(mod) Tsw 2 New Dynamic Cloud Visuals

THAT!
I asked myself yesterday while driving exactly WHAT it is that makes me feel the world appears a lot more authentic now.

 

Do you want some clouds ?

 

4.26 has a new default sky system. Take a look on the website.

 

Interesting. Although we’ll see how many features of 4.26 DTG will actually use, as the upgrade to 4.23 didn’t see many new features being utilised, despite it being displayed on UE4s website of all the new, available features.

 

I've already tested. Poetry. Maybe sometimes, although DCS has waited years for it Volumetric dynamic beautiful skies \o/
The terrain looks great under such a sky. I try to imagine all these TSW mountain routes in such a setting.

I really like the compromise by londonmidland. A very big change!

 

Thanks for the comment. I look forward to future routes utilising my skybox mod.

 

It's incredible how better this mod makes the whole game look. You sir, have the respect of the whole community.

 

Can you be kind enough to share your Engine.ini file? I've been trying to change the values of mine for months to find the best graphical setup (stable 30fps is enough for me). But I'm still not entirely convinced about the visual rendering.

Do you also use Reshade?

 

Thanks for the comments. Anything to make the game look and feel more realistic is always a good thing.

Previously I would never choose cloud settings, because of how dreadful they looked.

 

Hi, I’m not at home for a few days however I’ll get back to you on this when I can.

Also, I do not use Reshade.

 

It is interesting that no one from DtG towers has made a comment even if it is along the lines of "tut tut, you shouldn't be messing inside of our game" but secretly admiring the effort that LM and others put in to do what should have already been done in the first place during development. Or they are too dumbfounded at the obviousness of these fixes?

 

I just don't think they really care. They've had... three(?) years to the improve the skybox. Yes, the TSW2 system is slightly better than the old one, but it's clearly not very high on their list of priorities.

 

They have mentioned various mods on a few occasions during streams and they are anything but negative towards them. I wouldn't be surprised if they run a few themselves when they are not doing official streams

 

At the very least, Mr. Peddlesden uses Engine.ini tweaks.

Cheers

 

I just can't figure out why DTG haven't done these kind of sky tweaks themselves. LMs mod makes a whole world of difference and only took a few hours of work for one person to figure out (I think)?
Even though it's a train not a flight sim, nice sky visuals help so much with the immersion aspect, after all the sky does take up quite a lot of screen space.

Surely there must be a reason for DTG not to do this, as I'm sure I've heard Sam,Matt etc say a few times in stream that if something is easily done they would do it, no question. Slightly confused on this one.

 

Hi there. I’m not aiming to be in direct competition with DTG or anything like that. All my mods are simply done out of passion, as well as benefiting the community by providing my work to them.

I’m just happy that I am able to mod the game. Be it officially or unofficially, I don’t really care. The best feeling is seeing other players benefit from these sort of things.

 

Would you be open recording via obs for any YouTube tutorials?

 

Thanks for the comments. As to why DTG still haven’t done it themselves, I have no idea.

Initially I thought it was going to be a really hard job, with it either taking up loads of performance or it simply being impossible to alter without ‘proper’ tools. This, however, was clearly not the case. A few freeware programs will quickly get you on the right path.

I’m slightly confused why DTG have said in the past they don’t want to waste performance on pretty looking clouds, when from what I’ve seen, there isn’t any?

 

Hi. Even I’m not sure how or why it works. It simply just ‘works’. I just experimented with a few cloud perlin noise patterns (I still don’t know how it works) and it turns out the pattern I choose worked fantastically.

So I basically went in blind just experimenting with things and seeing what the output would be. Therefore, I don’t think I’d be able to create a tutorial as I don’t really understand why X causes Y to function Z.

 

londonmidland
We are certainly benefitting form your efforts - thank you

Are you open to requests? I'd absolutely love it if the sea in IOW could be replaced. The current version looks like something out of Inception.

