseshoe Curve? Ordinarily Sand Patch would be most similar, but it's TOD-3

Oh, never mind. HSC is TOD-3 also.

 

What are the characteristics? Is it overly bright or ok. Is there a lot of foliage pop-in or not much by way of foliage? I’d say don’t necessarily think about which route is built in the same setting, think about the characteristics of the route. DLC that are washed out and overexposed would probably be good to use Midland Mainline or Birmingham Cross City as a starting point for example. Hope that makes sense.

In this example Horseshoe is a TOD3 route, so I’d effectively apply the same criteria. TOD3 is easier to set up because the settings are almost identical bar the gamma settings. Pick a route that looks similar by default and use those settings as a base and work from there. I would say don’t touch the Color.Max or Color.Min settings and use the ToneMapper gamma to get an appropriate level of brightness. Fine tune it with the Color.Mid setting. Finally, remember only small changes as there can be plenty of unintended consequences if you go too big with the alterations.

 

That's not true, it's as true as the saying it's raining all the time in the UK.

That mist would be there after heavy rainfall on a hot day, but it's clearly over the top.

Using that slider will add a lot of contrast to the scene and make it more vibrant. Try it on BCC or MML, makes it a whole new experience for me.

 

Last ones. A setting worth playing with.


Very apparent here - no volumetric fog here - default "Light Clouds" in July. Figured the values are given in centimetres, so fog start defaults to 4m distance, and can be raised to 1km.

 

Thanks for this amazing mod, it must have taken loads of time to get it to what it is today!

I just have a question regarding the night settings - on some routes, most notably Vorarlberg, the blacks are extremely elevated, it looks the same as when you would lower the contrast of your monitor, or how blacks looked on the first LCD monitors. During the day there is absolutely no problem, it looks fantastic, but even then, when driving through a tunnel, the raised black are there.
Some routes don't exhibit this and black is mostly black, for example SEHS, but BML has this effect too.

What is the parameter I could look into, to try to fix this? It is really almost impossible to drive at night like this, because instead of seeing some details in the dark, it is all just milky white, almost like driving in a fog.

 

Here is an example, BML, Three Bridges, midnight, overcast. First without the mod (it is a little brighter in-game, for some reason the captured image is darker), then with the mod.

edit: for some reason raised blacks in the second image are not displayed as I see them in game, really strange. Will try to find another way how to capture it, the only picture browser where it displays the same as as in game is Faststone image viewer.
edit2: if you download it to your PC and open it in the default MS Photography app (I hope it is called like this in the english version), it is visible there, although in-game it is even more pronounced.

 

Here taken the actual screen using phone, this is much closer to what I am actually seeing:

 

I think I found it, it is caused by "r.ToneMapperGamma=2.5"
It needs to be set to around 2.0 for the blacks to be normal at night. Of course this also affects day, it is noticably darker too, so it is about finding a balance between the day and night image. Also I think this then messes with your carefully tuned other parameter values.
Any tips on what to modify so day would be at least a little brighter while keeping the gamma down to preserve the blacks?

I also wonder if no one noticed this or is it that nobody cares? To me it was almost impossible to enjoy night driving, all I saw was white darkness. Maybe because I am on OLED and I am used to perfect blacks?

 

I have another (final, final if you like) version coming out shortly in which I’ve made many changes, one of which is the Voralberg lighting. I’ve got to be honest though, I’m not entirely sure what you’re talking about. What do you mean by ‘blacks are elevated’? Are you saying they’re too dark or too light?

If you start playing around with the gamma settings you’ll likely knacker all the lighting I’m afraid. The issue is definitely not down to the ToneMapper Gamma though. The old TOD3 routes are an absolute mess in TSW4. Everything is far far too dark, to the point that they’re almost unplayable in the daytime. If you sort that out such that it looks good, it means the night skies are lighter than is ideal but there’s nothing I can do about that. DTG have left those routes in this state, all I can do is try and improve them as I will never be able to alter the actual lighting on the route in the editor.

One other thing to note, I’m not trying to make the lighting look like a ‘perfect black’, as that is not what your eye would see. Unless you are stood miles from anywhere, under an overcast sky with zero ambient light, black is never pitch black at night.

 

It’s also worth noting that pure black (six zeroes in photoshop) looks awful on screen in a gaming environment.

 

FYI aiming to release 4.2 (with Goblin Line included) tomorrow all being well

 

Trying to figure if I should wait until next week when you may have included Fife Circle.

 

Judging by the 5 minutes I’ve just had to play with it it’s going to take a lot of tweaking. How can the graphics and the performance both be so poor?

That’s got to be the worst looking (graphically in terms of pop-in, lighting etc, not route building and asset placement) yet worst performing routes I think there’s been. That’s on stock Ultra, very high skies and 90% screen percentage in 4K on a 3090. The GPU is totally maxed out and can barely maintain 40 fps for large chunks.

 

Fife will be text only, assuming I buy it of course! 4.2 is a GodMode update that grew out of the conversation on this thread regarding shadows etc and includes a fair number of improvements over previous versions. I’m confident this will now be the final final final version of the GodMode.sav (I sure hope so!)

