PC Graphical Downgrades In Recent Dlcs - Wet Platform Textures

Discussion in 'TSW General Discussion' started by LimitedEdiition, Dec 23, 2019.

  1. LimitedEdiition

    LimitedEdiition Well-Known Member

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    Haven't really seen this come up at all in discussions of new DLCs, but it seems that although the newer DLCs have come a long way in terms of visual fidelity and added features like the Class 377 over 3rd rail gaps or RRO's lush hills, I can't help but notice that certain features have been omitted, maybe as a trade off for this increased detail in scenery.


    Wet platform textures have been gone since Tess Valley Line has been released, and has been absent for every DLC since then. I'm not sure why every DLC after MSB has omitted this, I'm speculating that it has to do with FPS optimizations, but it makes a huge difference playing in wet conditions. Attached are a series of images which demonstrate the difference it makes. I will concede that this is ultimately something very small in the grand scheme of things, considering the vast library of support tickets DTG wades through and bugs that need fixing, but it would be nice for an official explanation as to why something that has consistently been in the game before TVL is now gone. Attached are all images that I've personally taken in game with Wetness applied to max and precipitation at the halfway mark. On with the visual evidence:

    American Platform Textures: Here we see a huge difference with what wet platform textures accomplish comparing LIRR to Caltrain. The addition of this wet layer makes TSW look like a true "next gen" game, whereas Caltrain looks something similar to a scene in TS1.


    20191213043600_1-1.jpg

    20191217234353_1.jpg

    Stone Platform Textures:
    Next up are Stone platform textures. You can see a little extra fidelity in the wet rain surface on MSB vs a scene from TVL here, also attached is dry platform textures in the newly released ECW. Stone platforms also exist in RRO, but following the trend, the layer of wetness is absent as well.

    DRY
    20191213043719_1.jpg
    20191217234614_1.jpg

    WET
    20191217234836_1.jpg
     
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  2. LimitedEdiition

    LimitedEdiition Well-Known Member

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    Last up we have Brick textures:
    Attached is an example of brick textures looking identical in wet and dry conditions in RRO, which proves that wet textures are not present. Also attached is an image of a brick style platform texture from MSB which does have the wet layer.
    DRY
    20191213043341_1.jpg
    20191213043423_1.jpg
    WET
    20191213043838_1.jpg

    It may be a small detail in the grand scheme of things, but it definitely adds a layer of atmosphere when driving in wet conditions. Hopefully DTG takes this into consideration and is able to add this into the newer DLCs in a future patch, or considers adding this into future DLCs.
     
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  3. londonmidland

    londonmidland Well-Known Member

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    DTG is very inconsistent when it comes to things like this.

    Just like removing working level crossing barriers which featured in TSW’s first ever route; Heavy Haul, only to remove it in future routes due to ‘performance issues’.

    Guess what, we still haven’t got a replacement for it.

    Give me working stuff which may have a few performance issues here and there rather than removing features and offering no replacement for it.

    What’s the point using a powerful engine (UE4) which offers loads of features and possibilities when you aren’t going to use it to its full potential most of the time?

    One step forward, two steps back anyone?
     
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  4. nne4229

    nne4229 Well-Known Member

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    Use reshade to fix it
     
  5. Anthony Pecoraro

    Anthony Pecoraro Well-Known Member

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    It could be a bug. I don’t think it was for FPS reasons.
     
  6. nne4229

    nne4229 Well-Known Member

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    Meanwhile, Star Citizen has working display screens, departure time, and announcements on the trains. Lol
     
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  7. hightower

    hightower Guest

    I believe they’ve already said it was intentional Anthony so it’s not a bug.

    I’ll happily hold my hands up if I’m wrong, but I’d hazard a guess it’s to do with console optimisation - which officially there is no need for. I find it hard to believe they’ve done it intentionally because PCs were struggling with it.
     
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  8. Anthony Pecoraro

    Anthony Pecoraro Well-Known Member

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    Where was that said?
     
  9. hightower

    hightower Guest

    The OP filed a ticket and shared the response on Discord.
     
  10. DominusEdwardius

    DominusEdwardius Well-Known Member

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    I think the wet platforms are also absent from NTP as well
     
  11. Anthony Pecoraro

    Anthony Pecoraro Well-Known Member

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    Is it intentional?
     
  12. Digital Draftsman

    Digital Draftsman Well-Known Member

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    It's things like this I find bizarre with DTG. How can a working crossing gate cause 'performance issues?' It's a piece of animated scenery where the animation is triggered by a train being in the section. The game already has to check if the train is in the section to set the signals correctly, so there's no resource savings there. It still plays audio and flashes, so the only saving would be the animation of a gate moving, which requires a tiny amount of resources and it's no different to a semaphore arm moving. I just don't understand how DTG get themselves in a tangle over simple things like this.