 

Thanks

Unfortunately with the sea, I believe it is the way DTG initially set up the way textures are displayed, so I cannot fix this unfortunately. The same goes for fields and grass. There are solutions, but only DTG can fix this.

 

Hello, my ini tweaks are as following:
r.ViewDistanceScale=4.0
foliage.LODDistanceScale=5
r.BloomQuality=5
r.GenerateMeshDistanceFields=1
r.TonemapperGamma=3
r.EyeAdaptationQuality=1
r.ToneMapper.Sharpen=0
r.Streaming.FullyLoadUsedTextures=1
r.Streaming.HLODStrategy=2
r.DefaultFeature.AutoExposure=1
r.DefaultFeature.AutoExposure.Method=1
r.DefaultFeature.AutoExposure.ExtendDefaultLuminanceRange=1
r.TextureStreaming=0
r.LandscapeLODDistributionScale=3
r.StaticMeshLODDistanceScale=0.00
r.fov=95
r.LightMaxDrawDistanceScale=50.0
r.MotionBlur.Scale=2.0
r.MinScreenRadiusForLights=0.00
ts2.CameraMotionSway.EnableUprightCompensation=0
ts2.CameraMotionSway.KSitting.Y=100.0
ts2.CameraMotionSway.KSitting.Z=50.0
ts2.CameraMotionSway.LSitting.Y=100.0
ts2.CameraMotionSway.LSitting.Z=1
ts2.CameraMotionSway.SittingPivotOffset=-200
ts2.CameraMotionSway.LSitting.X=50
ts2.fov=95
ts2.save.CheckpointsEnabled=0
r.Shadow.RadiusThreshold=0
r.SkeletalMeshLODBias=0

 

Thanks londonmidland . Let’s see how kind this setup treats my graphics card. I’m on 2080ti so hoping I’ll still pull 60fps

 

I play on a 970 with decent FPS at full graphics so yours should offer more than enough power for decent game play.

 

DTG did work on the skybox for TSW2. However, they view their new cloud system as a "massive" improvement over the TSW1 clouds. IMO, they should look at their skybox the way that we look at it. The clouds in TSW2 are bad, and they are WORSE in TSW1. If DTG would look at it this way, maybe they would prioritize the look of the skybox.

Now that Londonmidland has done some magic to the clouds, we all owe a debt of gratitude to him for his efforts. I'm blown away at this! A new skybox, as well as TrackIR, Directx controller support were my core requests I wanted added to the sim. A member of the community comes through with the goods? As soon as I saw the screenshots I thought this is not going to play well for DTG in the forums. Great job LM!!

 

Thanks for the feedback I've always wanted better looking clouds in TSW, and choosing anything but clear weather always made me put off playing TSW.

I agree with what you said. I was expecting the new skybox in TSW 2 to be a substantial upgrade over the original TSW 1 skybox, however this was not the case. We still had those very flat, large and ugly looking clouds. They were also very basic in visuals. The only thing I can say that was improved was the overall lighting.

I'm not sure why it was so hard for DTG to do a decent job of the clouds, as many games, which are over 10 years old now, feature better looking clouds than TSW 2.

 

I believe the situation is that they got Unreal Engine, but took the really minimal time to study it and see how it works and find it's potential. I mean they use it as a graphics engine and use the editor, but barely anything else is "unreal worthy" in it.

For the ugly original clouds they probably just googled "dynamic clouds for Unreal Engine" and went with the easiest solution and didn't try polishing it much. I mean it clearly shows when someone from the community can improve the visuals by tenfolds just by replacing the noise pattern for the clouds. A very simple solution which could've been easily found by the developers as well.

Or look at how ugly the water is in the game when used in big areas. Or how the windscreen rain droplets effects are straight from Train Simulator. Or how they can't make the shadows render more than 500m in front of you. Wish they would do more with what the engine is capable of.

 

londonmidland: Thanks so much. In particular, the setting of the FOV and the CameraMotionSway are very interesting.

 

londonmidland Thank you for sharing your engine settings.