 

Too light, even though that is probably not the best description. The second set of pictures taken by phone I posted clearly demontstrates it, in my opinion. The second picture is the one that displays the issue, mainly in the the lower right part where there should be dark platform it is clearly white-ish, while the picture above has much better contrast, because it does not have the white tint. Now that I found out that it is caused by gamma settins, you can easily simulate it by trying to crank it up to 3 or 3.5 and then load the route at night, and you will see what I mean.

I am not trying to pursue something new here, I am just trying to get close to the unmodded darkness, not complete and perfect black. Applying your mod with the increased gamma settings must logically cause this issue I am seeing (with 2.2 being the standard), that is how gamma value works. Don't get me wrong, I am very thankful for your work, I just wanted to know if this is something known, if someone maybe asked about it earlier and there is some mitigation for it. Now that I know I can play with gamma to balance day/night I can adjust it, even though it will definitely mess with your other tuned settings, I am aware of that. But unless there can be different values loaded for gamma for the day and night, I do not think it should be changed, because it will simply make the whole image washed out.

 

In a nutshell, you can’t do it. The choice is either fix the route for daylight and accept a degree of compromise at night, or have dark night skies and accept that daylight is far far too dark. I suspect that the overwhelming majority of people play during the day so I went in that direction. I’d love to be able to fix it all like you can in TOD4 but TOD3 doesn’t allow you to control the night sky independently of anything else.

I have retuned many of the night skies (amongst other things) and paid particular attention to L2B as a result of your post (being careful not to trash the day lighting), but the truth is that unless DTG take steps to address it themselves there will have to be a compromise, one way or the other. If the possibility exists to darken the night skies on the TOD3 routes it’ll require an external mod changing something else as It can’t be changed through the engine.ini. I might have a look at Aran’s mods and see if I can’t maybe adapt them to work better with this pack.

Another issue, which you’ve probably noticed, is that what you see in terms of lighting varies from train to train. I can tune that route using the 700 then switch to the 375 and it looks like a bag of LOVE, which in turn looks different on the 66 and so on. Due to there being virtually zero standardisation in the way these routes and trains are built the whole thing is a giant balancing act which is why it’s very difficult to get it 100% right and put it down. I’ve found I’ve got to the point where I go into routes and am opening GodMode to change things less and less. That’s probably as good as it’s going to get I think.

 

Fair enough, thank you for your replies and all your hard work. I guess I am more sensitive to the gamma settings than others
There is always an option to change the gamma for the night drive once the game is loaded, then simply reload via pause menu and the new value is loaded, works perfectly as I found out during my testing

 

I can say that as a result of the changes I made to that route today I think you’ll find it more to your liking. I just hope it hasn’t knackered day lighting for a unit or set of conditions I haven’t tested but I’m hopeful it hasn’t.

 

Hi all. Version 4.2 is now available on TSC, including new pre-sets for The Goblin / Suffragette Line.

TSW 4 | Lighting & Graphic Enhancement v4.2 - Train Sim Community

v4.2 Changelog

- A final final (promise) version of the GodMode.sav mod
- Includes a significant number of changes and improvements across many routes, particularly around shadows and their consequent effect on performance. I'm confident this will both look, and perform, better than any previous version
- Re-introdces the 'High' pre-set as it was missed more than I anticipated. Can't win them all.
- Includes pre-set for the new Goblin Line DLC released yesterday (19/03/2024). Please make sure you have version 0.5.4 (or later) of GodMode
- Going forward, as anticipated, all updates from here on will be text only updates for you to copy and paste into your own dynamic.ini

 

Thank you JetWash, I was waiting for your update since I can't play the vanilla routes anymore! Time to hop in Goblin Line!

 

A little precis of what Goblin now looks like. The ballast is an as yet unreleased mod by SprattyHeath (and a huge improvement it is too!)

TSW4 | Goblin Line - Graphics and Lighting Enhancement (youtube.com)

 

Looking forward to trying it later today.

 

The last update is perfect, the black levels at night are now spot on, and the day is still... proper day Many thanks!

 

Pleased to hear it. If you spot anything else let me know.

 

Hi all. Just to let you know that with a bit of a heavy heart (or as heavy-a-heart as you can have cancelling a computer game pre-order ) I’ve decided to cancel my pre-order for Fife Circle. I’d urge you to do the same too.

Why? Because I’m sick of the wild swings in quality from DLC to DLC, from one developer to another. After Bernina Line I was really, properly, looking forward to this route but there is just so much wrong with Fife Circle that I just can’t bring myself to pay for it at release. Doing so implies that I’m happy to pay for that standard of content and I’m not, however much I want the route. Up until last night I was willing to give it a go and wait until I had it in hand before making a decision, but the trailing of the announcements and the attitude displayed by Jasper on a number of threads were the final nails in the coffin. The announcements are terrible, and they’ve persisted with this bing-bong-bing before onboards which is ridiculous. Additionally, I believe they’re lying about this ‘build’ issue. It’s one thing accidentally using an outdated build on a stream (which, let’s face it, is bad enough), but it’s quite another to release that same build to consoles. That suggests to me that that was, in fact, ‘the’ build and that any changes to come before release on the PC are being done as we speak. I’m afraid I can’t and won’t support that.