    I get the impression that when they started developing TSW the team they hired were very inexperienced with UE4; They got really basic things wrong, like the name of the game. They didn't realise that changing the name of the game at a later stage would result in a lot of code having to be changed, which is why the game is called 'TS2Prototype' instead of something sensible like 'Train Sim World'. Given a basic error like that, I think they have probably made many more similar errors in the early stages of development, which have made developing TSW a complete nightmare going forward; This would explain why they have all these issues implementing basic things like animated crossing gates, on board announcements and selective door opening.
     
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  13. keksman

    keksman Well-Known Member

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    These guys have some seeeerious issues optimizing this game... started with the extremly low view distance even on ultra, then they made the grass look worse (thread of it is somewhere in this forum, just like about worse lights) and then they made the scenery look disgusting on some points in newer dlcs, like I cant be the only one who just cant accept this and their stupid reasoning for doing that: https://forums.dovetailgames.com/threads/main-spessart-bahn-and-2d-trees.15105/#post-67948
    So I wouldnt be suprised if removing these wet platform textures is just another lazy way of them "optimizing" this game as theire main priority is and will always be releasing dlc after dlc in a endless cycle.
    Note: These issues are all DTG exclusive ones btw
     
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  14. Anthony Pecoraro

    Anthony Pecoraro Well-Known Member

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    Maybe TrainSim-Matt can explain the reasoning about the animated crossings.
     
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  15. hightower

    hightower Guest

    For the all the praise that ECW is getting (some of it I agree with), I don't see that this is particularly a step forward...

    1.png

    If you play GWE and look (really look) at it like it's the latest DLC it is way more detailed than ECW is. It’s streets ahead. Clearly the loco builds have moved on since then but has the scenery? I felt after RRO that things were on an upward trajectory...now I'm not so sure.

    One thing is for sure, the older DLC didn’t have these damn trees changing resolution/detail level right in front of you like ECW does. It looks awful. Again, I simply don’t believe this is an optimisation done because the PC is struggling...
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Dec 24, 2019
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  16. LT586

    LT586 Well-Known Member

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    When TSW was announced it was a long time before we had a supposedly next gen, modern train simulator; I’d love to see what can come for 2020 but I didn’t notice this either, to be fair MSB is more atmospheric in its weather patterns than ECW and with the UK there’s a certain level of weather fidelity that makes it unique. My mate, who is a heavy console player agrees that this simulator isn’t for console it’s too complex for console; where as PC is always ahead of the curve due to dedicated separate peripherals - I know consoles are powerful but, not as powerful as an Intel i9 or AMD Ryzen coupled to 32GB Ram with an M.2 SSD and a high performance GPU, with 800-1000w PSU and watercooling...

    Comparing to OMSI since 2011, it can do real ICAO code weather, it feels real when its raining; it can do puddles and even spray from vehicles; it can do a lot of things we still don’t have in TSW. Even TML have now implemented better weather but what UE4 can probably do is use Airport weather data to map weather to.

    Surely
     
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  17. londonmidland

    londonmidland Well-Known Member

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    DTG’s idea of optimisation is removing working features and replacing them with static or lower quality versions.

    That is not optimisation. It’s simply being lazy and putting your head in the sand.

    I’m sure the working gates on HH were fine and just needed some code to be amended to make it more ‘optimised’.

    In fact I’m sure the wet textures for the platforms barely have any effect on performance at all.


    DTG’s feature list sounds like a game of snakes and ladders. Add one thing but potentially loose something else.
     
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  18. DominusEdwardius

    DominusEdwardius Well-Known Member

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    The gates on CSX were If I recall done with a large scale collision volume checking... which is a horrendously inefficient way of of doing it, wet platforms I don't think were performance related, especially since basically everything else in the world gets wet and has the respective Screen space reflections.
     
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  19. Anthony Pecoraro

    Anthony Pecoraro Well-Known Member

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    So probably just forgotten?
     
  20. hightower

    hightower Guest

    In at least 4 DLC?!!

    Come on.
     
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  21. Trenomarcus

    Trenomarcus Well-Known Member

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    Feel the detail.
     
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  22. Coppo

    Coppo Well-Known Member

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    I don't think it is just the platforms not showing up as wet. I have noticed that the rivers in the newer dlc all seem to be semi-matt instead of glossy. The ones in TVL sometimes look like asphelt..
     
