This was an issue with TSW2 as well. I thought it might be addressed in TSW3. Not sure if it happens on other platforms. I'm running the game on Xbox Series X set to 4K. When you get up close and to the side of a train there is a great reflection of it's surroundings. But if you move the camera even slightly the reflection turns to a blur. Is it a limitation or the hardware? Providing 2 pics to show what I'm talking about. Good reflection: Blurry reflection:
Happens on PS4/5 too. I presume it's more to do with the game engine than anything DTG have specifically done. It's really noticeable on the shinier trains like the Amtrak one, as though there's some sort of diffraction angle being used in the calculation. It's right up there on the list of annoying graphical issues, next to "rain only landing on glass areas". At least they've sorted the rotational motion blur thing; one step at a time, eh?!
This happens in pretty much every game to some degree, screen space reflections only reflect things visible on screen, on your first image you can see the pylons to the right which are reflected in the train. In the second image you can no longer see the pylons therefore the game doesn’t know they are there to reflect them, if you zoom in you can see the couple of remaining pylons further away are reflected. The only way you’ll get fully accurate reflections is with ray tracing which allows reflections to reflect things not visible on screen, but that’s very GPU heavy so often not used.
I know it happens in other games but I've never seen it so aggressively removed before. Happens in the lake in the training center route too. Car games have been able to handle this for years now. They aren't using ray tracing to solve it either. I should be able to rotate the camera around the lead loco and get decent reflections. I'm not looking for perfection but something better than this mess.
Usually, games will get around this by having cube maps which the game falls back to when objects fall out of screenspace, the more complex you make them the more performance it will cost you, however. In that scene you could probably expect them to display a low quality version of the pylons, but not of the other train.
