Firstly - poor attempt at clickbait. Thank you for stopping by. Genuine questions below. Secondly- I've been really enjoying Horseshoe. Its been a real grabber for me, though I noticed something and it got me pondering. How important is weathering to you? I love some of the Tees valley stock as it looks old, it looks used and full of grime. Sherman was good with weathered and unweathered variants of stock. I'm curious as to weather (bad pun) there is enough. I saw the SOS yards look like the floor is dirty but to me there are some routes that still look a bit dead and clinical (here's a hat tip to every digger in TSW2 that has not moved for years, which has been fed back for years, whilst TSC's beaver away - Tangent.... I digress). So.... Is there anything else you think should be weathered and where? londonmidland cheeky tag for you mate as I know you've done some awesome mods for this.
Interesting thread. What I’d like is some more variation in weathering on loco stock and coaches. Currently we only have one variant for all trains. It’s either clean or dirty. Why not have it so it’s a mix, so certain trains are dirtier than other? Better still, this can be randomised within the consist. So for example, you could have some wagons which are clean and others which are dirty. There’s too much of ‘the same’ in TSW, with little variation. Even modern trains and units have weathering of some sort, yet we always end up with them looking pretty pristine looking. Luckily I can mod these, but it would be nice to have some variation of some sort.
I would agree with the above. Personally, I do find that most things in TSW look too clean, so clean that it makes it look unrealistic. Looking at the SOS locos, everything on the loco looks soooo clean, the rods have no grease marks, the cab has no grime, all just so clean. If you look at the chemical (I think) wagons on the German routes, the wagons have stains running down the sides of them, makes them look so real, makes them look industrial, and used. I feel like these sort of details is what takes good and creates something great! It as well creates a more immersive atmosphere as this is how it is in reality.
It's so important to me I did a dedicated search for weathered locos and rolling stock in the creators club and added anything relevant for me. At the moment I'm pretty happy with the outcome
The thing that bothers me most is that there is just a single weathering patterns for each piece of rolling stock, a rake of TEAs which all look identical is rather immersion busting
I thought DTG said somewhere (stream?) that some licensors didn't want their locos dirty. That ring a bell for anyone else?
Yeah, I do remember Matt mentioned that in stream once. If they not allowed to do it with a loco I can understand, however, with regards to wagons, stations, track side, etc…, I don’t see why they couldn’t.
Performance issues. A dirty version of a piece of rolling stock is an entire new livery, as far as the game engine is concerned, which has to be loaded and which in effect is a whole new piece of rolling stock; and the more different non-cloned vehicles there are, the more processor load and performance hit, especially on 8th gen, suffers.
That's not necessarily true. You can add dirt maps to each vehicle's material similar to how it's currently done with snow. Then adjust the amount randomly for every train that gets spawned in.
In my opinion there’s too much compromise when it comes to not including things because of performance/memory. This is where things like toggles and/or settings become handy. Either that or just make it next gen/PC only. We’ve been held back for too long now, which has result in TSW not expanding as fast as I thought it would have. The same applies for scenery density and graphical features.
i've been saying similar to this for a while, the consoles are holding back this simulator, it could be so so much better than it is atm. especially having to change things so they work on ~8 year old hardware, with controllers that are really not good for train driving (didn't someone say something about adjusting the dampers being a pain to operate on the console controller, so they didn't bother on the live stream)
Agree, though these toggles then link into the recent steam streams whereby we can’t have a steam density slider because the menu is too fragile. I do sometimes wonder how far ahead the vision for tsw went when development first started. It sometimes seems like adding a new feature to TSW is like this game below. One wrong move and Kaboom (loving a gif to break up the text at the moment, apologies)
I guess it comes down to two things -- artist time, and TOC approval. I wonder if it is technically feasible for the artists to 'paint' layers of grime and dirt, and have the game randomly select which layers are hidden or applied when a train spawns in? Or would that hog memory...
The trainbow proves this can be done, it is an extra decal added to one loco. Layers of dirt/grime or even graffiti could be produced and then randomly loaded onto the train. Going one step further, you could even remove the dirt layer if you use the train wash. But that would require the ability to reload the textures in-game which might well be impossible.