I'm particularly interested in the fov settings. Having tried multiple values, I notice no difference. Are you aware of any other settings / dependencies that could be "locking" fov in place?

 

No problem. The motion sway now feels a lot more realistic, as the default values felt for too ridged and stiff for a natural head movement feeling.

 

Unfortunately it seems changing it via the ini document does not affect it. The only way to change it is to download Unreal Engine Unlocker and type in fov 100 in the command box.

 

Happy to hear that my skybox mod was mentioned on the live stream. Thanks guys

They MAY ask for my permission to use it/develop off it. Emphasis on may as nothing is confirmed or going ahead at this stage.

 

I'll have a listen out for that tomorrow, congrats on someone paying attention, should be red faces really.

 

I was a witness - it was praised!

 

I asked if they could implement it officially,glad they noticed

 

The impression I got is they probably won't be going ahead with it as it cannot be implemented on the consoles

 

That was just a speculation for saying "we can't promise it for 100%". Currently there is nothing pointing to the fact that this couldn't be implemented to consoles. I mean it's just a replaced noise pattern file, nothing hardware specific.

Anyway I hope they reach out to OP and get it working on all systems. It really is a big improvement, and maybe they could even improve it even further. After all they have more tools available.

 

True....but the other factor is DTG are themselves in the process of developing their own dynamic weather/cloud system (or is on their wishlist to do so) and they may have their own tech in mind and it would be unknown how compatible this would be with theirs.

 

same here. I asked a few times in thread about why londonmidland could solve quicker than core team. I’m pleased recognition was given. I guess we’re lucky we can run at the very least

 

I think the main reason why they haven’t changed the visuals is because of some of the core issues which still exist with the weather system/skybox.

It’s far from perfect by default - clouds disappear at night, clouds cause things to get brighter and make everything look washed out etc.

I think perhaps they want to fix these things first before changing anything. Although I could be wrong.

 

The reason is that the core team in TSW is small and they are responsible for all the tech in the game not just one individual thing that may appear to be easily changed. They also have to ensure that it works under all conditions and on all platforms without affecting performance and this involves QA time, which is used up by everything else in the game too. Any modder can come up with an improvement in a short amount of time and release it without any of the extra stuff that a developer has to ensure.

There’s another point that is often missed. It has also taken the entire modding community a very long time to get round to trying to improve this issue. Once londonmidland sat down to do it he got results, but what took him so long to get round to doing it? He’s just one guy working on many things. This is the same issue the devs face and they aren’t only looking at the things londonmidland wants to improve but an almost endless list of things that need improvement, dev time, testing time and all under scheduling from the producers and management who are also creating content alongside any core improvements. That’s why they haven’t got round to doing this yet, which they would likely tackle as part of a scheduled look into more than one small cloud improvement, but a larger set of improvements.

It’s not as easy as saying, this guy improved it, why can’t the devs do it, because it’s an entirely different environment the two are working under. For the moment PC players can take advantage of the improvements made for TSW by the modders but the realities of DTG coming up with similar results for all the multitude of things that need improving is a different issue.

 

Exactly. Other people need to understand this.

 

Could the issues they mentioned last night possibly be related to the basic dynamic weather they have on Clinchfield and Sandpatch?

Has the mod been confirmed to work ok on the scenarios that make use of the change in weather on those two routes?

As I say just thinking that it could be a reason why they said what they said as well as console issues.

 

Fair comment and taken onboard

 

Is anything similar to this available for Train Simulator alias Railworks?

 

Someone should convince DTG to include this officially in the game on all platforms, it simply looks amazing and completely transforms the feel of the sim for the better.

 

There’s the Sky & Weather Enhancement Pack by Armstrong Powerhouse, however it is payware and is for British routes only.

 

I believe in one of the past live streams, Adam mentioned that he may consider utilising it, however I haven’t heard anything since.

 

After Rush Hour ... ;-)

 

Had this mod since it’s come out, apologies haven’t got round to thanking you for much of a improvement this adds.

Top work as ever, keep up the great work!