Unfortunately, it was confirmed in one of the streams that this 'feature' is not going to be toggleable. This is quite disappointing because 1.) Watching the German route where it was tunnel after tunnel after tunnel it looked quite annoying, repetitive and took away from the experience rather than adding to it 2.) People were saying that they were getting "migraines" from the effect. Which, when it was a really bright day in the game I can see how that could happen. Especially on a route with frequent entering/exiting of tunnels. It also concerns me how this 'feature' may impact people with accessibility needs, epilepsy immediately comes to mind Please DTG developers see what you can do about making this feature an option in the game settings as I do believe it is going to be something that many people will want. I'm surprised this wasn't brought up in whatever QA still happens at the game. It seems like a major flag for anybody with any experience with UX testing & identifying accessibility needs. Also a slightly off-topic rant, but wanted to put it somewhere: Is it just me or does the TSW3 logo feel like a massive downgrade to what has come before? It might just be my personal preference but it seems a wild change with a new random orange theme going on and suddenly very minimal from what we've known before.
I don’t think it can be toggled. It’s integral to how the lighting system works. I’m sure how bad some aspects of it are would have come up in testing but without abandoning the whole lighting system they have chosen there would have been nothing they could do about it. They probably reckon they can tweak it to make it better given time but as they have decided to do it this way and have to rely on full eye adaptation rather than a smaller dynamic range in the lighting we are stuck with it and all the downsides that come with it.
When you are about to enter the tunnel, look away for a few seconds, when you are about to exit the tunnel, look away for a few seconds, there's your toggle
Its like they are trying to drop the Sim World part of the franchise so minimizing its prominence in the logo, perhaps the brand name has such a bad reputation and the next reiteration will just be Train 4
A significant number of games, even UE4 games, have it as a toggle. However some of those that don't do so, tend to incorporate a slider for controlling its adaptation speed, which basically does the exact same thing as manually editing the settings for automatic exposure in the game files can (and probably also will in TSW3) allow for.
Unfortunately what a lot of other games have is and always will be irrelevant to what’s in TSW. It seems to be different somehow.
Lol no. You can easily turn the whole thing off in the engine.ini file. So judging by that, it should be just a matter of giving it a toggle option in game.
I think you'll find that if you do that under the new lighting system, everything will either look permanently blown out or permanently dark. The adaptation is literally adjusting sensitivity between lumen levels similar to a human eye. Cheers
Hence why a lot of games have a slider for tweaking it, in order to make it less noticeable/intrusive by adjusting the rate at which the adaptation takes place.
Its been stated that its not possible to now disable eye adaption due to the new lighting and how bright it now is. This screenshot was shared on discord (but cannot fully verify it's legitimacy) as an example of how the game would now look if EA was disabled.
Forgive my ignorance, so is the eye adaptation an Unreal Engine thing or is it a homebrew system built by Dovetail Games?
I highly doubt that screenshot is legit. Of course I might be wrong, but I can't see how the lack of eye-adaptation would result these visuals. And my bet is still that we will easily be able to turn it off with the engine.ini file. Though personally I like the tunnel effect. The only thing I dislike is the overly bright outside from the cab on the Cajon Pass route.
I know the screenshot is legit. And by that, I mean I know I saw the German route stream the other day where a similar question to mine was asked and in response, the developer doing the showcase said that "no it's not toggleable" and that apparently because "when you turn the lighting off" (whatever that means) then you get the result of that screenshot. But I know better than to take a Dovetail developer at their word these days, so like you I'm unsure if it really would be impossible to make this a toggleable option. It seems absurd to me that if this game was properly QA tested then this issue could be forseen. Not just for some claimed accessibility needs but also out of pure user experience from the old games who may not want this obnoxious and frankly gimmicky feature. I think you're right about the engine.ini setting though. And if that is the case then it's truly hilarious at how much DTG really don't care about treating not only their customers but also their live viewership with pure & utter contempt. Sorry, rant over lol
Unreal Engine feature with extensive documentation on how to adjust every variable within its functionality. https://docs.unrealengine.com/4.26/en-US/RenderingAndGraphics/PostProcessEffects/AutomaticExposure/ Again, certain of these values can be made adjustable by the end user (while stuff like the masks obviously cannot) and in this way negative impacts of the system can be minimised.
