PC Please Dtg, Fix The Lighting Issues

Can you post some screenshots? I've tried turning shadows off, and saw no difference. I just use reshade to pump up gamma and, also eye adaptation effect. It makes almost all routes playable at night when summer/clear is selected.
Also I've tried the latest german route, and it's playable at night without any tweaking, so I guess they must've fixed some ligting issues, and I expect all new routes to come will be playable at night. Existing ones will probably remain as they are, though.

 

The conditions in which there is total darkness are not as common as in this game. In fact, there is a moon that always leaves a certain bright glow - and this is lacking. If we strive for 100% simulation, let's be aware of the limitations of the monitor and sitting in front of the desk. Hence, compromises are necessary. That is why I support the implementation of the "gamma" or brightening functions at night. And of course, I am calling once again for refining the rocking function. Rocking wagons is not enough. The driver's body should not be attached to the locomotive - the head has its inertia and should "swing" in turns and with sharp braking. This would increase the dynamic impression for those sitting in front of the desk.
I'm sorry, but I get the impression that some things are too difficult to do in DTG or someone insisted not to do them.

 

Have a look at this ;-)
I don't want to sound rude but "there are some lighning issues" ...

 

One of the big problems is that you can never be totally realistic with lighting because our hardware mostly isn't. Cameras and monitors we use have about 30% less dynamic range than average human eyesight.

That doesn't tell the whole story of course. The human eye can see about 30 f-stops of dynamic range, but only about 10 f-stops of range at once, which corresponds to about the range of a really good camera. That means during standard lighting conditions like daytime light our hardware corresponds well with our visual acuity, but in extreme lighting conditions such as dark nights, our visual acuity tends to be significantly better than our hardware. (Unreal engine has built in functions to simulate the higher dynamic range of the eye, but they tend to look unnatural when overcooked. See r.EyeAdaptionQuality in Engine.ini)

Given that we can't make consumer level hardware that gives us the level of visual awareness we have in real life in the context of a sim, to be more realistic we need to provide affordances to assist in filling in that missing detail. As with most cases of accessibility we can get around some of the limitations by offering the user choice, such as a gamma setting in game. Real life doesn't have a gamma setting, so it's not entirely realistic, but then again we're starting from a limited simulation of real life so options like gamma or tuning eye adaption quality settings in-game would be helpful to players.

Personally I do occasionally tweak these settings either in engine.ini or via graphics card drivers, but having to quit the game and go edit files to play a night service is pretty sub-optimal.

 

I think this discussion can be actually broken down into two different issues:
1. night in TSW is too dark for many users (depending on the personal perception, screen used, etc.) compromising gameplay.
2. there are pretty important bugs with headlights and other artificial lights, as reported multiple times. Headlights of multiple locos do not project anything depending on the camera position, light poles not projecting light depending on season and time of day, trees becoming too bright on early morning, last but not least the "shadow cone around the user". For each of these issues, there is screenshot evidence in this post and all other posts on the same topic.

For problem 1) a gamma/eye adaptation setting would be an amazing solution. And should be extremely simple for DTG to implement it, considering it's just altering a variable of the engine settings. But considering they never introduced even simpler quality of life improvements like auto-switching between miles and km, they will do it only by the year 2050.
For problem 2) the sad thing is that they do not even acknowledge the existence of bugs related to lights. But at this point it has been 10 years talking about the same attitude towards the community, so no real surprise here.

 

Its not the hardware its the game engine can it do proper illumination, as UE4s lighting isn’t great. DTG probably would of looked at making an engine themselves using various better gfx engines out there, but I think they’ve done okay with this, just needs improvement

 

Sure looks dark at this switchyard, but then, not on the platforms:



Interesting part begins about at 2:35.

Also, funny at 5:30 "Oh... everything's in Swedish?!"