Hi guys, I picked up RW Enhancer 2 about a week ago, and if you are looking for a face lift for TSC, you might want to take a look at it on RW Central. It is very, very good. It's not just a Reshade preset package with lipstick on it. It's a very good comprehensive face lift for TSC. RW Enhancer 2 does so many things for TSC, I'm not going to try and list them all, but they include... Shader enhancements of the colors, shadows, and light enhancements in general. The window reflections are excellent and look more like real glass. And the lighting effects at dusk/dawn, sunrise and sunset are also excellent. Audio enhancements include station announcements in 3 or 4 languages. And lots of other ambient audio enhancements, from stronger train rumble, to rain (which is very good), to birds and wind. And RW Enhancer 2 doesn't overwrite any of the sounds in TSC, it just adds more sounds that you can turn on or off (or set the volume to your preference). And if you aren't a geek (and "geek" is a compliment), the presets that RW Enhancer 2 starts out with are very usable "as is." You don't have to be a shader and RGB color expert to get it set up. It looks good straight out of the box. And if you want to fiddle with the settings, it has "pop up" instructions for every setting, telling you what it is and how to use it. When I was considering buying RW Enhancer 2, some of the reviews of RW Enhancer and RW Enhancer Pro aren't that good, with complaints of garish preset colors and hits to your FPS. But RW Enhancer 2 isn't like that. It has very good presets and a professional looking GUI interface for the entire product. And my FPS hasn't changed. RW Enhancer 2 is definitely worth taking a look at for an easy to use comprehensive product that will enhance many aspects of TSC https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2884552265
I don't like to run anything without it. As you say it offers so much to virtually all routes and locos. There are those who can achieve these improvements without recourse to a commercial product but I am not one of them.
Note to RWEnhancer Pro users: If it's just graphical improvements you are interested in, the shader config panel in version 2 seems identical to the original Pro version if you already have that, so may not be worth an upgrade if you are just looking for graphics improvements, as you will already have all the same tools at your disposal. There's nothing new in terms of actual shader graphics improvements in version 2 - it just gives you preset options, which aren't that great if I'm honest, and definitely needs some manual intervention. If you have AP Sky and Weather, you already have a much better rain and storm audio suite, and also visual lightning. RWE2's audio also often clashes with the AP sound and kind of messes up thunderstorms. I ended up turning the audio enhancements off as a result. Re: announcements... Oh dear.... They're terrible. Switch them off. Just some generic voice and announcement tones that bare no resemblance to anything in real life. Also, things like "welcome aboard train number eight thousand, four hundred and twenty seven".... what? LOL. I turned them off instantly, and never turned them back on again. If there's a way to customise these announcements, I never found out, as I never switched them back on to find out. If there's something you can do about this, please If you have neither version, it's worth it, and it's only 19.99 at the moment, but some of the new features are not all they're cracked up to be if you already have other 3rd party improvements installed. The consist editor is nice, and if you prefer a more game like/TSW like driving GUI, it has that as well. I find all that on screen stuff a distraction though. Your preferences may well be different. The 'cooking' process extracts everything and puts versions in its own folder, so you can pay quite a high price in disk space, and it did mess up some highly modified 3rd party assets as a result. Even the website says that "RW Enhancer 2 is designed to leave most of your existing content and mods/addons untouched". Most being the key word here. I strongly advise you to back up your Railworks folder if you want to try this, as uninstalling it will not restore the stuff it messes up. It just cased me too many headaches. I'm back to using RWE Pro. I think it is mainly because of the complexity of my install and the existing number of third party addons I already have. If you have a more sensible install, you mileage my differ [edit] I'm not slagging the product off.. just saying in my circumstances it was problematic.
Excellent and honest review thank you.I currently use reshade so sounds like I am better just sticking with that.
Somebody else had the same problem which they mentioned on UKTS - one of the reasons I will leave this alone.
RW Enhancer Pro is pretty decent for a little extra flair. And it leaves your files alone, can easily be disabled. I'm on the fence over RWE2, maybe they could release a light version that doesn't manipulate files.
I had issues, unless it was co-incidental of course. I didn't try to repeat it to find, out. The 'cooking' feature is disk space hungry though.
For me the cooking process killed it and I went back to Pro. The Cooking does not run in the background so you can't run any windows processes while it does its thing and that can be quite a while, up to 20/30 minutes if you haven't used RWE2 in a while. That is not how software programs should run. CP requires 100% of all your PC resources to run and that is not good programming IMO. If you minimize the CP process- it doesn't seem to work. You cannot use any functionality in RWE2 (except upgrade) until the CP has been completed, (or on your PC). Does it work if you don't Cook every time you want to run TSC? If you have to restart your PC for any reason, eg windows update on the same day you have to recook over again. I was never sure if I closed RWE2 if the settings would work in any scenario that I ran or if it would only work when you started TSC within RWE2. The visual results in TSC were excellent (not the sound) but so they are in RWPro.
My Railworks parent folder is 304 GB, and my RW Enhancer 2 parent folder is 1 GB, and I didn't think that was too bad. Is RW Enhancer 2 writing files elsewhere that I don't know about? Thanks!
