One of the things I've always wanted to do, but can never fully get through a session, is play during dusk in TSW. This video explains perfectly why. Took with 'Spring Cloudy' setting between 19:00 - 22:00. The timestamp around 19:45 is the 'perfect' night conditions but it quickly goes downhill from there. Seriously, why does everything including the sky get brighter as it gets later on into the night?! Link to video
I think Matt had mentioned (might be wrong) in one of the clinchfield feeds that the reason it gets brighter is to replicate moonlight evenings. I think it’s so it’s not that dark that you lose any detail and can see nothing
If true, then this is where they are going wrong. Even with moonlight, it definitely shouldn’t be that bright. Just look at how bright the house roofs glow as well as the terrain and trees getting brighter. It’s definitely an immersion breaker. Regarding it looking too dark, this highlights the shortcomings DTG face when route building. Why is it too dark? Simple. Because DTG don’t have near enough light sources. Most assets are completely unlit which is why they artificially brighten up night scenes, which make it look highly unrealistic. Rather than choosing to actually solve this issue, they choose to take the easy route and just make everything brighter instead.
The nights at crr look way better compared to for example peninsula corridor for some reason, do different routes have different skyboxes? If you compare the skies from assetto corsa competizione (also unreal engine) with tsw.. It's a bit hard to swallow to be honest
There’s only a half an hour or so period in that video where it looks totally unnatural. When it goes dark, some things get lighter, but then they do go dark again. If that’s the period of time you are interested in then it’s going to look bad but it’s not all broken, which you tend to suggest some times. It’s that tricky bit between day and night. It looks like there is a conflict between a couple of different systems that aren’t quite in sync with each other and different ways in which objects react to those systems. As many times as there is too much light on objects there are a similar number of times when there is too little. The transition in the morning in SEHS is an example of that. It’s getting light but no ambient light illuminates the train at all, so it looks like a shadow mask instead of an object. A little later the train starts to become visible, later than the amount of light in the sky and on the surroundings would suggest it should. I’m not sure if no light on a train is worse than the almost glowing trains you also get. Everything that’s going on with the lighting seems to me to be a compromise and transitioning from one compromise to another is not going to be an easy task for the developers. As I don’t know exactly how the lighting works in TSW2, I can’t comment on whether they are doing the best that is available to them at present or not. I don’t think it can fully replicate how it is in reality, or even if that would be desirable from a gameplay point of view, because there are so many variables in real world natural lighting. Low cloud can make a built up area extremely light at night, whereas no cloud with no moon can be pitch black as no light is reflected down from the sky. That’s an awful lot of computer programming to replicate that in real time.
One half of us wants more authenticity and the other half wants higher fps and smoothness. What is a poor dev meant to do with the tools currently at their disposal? Wear sunglasses for the added fidelity after dark...
I think the newer routes have better skyboxes and Jamie’s team are going back and sweeping up on the old ones to improve them. I’ve no idea what’s for what though
If so, then it fails in Clinchfield, with many services (including shunting/coupling) in inky blackness- almost unplayable. DTG really need to give the external cameras a "flashlight", especially since we often use them to represent a brakeman riding the end of the cut. Oh, and real headlights.
It seems to get dark at 19:45 but then gets brighter again and then darker which makes no sense. I wonder if that will be fixed
It's quite interesting how TS got the day / night cycle a lot better. From dynamic clouds that cast shadows on the ground to getting from night to morning with the warm sun casting light on the ground and train. Nights where pretty dark but when you had stations and cities lit up by fantastic lights and usable locomotive headlight, it really was a pleasure to do night runs. In TSW2 night scenarios are a chore with dead unilluminated cities and non existent headlight. Now considering that TSW has superior shading, shadow and lighting capabilities compared to TS you would expect a lot better.
I guess dtg don't see lighting as a priority but wouldn't there be some sort of lighting team that can fix the issue
Fixed it for you - Now that UE4 has superior shading, shadow and lighting capabilities. To my knowledge TSW barely makes use of these three things because as always, performance issues. Until they get past this, nothing will ever improve.
Well where is the performance going? because the graphics level cannot justify the performance hit. And SimuGraph is not a good argument since the entire game barely uses 40 % from a 6 core / 12 threads CPU. Also do you think that an update to Unreal V4.26 would make a difference in graphics and performance?
I think the answer we all hate to see is.... “needs to be good on all platforms”. This loosely translates to “who cares if you’ve got a capable pc of today or yesteryear, you get what you’re given”
Sadly that statement is so true , "From dish washer, vacuum cleaner and potato pc, we run on everything!". I know that blame was also thrown on the consoles but i don't know if anyone actually seen what kind of games can a PS4 run. We are still talking about 8 highly optimized cores, a modified AMD 7870 video card (top of the line at its time) and 8 GB of ram. Might be old but still capable in my opinion right?
Quite simply it’s the lower end consoles limiting everything else. They’re very much underpowered for modern gaming, so this is why we don’t have more features and better looking visuals. Until they drop support for these devices I wouldn’t expect much change.
I must admit if you play Assetto corsa competizione whilst the geographical area is smaller and rain still looks naff on a replay it’s far better for lighting in ue4. Even on the Xbox.
I wish sunsets would look nice. But at TSW it just looks gross. You just can't look at it. The sun sets and a gray-black sky appears. Usually twilight looks like this, but in TSW it's anything but that:
I think he meant more sunset variety colours, based on location and season, as opposed to the only blue and yellowish variant. That pink looking sunset would look very nice in TSW.