Retina effect I think they called it.... Well, it was seen live today in the German route preview. The visual effect when EXITING the tunnel I find quite acceptable, but the effect when ENTERING the tunnel in my opinion feels very unrealistic. There is a flash, and then the tunnel lights up for two seconds with a saturated light, as if there is fog in the tunnel or something like that. Anyway, I find it horrible, and I think it will prevent me from fully enjoying this route, where we go through 1 million tunnels. I would like to know your opinion, I attach some screenshots that I have taken from the streaming.
It’s funny that even when you approach a tunnel, it looks lid, even though it should just be a black hole, as your eye is adapted to bright daylight. For me this is a bug, which probably has something to do with the way the tunnels are made within TSW. In reality it should be the other way round, completely black when you go in and then adapt and make the tunnel slightly brighter…
The light flash and the light in the tunnel is similar to the way TSW transitions into tunnels currently with certain atmospheric things not being applied in the tunnels. The eye adaptation is added on top of that it seems. It’s a bit of a mess really. And it’s not the only thing wrong with the new lighting but there you go, it’s what we’ve got now.
Yup, I agree. We will have to live with that. It’s not a deal breaker for me, as, in general, it’s still better to what we have had before
There was also the horrible effect of the fog outside not visible when approaching the tunnel exit and then suddenly popping in a split second after exiting the tunnel.
Remember that it was a dev build, but I guess at least at launch it won’t be way different than what we have seen
Yep noticed the light issues when entering the tunnels, didn’t look great at all. The train itself seemed too bright on external camera shots too. It didn’t feel like it belonged in the world - especially when it went dark and rainy.
Completely agree. Entering the tunnel is very odd. It almost looks to me as if you can see the exit of the tunnel for a short time before it disappears. I'm really not sure what the effect is trying to represent, but it doesn't seem realistic. I hope they go back and reassess it.
I've seen this issue in TSW2 as well where foggy weather doesn't render in before exiting the tunnel. Would be great if this could be fixed. This is from the TSW3 dev build stream tonight where the weather is clear before exiting: And right after exiting... fog appears out of the blue!
Also... lightning bolts hitting in the tunnels... can't find the exact timestamp, but it happened multiple times.
Out of interest, can someone explain what it is with tunnels?! Why are they build the way they are within TSW? It seems you somehow travel through two worlds, which you change when you enter or exit a tunnel.
This feature definitely doesn't work properly, and it's extremely distracting when entering tunnels: There is a "flash" in the cab, a sudden brightening on the textures, as well as the screens, before the whole cab darkens. The tunnel itself takes forever to darken, often several seconds after entering it. The screenshots above perfectly demonstrate this, it's like travelling in a foggy, lit environment, before the tunnel goes completely dark. It looks really off. In rainy weather, the outside fog isn't visible from inside the tunnel, it abruptly appears as we exit the tunnel. Again, very distracting. Ironic that we can see fog after entering the tunnel but not before exiting it. I appreciate this eye adaptation feature and understand why it's there but its implementation should be fine tuned, because in this state it will be extremely off-putting, especially on this route, which has 50 tunnels. Even the stream was disturbing to watch with this effect.
The difficulty with tunnels is that, in 3D CG worlds, the default lighting condition is "light everywhere", as opposed to the real world where of course it's dark everywhere there isn't a light source. This means that inside tunnels the routebuilders effectively have to "erase" the light inside, so everything to do with lighting is upside-down and counterintuitive.
The fog/haze and rain simply didn't get any update between versions. They are simply globally turned down after camera entering a tunnel, and then turned back up after exiting it, like it was done in TSW/TSW2. Looking outside of a tunnel while standing still right in its exit will show there is no fog nor rain visible outside, and stepping a step outside will make the fog and rain magically appear in a moment.
And not a single other game that I know of has this problem. So either DTG has some really incompetent devs, or there is a massive bug in their version of UE.
It's an unfortunate consequence of the new lighting interacting with the existing flaws inherent to TSW2's rendering. Because it only renders a short amount of the tunnel ahead of you, and when the draw distance cuts off it puts the light at the end of the tunnel there, we get this flash. Only real fix would be some kind of workaround that fakes the tunnel being dark all the way into the distance by rendering some kinda cheap billboarding effect right at the edge of the draw distance to block it maybe? I imagine it'd need to render a set distance from the train and then presumably fade out as you enter the tunnel to transition smoothly.
Honestly, it looks really bad and for one of the big features that warrants a bullet point, it should be fixed. It should be immediately dark when entering a tunnel. I don't understand how something that is clearly not working correctly is accepted and that they would even draw attention to it as a feature of the new game.
Instead of the gradual dimming when entering a tunnel, it could just dim immediately. It currently takes 2-3 seconds for it to dim from default lighting to completely dark when entering a tunnel - doesn't seem to really be an artifact of draw distance.
I am all for transition speed sliders for lighting being a standard in games' UIs. But the massive white hole a few yards behind the tunnel entrance when you first approach it which steadily moves away from you is going to be a source it makes use of when working out the lighting within the tunnel and how it interacts with other environmental effects, like when you currently go into a tunnel in fog and the whole thing is brightly lit up because the light interacting with it within the tunnel is not blocked by the tunnel walls. If it's treated as an emissive source for the eye adaptation, that's going to then add more complication on top. What we need is for tunnels to be properly dark in a manner representing their length. Now of course, we're not gonna see a full rebuild of the system from the ground up to some kind of RTGI solution, so it's gonna take some cheats and cut corners working within the existing TSW2/3 engine
Also, the longest tunnel of the route has lights on the walls IRL but in game it didn’t. That’s an obvious error.