As far as this mod goes then I won’t be able to provide a preset until some point in the future where I determine the quality vs price is worth it. Clearly, from looking at the preview stream, this route is in dire need of this mod as the lighting and flatness of the world was as bad as I’ve ever seen it. I would hazard a guess that the Edinburgh to Glasgow presets would suffice until such a time as I can make a dedicated one. It’s certainly where I would have started and hopefully won’t be too far wide of the mark.

Obviously it’s your call as to whether or not to buy it, but I’d say don’t let the desire to have this route / unit override the practices of Rivet. This standard just isn’t good enough, and at some point we have to take a collective stand against being taken for mugs. This is my line in the sand. The Goblin route was a triumph & TSW is generally moving in the right direction. Fife Circle is a step back to the bad old days and we need to show in the only way we can that we won’t accept it. Please also be aware that if you’re buying Fife and hoping that there will be some mods available to knock it into shape then I think you’re very highly likely to be disappointed. Don’t rely on that when you make your decision.

Anyway, that’s all. I hope you’re enjoying v4.2 & have a good weekend!

JW

 

I have installed the latest ultra version that includes the Goblin line, but it's not working on it for some reason. All other routes it is working fine. Working with version 0-5-3 of GodMode

 

You need the new version of GodMode, that will sort your issue. It is updated at least every time a new DLC is released and is currently 0-5-4

 

JetWash, thanks, so many things to update after each dlc.

 

The Godmode needs an update after every new dlc to get work with it... Otherwise it will not recognize the route

 

A big thank you for this, makes the sim all that much better

 

can u use this without god mode as i hate godmode

 

No. The purpose of using god mode is so the settings can be individually tailored to each route without you having to quit game, alter ini, and reload game when changing route.

 

I don’t really understand, what’s not to like about God Mode?
TBH I just play the game and forget it’s there on most occasions, but it’s great when I do need it. For example I sometimes get tired of moody scenarios in gloomy weather and like being able to brighten things up a bit.

 

How can you ‘hate GodMode’? That makes literally zero sense. You never have to touch it if you don’t wish.

 

TBH rather than putting in a full on mod, I would prefer to just be able to change or add a couple of lines to the ini file, to tame the brightness.

 

It’s not a full on mod vern. You install GodMode (drag and drop) and my thing is just a GodMode .sav file (also drag and drop). It takes seconds to install and you don’t have to think about it again should you choose not to. It’s easier than using the main .ini file, that’s for sure.

Give it a try, promise if you don’t like it I’ll let you refund it

 

I will give it a try, rest assured. I'm really enjoying ECML and Goblin at present but the over bright lighting and the "solar flare" bursts as you emerge from tunnels etc are still a bit insidious.

 

I was late to the party - as also not keen on having to mod games - it should be right originally - but I'd struggle to go back to running without this one

 

Once you have GOD mode installed, I am pretty sure you will love it.
Coupled with Jetwashes mod, it changes the game.
Have a play with the environmental sliders too. Being able to make it rain or snow in an instant keeps things interesting.

 

Very kind of you to say so

 

I have read it's a great help on routes like Clinchfield where some scenarios have you switching or loading in pitch black. Even for more everyday needs I prefer a lighter night time and I guess it can help with that, too.

Of course, we should have sliders built in to control this sort of thing anyway. But something tells me, if they were going to do it DTG would have done so by now.

 

As a complete newb I am very impressed with it, I am always very happy to find mods that help with the over all experience of a sim, for me personally it now counts as a mandatory add on.

 

Due to the way it's now done, it's so easy to try. Its 2 files, 2 locations, and a line of text in the ini.
If it's not for you, delete the 2 files and the ini, and you will be back where you were.
Once you have played with the weather sliders, there is no going back.
I also challenge you not to alter and play with the lines in the dynamic ini. Just for giggles

Also worth noting that with GOD mode enabled, the zoom/pov becomes mouse wheel only, rather than the left stick of a gamepad.
POV also has greater parameters in god mode. You can nearly sit on the back wall of the cab.

 

On that note, on every train bar the 323 I find a FOV of 95% gives a much better experience than the default camera position, even with Spikee’s Cab Cam fixes

 

The nice thing about JetWash' tweaks combined with GodMode is that they are tailored to the lighting conditions of each particular route. Editing the main engine.ini is a "one size fits none" solution.

 

I have not played much due personal stuff, but I had a run on GWE last night, and with Robs mod and Jetwash`s lighting, it really holds up well considering its age.
Wonder if DTG are aware that the shadows THEY broke are still broken.?

 

countcussy, have to agree with you on how the GWE is now. Just finished a run with the 166 and its a very good route now.