Okay, we are talking about two ENTIRELY different things: The effect on EXITING a tunnel is the eye adaptation routine. However, the "flash" on ENTERING a tunnel - which is the thing which has drawn the most complaints - has nothing do do with eye adaptation; it is an artifact of the transition form "live" outdoor lighting to baked tunnel lighting. The fix for this has nothing to do with eye adaptation (and it isn't affected by turning EA off)
Auto Exposure CAN however interact negatively with your emissives, if for example, let's say for the sake of argument, totally randomly plucked from thin air, your fog effects continue to be rendered inside tunnels, and end up appearing blown out causing the adaptation to treat the lighting differently.
That screenshot was shown in the Kassel-Wurzburg live stream when a user asked if Eye adaptation can be turned off and they demonstrated what would happen if it was turned off
They'd have nothing really to gain from faking such a screenshot since people can literally toggle it off as soon as TSW3 is available in a couple of weeks and see for themselves.
Well, I’m talking about eye adaptation. The flash on entering the tunnel is the same as the flash we currently have in TSW2 but that and more besides (coming out of a tunnel is where you see it in action the most) is made worse by the eye adaptation implementation. The eye adaptation that’s already in TSW2 is quite a subtle effect and I already wish it could be turned off but in TSW3 it is not subtle at all and can’t be turned off because it will totally break the lighting.
You´re not alone. The current logo looks pathetic. Like the intern nailed it together in half an hour on Gimp. Not even the font spacing is correct.
I think, since it's not so far away from TSW2, you can modify the effect via ini change. Sorry for the consoleros of course :-\
Wasn't this how the game was looking when the lighting was disabled, and not when eye adaptation was disabled? I saw an external view during the live stream with the lighting temporarily disabled (possible to do with a key, as it was a dev build) which looked like this. It wasn't said at that time that the eye adaptation was disabled, but that lighting was disabled.
Is that the same effect that causes trains to light up as soon as they enter a tunnel like in the screenshots below?
Going in and out of the tunnels is going to cause issues for those of us whom are light sensitive or those that have epilepsy. I am one of the people that is very light sensitive.
3D virtual worlds don't have a concept of lighting and is "faked" using different techniques, so the default state is for everything to be lit up/visible. Baking the lighting makes it so the default state is dark in that region of the game world. Without baking you'd essentially have to hit-test the environmental lighting to the tunnel walls to cancel it out which isn't cheap in performance.
I wonder if the game is called "Train 3 Sim World" Also it seems someone just took inspiration from the Traiz logo since they look very similar. I guess they couldn't come up with a better or own custom logo
I think the devs will find a way to fix this issue in time. As the issue did not exist in previous games this must be the unwanted result of redesigning the lighting and eye adaptation in the game. Would be nice to also hear a devs position on this subject to
They couldn´t use Train Sim World 2 name because it was taken by many issues that surfaced throughout 2021 and 2022. Train Sim World 3 was created to try to leave the shame behind. It looks like they might need to start brainstorming for the next name... I don´t understand the desire of developers to throw out anything but the final product, unless in their eyes this qualifies as the final product. This is sad, isn´t it?
Thanks for your post. I honestly thought this would be the case. I don't even have any medical conditions like you do but even I found it was causing me some discomfort from the effect, especially when watching/playing in a dimly lit or dark room. I don't see how whoever does QA for this anymore can't even pick up on this basic accessibility issue. It's game testing 101 these days..
Tunnel baking and eye adaption look much better in the latest stream, on the test route. Hopefully this will be the same result for all applicable routes.
I remember DTG a while back asking for people with disabilities for their thoughts on playing the game but very little has been done. They pulled lightning from TSW2 because it might trigger people but this is OK? I suffer from double vision so if I was going to get TSW3 this would effect me, migraines and all that. So I hope they are going to fix it sooner rather than later for the people that will be buying it.