Thanks for the comments, it seems that there are more people who don't like this visual effect. I just played with the TGV to look for some comparison with high speed and I really think without that new effect it felt much better. And here there are few tunnels and it wouldn't matter so much, but on this new route that we are constantly going in and out of it is very annoying. I don't understand how DTG could have liked this.
Just viewing the stream now. Through the tunnels and on exit looks fine but during the first 3 - 4 seconds of entering a tunnel looks atrocious.
Yeah, should be something more like this (the above screenshots merged with outside view brightened around twice):
Did anyone else notice how ridiculously bright everything looked when the emergency brake application scene took place? This is an outside scene, whilst it was raining at the same time, yet everything looks so, so bright. Something definitely needs to be done regarding adjusting the lighting, as it seems it hasn't been fully/properly set up. Hopefully a few ini tweaks will make it look less bad. Same goes for the ground here. Look at how cloudy it is, yet despite no visible sun rays, it looks like it is being lit up by a massive light. It almost looks like snow because of how white it looks:
I haven't watched the stream yet but if that first screenshot is what we can expect, just wow... I'm not really into messing with .ini tweaks, but this might be the thing that pushes me over the edge (assuming there are tweaks for this)
It seems this is an old TSW issue. Anything less than 100% cloud cover will cause wild fluctuations in lighting, and will cause the terrain and certain assets to become massively over exposed. I would personally avoid dynamic weather because of this reason. Instead, I would stick to rain with 100% cloud cover or light cloud settings. Anything from 30%-90% cloud cover in TSW just looks really bad as the lighting doesn't react appropriately to the cloud cover seen.
So one of the features that's meant to be selling tsw3 hasn't even been done correctly. Glad I haven't pre ordered it.
I really wanted to be positive but honestly I am so disappointed after tonight's stream. The presentation of the most recent dev diary features and the new music and UI are cool but the lighting upgrades not so much. I think I feel less understanding and accepting because DTG have chosen to market this under the guise of it's TSW3 title.
Maybe that's why I tend to really like 100% cloud cover in game (no rain b/c I don't like how rain suddenly got ridiculously loud in TSW2). But if that's the case, then it seems the TSW3 lighting system upgrade was less about actually fixing the problems and more about just moving the shaders to use PBR (physically based rendering). #TSW2.2
Are we sure that's not snow? I know it wouldn't make much sense weather-wise, but, when you zoom in, it really does look like snow covering the ties. If it's an optical illusion, it's a very convincing one.
100%. At 1:22:13 in the stream Lukas asked "Has it started snowing?" and after a glimpse view using an external camera it becomes immediately clear that it is not. Lukas then continues on to rather sheepishly answer "No." in response to his own question.
Do developers even see what kind of product they are making? What it is? What is number 3? This is the same Tsw 2!
Not sure that is still the case. The tunnels on this route have undergone lighting updates, bringing them to the latest standard, which has the lights all turned off during normal ops. However, I am not sure this work has been completed to date, though.
Wet materials are way too bright what was raported over and over and now again and still no solution. Entering the pitch black looks Riddick'ulusly wrong in visual aspect. BR
This video from four months ago still has the lighting. Now of course we don’t know if it was recorded four months ago or earlier, but it’s fair to say it’s probably a recent video.
I had seen this as well. It’s not just that we don’t know when it was taken, there are other reasons why lights in tunnels are illuminated. Could be maintenance or what ever other reason. But in general I agree to the fact that it would have been cool to have a couple of tunnels illuminated. Would have been a welcome change from time to time;-)
Wow, that fog thing is still not fixed...a joke... In the station you see outside is clear, no fog. You get out of the station building...suddenly FOG. Reminder, its 2022 not 1996!
I went from Fulda to Kassel yesterday (so I can't say anything about Landrückentunnel) and there were multiple tunnels with lights turned on, like four or five. One of them that I can name is the Weltkugeltunnel. And as far as I remeber, there wasn't any tunnel with lights in the stream yesterday.
Seems like lighting continious to be a mess. Things that should not be bright white like milk below a 1000W daylight lamp appear that way, light coming from unrealistic sources and angles. Extremely dissapointed.
I love Train Sim World, but with updates to the game, it always seems to be two steps forwards and one step back. When TSW2 was released, we got scenario planner, livery designer etc but also got the horrific Xbox sound issue which took nearly two years to resolve. We now have TSW3 which boast fantastic new lighting. We even got previewed the great new light effect of leaving tunnels. Yet, they purposefully didn't show us entering the tunnel, or the terrible reflection of the nuclear sun on the wet ground. I expect the general response will be "what you see is what you should expect when the game is released". They seem to give with one hand and take with the other. I suppose we'll have to now wait until TSW4 for for the new lighting to be improved...
I think the lightning is. Nice feature but when I saw it in use it looks like a background sized feature hitting the foreground. That lightning would be huge hitting as close as it is there.
I'm hoping they use this to make the blinds actually useful. So when the sun is visible it washes out everything and makes it practically impossible to see and then when you pull the blind down it makes it normal again. Omsi has this feature and I think it is so cool and adds a mew layer of immersion
Tempted to cancel my pre-order tbh, I'm slowly getting more disappointed the more I see. As a lot of people have said, this should not be a TSW 3 but rather an addition to TSW 2. I feel for DTG because I believe they want to do better genuinely, but imo they should balls up and create their own engine. Not only will this give them complete flexibility over pretty much everything, but will open up the door for modding. As long as they continue using the current unreal engine one, we will continue to be disappointed. And the sad thing is, unreal engine isn't even to blame.