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  23. Tonto62

    Tonto62 Well-Known Member

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    I had a run in the Tees Valley last night, selected snow and every horizontal surface had a good covering including the train roof and even the footboards on the 101. Unfortunately absolutely no snow on any of the station platforms. It spoils the effect completely. I understand that it might be difficult to model the effect of the passengers walking in the snow and making footprints but the roads have tyre tracks so it must be possible to include areas where walkers have flattened the snow.
     
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  24. Anthony Pecoraro

    Anthony Pecoraro Well-Known Member

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    I always imagine it as the employees have shoveled and salted the platforms. lol
     
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  25. J4mes

    J4mes Member

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    I agree, we can't have the Passengers slipping off the Platform and falling on the Tracks waiting for a rather horrific incident can we now!!
     
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  26. Sunscreen

    Sunscreen Guest

    Indeed. Talk about legal liabilities.. we live in a very litigious society these days.
     
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  27. londonmidland

    londonmidland Well-Known Member

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    I think there needs to be *some* snow on the platforms. Particularly towards the ends of the platforms. It just looks wrong when there’s virtually no snow on them with everything else covered in it.
     
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  28. J4mes

    J4mes Member

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    That is very true, just imagine the paperwork involved and then the subsequent investigation as to the cause, and who was responsible!! I don't have the time for that!!
     
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  29. LimitedEdiition

    LimitedEdiition Well-Known Member

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    There is snow present on RRO's platform when you select snow, but it's just a tiny blob of white and the rest of the platform is dry. Looks really out of place and jarring considering the entire platform itself should be wet to capture passengers stepping all over the platform, and the texture remains the same even in a heavy blizzard environment where the entire platform should be coated with snow. I'm not expecting them to simulate this perfectly, but simply adding a wetness layer to platforms does a whole lot to immersion rather than just this...

    20200102125126_1.jpg
     
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  30. jörgen Näslund

    jörgen Näslund Well-Known Member

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    Is not it great risk to those consoles complain about the poor frame rates, and they are they are in the majority now.
    So dovetail takes more care of them than us pc owners. Then they change and remove features so that it flows smoothly in the consoles.
    Then we who have powerful computers step back and get not so good routes than we should.
     
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  31. Darthtool

    Darthtool Member

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    Their has been a lot of downgrades since i first got the game, parallax ballast has been removed/wet textures and reflections have been reduced in quality. Catering for low end Consoles, i doubt Dtg give two figs about what anyone here thinks about it either.
     
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  32. londonmidland

    londonmidland Well-Known Member

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    TrainSim-James TrainSim-Matt I don’t mean to unnecessarily tag but can we please have some explanation on these graphical downgrades discussed in this group instead of us having to speculate upon ourselves?

    It certainly is a step back if you have no direct replacement for it, if it is due to ‘performance issues’.
     
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  33. Anthony Pecoraro

    Anthony Pecoraro Well-Known Member

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    I think it’s just a bug.
     
  34. LimitedEdiition

    LimitedEdiition Well-Known Member

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    Although a common theme when it comes to graphical downgrades is to just simply blame consoles, I'm not so sure they are the primary culprit for this (although they very well could be, most of this thread is based on pure speculation until DTG officially responds). Something that I noticed when looking at the old GWE promo video featured here, shows that downgrades have existed since the early days of TSW before TSW console releases were a thing. Seems like GWE featured different track ties at one point in an early build, but for whatever reason, this was omitted when it officially released.


    Video in Question:


    Attached are images from the video which shows the omitted track tie which appears on the left. GWE in its current form today only features one type of track tie, which is what you see on the right side of this image :

    trackties.png

    Image of what it looks like today:

    20200103002606_1.jpg

    Attached are also some images of this omitted type of track in other locations other than Paddington:

    track3.png
    track2.png
     

    Attached Files:

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  35. LT586

    LT586 Well-Known Member

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    When I see the images of TSW I do think if only, the community could get their hands on an editor....What they'd come up with would be something mighty.
     
  36. Anthony Pecoraro

    Anthony Pecoraro Well-Known Member

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  37. LT586

    LT586 Well-Known Member

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    This will make people again question, why use Unreal Engine. But its thee most smoothest gameplay. Compared to tile loading last minute like TS2020 and stuttering to high heaven lol.

    Thanks Anthony, the DTG Dweller
     
  38. Anthony Pecoraro

    Anthony Pecoraro Well-Known Member

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    I just get the information from Discord. You can join if you want.
     
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  39. LT586

    LT586 Well-Known Member

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    No was on discord before - I have a wife that requires more attention
     
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  40. Sunscreen

    Sunscreen Guest

    Happy wife, happy life. ;)
     
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  41. LT586

    LT586 Well-Known Member

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    You know that sir! No, in all seriousness I haven’t even time to game that much. Im still no where near as explored in TSW or TS2020 as many
     
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