To be perfectly honest, I think the " eye adaptation " effect is more than a little gimmicky. Like " Lets do it because we can. It sounds clever and people will be impressed. ". But do we really need it? It had never been suggested by any players to the best of my knowledge. I think the dev time could have been better spent on improving the lighting in other ways, like headlights and night lighting, for instance. Plus, it might be unhelpful to those who are visually challenged. I guess we'll have to see how it looks in game, but I will probably toggle it off, if I can and it becomes bothersome to my tired old eyes.
Did we ever figure out how to turn eye adaptation off? Just posted in another thread two images from Cajon which demonstrate driving from inside the cab is really washing out the appearance of the scenery. Another player has suggested this could be the eye adaptation at work, in which case we definitely need an option to disable or tone it down.
There is a mod on the train sim community website that decreases the auto exposure (eye adaptation) that makes it less washed out. Now I haven't downloaded the mod, so I don't know how it looks or if it looks good or anything
Did DTG ever offer any responses yet on anything they may be working on with this? Perhaps a toggle to emulate the changes made by these mods? Playing more TSW3 of late due to routes like BCC and EBG, it's REALLY stressing my eyes unless I pick services at certain times of day, or play exclusively in external cams where the game's a lot less of a train driving sim than a train set sim when I have to play it like that. The other day I think the TSW3 lighting was likely the trigger of a 45 minute optic migraine with full kaleidoscoping of my vision. I've been compiling some videos that are pretty interesting using the external and internal cams of how unrealistic the effect is, and was thinking of posting a thread of them once my home internet is back up (Workmen seem to have cut the cable a week ago and I am still waiting on a fix by an engineer next week) - it's a serious wow moment when you see how washed out and shadow-free the cab interior suddenly becomes when you toggle from the external cam looking in the open window over your driver's shoulder, to the internal view looking in the same direction, while the ground goes from having texture and colour to a shiny reflective white.
I will confess, I am purposefully holding out on posting such a thread to a time when I have had a bit of a break to play TSW2 for a while, so my pained head doesn't reflexively title it "Eye adaptation HAS to go!" or similar.
I think Matt said some values can be tweaked to improve eye adaptation a few months ago, but that was really it.
Hopefully the game isn't the cause of your headaches. On top of all the other issues with the game, making some customers seriously ill wouldn't be a good look for DTG.
To quote myself in another thread on this: It's a shame, but as I see it based on my observations, (I'm by no means an expert here, so I'd love to be proven wrong) any potential tweak to the auto exposure system is unlikely to tackle the root of the issue. Maybe some PBR work could at least handle things like how grass surfaces behave like they have the specularity of metal or glass, and reduce the impact of it? Speaking of glass, windows could probably do with some kind of pass to adjust how they react to the TSW3 lighting. The way stuff looks in the external cams is probably already how I'd expect the glass of the windscreen to wash it out, but that passing through them just washes it out even more. On lesser tweaks, possibly if the game supported an HDR mode, we could tweak the contrast/white levels there to balance it better?
Sadly, looking at anything that's low contrast, high brightness, for too long sets this kind of experience off for me. It's why I have a dark mode browser plugin to override websites that don't have such a mode by default, and part of why I have monitors with aggressive low blue light modes, and still use incandescent bulbs (It also makes it possible for me to ever sleep)...
When TSW3 was released, I was on the fence about the enter/exit tunnel effect. I could see what they were trying to do, and why - on SEHS it seemed okay. But the implementation of it is causing more issues than it solves at this point - with BCC there were some awkward transitions, and it's clear from Scotrail Express that it's not helpful for third parties (on this route in some places it's simply terrible). So while I love the new lighting overall, I think the eye adaptation part just seems forced, and doesn't really achieve what it's trying to do (the blue flashlight section looks bizarre, especially on slow speed tunnels (around Birmingham New Street, or Glasgow/Edinburgh). On this basis, I'd prefer if it was removed.
