(This is just a speculation, I have no experience with creating mods for TSW, I'm just throwing it here for the more experienced ones to possibly toy with if it's even possible) Yesterday I returned back to ECW and did the Railtour service with Class 37. As I was following a service in front of me, getting yellows and reds, it was a lot of throttle up and down action (granted, I could coast, but 37 just sounds great in full, so I had to give her opportunities). And TSW nicely shows the various stages of this by changing the colour and density of smoke coming out. As the engine starts speeding up and giving out amps, it burns more fuel than air creating a rather thick dark smoke. As you get to higher RPMs, the fuel gets more properly burned with more air in the substance and the smoke gets thinner until it's barely visible. So everything works the way it should, right? What's there to mod? The changes in smoke brought me to an idea - if it changes based on engines behaviour, it might be possible to tune it. It is not necessarily an object nor a texture. The game probably has some settings like "amount"/"colour" for this RPM when increasing throttle etc. But if this could be toyed with, could the effect be made stronger? This could then be used to simulate a broken turbo on GE locomotives, which creates a lot of smoke (potentially flames, which probably can't be simulated in-game). This could however create a problem that the parameter might be set across the board making all AC4400W on SPG smoke like that. So what if it was used on two-stroke EMDs to simulate an old engine. With all the wear and tear these usually smoke more than they should have across the board. This could be very fitting for the upcoming Clinchfield DLC as their locos were... not in the best condition most of the time. Changing the smoking parameters (again... if possible) could give F7s and first-gen SD40s a real feel of an old engine that has seen thousands of hours of service. Also having SD40-2s on SPG smoke a bit more than the rest of the mainline locos would give them a new unique feel. The idea is up for grabs.