Same.. Almost.. My Railworks folder is "only" 297 GB but like you my RWE2 folder is 1 GB Sorry but this is incorrect, average cooking time for me is ~ 60 seconds, IF I do a reset (a complete re-bake as if it was the first time running it, or there was an update that required a full re-bake) then it's around 10 minutes (just done one to find out and that was 14 minutes but it can vary from update to update, not sure why), as for the normal bake (the one you have to do every time you launch RWE2) then that was... 53 seconds (and I was browsing Facebook and had Paintshop Pro running in the background ready to receive this print screen..) About the announcements, there are two versions.. 1) free version - SAPI, sounds like Microsoft text to speech because that's exactly what it is. 2) Premium Subscription version - Azure - https://www.rwcentral.com/subscriptions - basically €19.99 a year but there are shorter term options available, the reason for the charge to use Azure is because there are server and hosting costs to RWCentral (RWCentral is just one person btw) but the Azure voices are very good not perfect but bloody close. There are other benefits to Premium but none that any of us would get excited about tbh, except for supporting the Dev which in itself is worth it imo, but realistically it's worth it just for the Azure voices. as for the train number eight thousand blah blah yeah its not ideal, I can only assume this is something from EU rail as I believe the Dev is French? I ignore it but you can also change your train number in the setting up stage of the scenario on the RWE2 program so maybe change it to something more tolerable? not tried doing a time in replacement of the number though because quite honestly I forget about it at the setting up stage and ignore when in game so.. I'm going to discuss this with the Dev I think, would it be better to have it say "This is the 1955 service to Paddington" or "This is service 1whiskey99" instead of the "Welcome aboard train number blah blah" ? (honestly the last time I was on a real life station or train was about 30yrs ago lol), I don't know what's possible but seriously this Dev loves ideas and suggestions to improve RWE2 and has implemented at least two of mine let alone the countless others suggested by other people.
Same here. Cook time was 10 to 15 minutes after first installing RWE2, then about 60 seconds with every launch of RWE2 after that.
If RWE2 is too much hassle, and I totally get why some people would feel it is then I'd recommend getting RWE Pro instead, that way like pooky you'll get the shader benefits without the extra elements RWE2 offers, also you can use pookys presets (which I myself use) and tweak if necessary.
Reef Stating that my findings were incorrect was a bit disingenuous I only reported my findings. Again if you have to cook EVERY time before you use TSC on a daily basis (to get the benefits of RWE2) IMO is poor programming. In the pro version once set it works every time you open TSC and that is how I would expect an app to work. RWE2 does state that it uses 100% CPU resources whilst cooking and if that cooking is prolonged - if you minimise RWE2 to say multi-task - in my experience, it no longer cooks and you have to re-start it again.
Peter, I use RWE2 currently and have been for a couple months. If you just want to use the graphics enhancements side of things, you do not have to cook the RWE2 program every time you want to play Train Simulator Classic. For me, RWE2 has been a great experience. No issues here. The graphics look better than they were in RWE Pro in my opinion, however it is not a huge difference but certainly a small but good difference in graphics enhancements.
Here is some comparison images between the same settings enabled on RWE2 and RWE Pro. (However RWE2 images do include 1 or 2 extra new settings options that is included with RWE2 that aren't in RWE Pro) RWE2 RWE Pro RWE2 RWE Pro Biggest differences I can spot is vegetation colouring and shadows, which both have better improvements in RWE2 in my opinion.
Look at the vegetation next to the left of the platform of the outside view comparison, as you can see RWE Pro has much greener and more unrealistic looking vegetation in my opinion. You can also see it out the right side of the cab. And if you look in the bottom left side of the cab, shadows are different. Or maybe it just could be a difference in monitor settings which means some people may not see much of a difference. But anyway, it always comes down to personal preference at the end of the day!
You can do that in ReShade far more effectively with a selective colour shader. Apart from the slight colour difference, I can spot nothing else, which comes as no surprise to me, seeing as the shader control panel is identical in both versions. Which is better is a matter of personal preference I think. I prefer the less green version. One of the things that used to annoy me with Train Sim, was its fluorescent green foliage. Even in summer, stuff isn't that green, and certainly not that shade of green. Like most video games, whoever develops this stuff fails to realise that the green of grass, and leaves, is actually made up mostly of yellow, and you can't make it more realistic by turning down green alone. You have to also adjust yellow. You can see this when you compare it to real life (click here - you may want to skip forward to get to the countryside). I went to a great deal of trouble to get colours more accurate in TSC, and the best tool by far was "PD80_04_Selective_Color_v2.fx" which allows you to adjust each individual colour globally, so no more acid green foliage and crayon blue skies. I wasn't able to do this with RWE. As for the graphics differences between RWE Pro and RWE2, I can spot no differences. They are both clearly using exactly the same shaders, and the two control panels are identical, and everything does the same job. If there are actual differences under the hood, they are of minimal importance visually. If you want to actually change the colours, ReShade using "PD80_04_Selective_Color_v2.fx" is vastly superior. RWE's lighting and reflection adjustments are awesome though, which is why I use both RWE and ReShade together. I consider both essential. RWE is also great at making snow, fog, and distant haze look more realistic. In a nutshell I think RWE is best at lighting, reflection and makes a much better job of ambient occlusion than the game itself does. ReShade is best at colour, contrast, bloom and tone mapping etc.
REEF SAID - Sorry but this is incorrect, average cooking time for me is ~ 60 seconds, IF I do a reset (a complete re-bake as if it was the first time running it, or there was an update that required a full re-bake) then it's around 10 minutes (just done one to find out and that was 14 minutes but it can vary from update to update, not sure why), as for the normal bake (the one you have to do every time you launch RWE2) then that was... 53 seconds (and I was browsing Facebook and had Paintshop Pro running in the background ready to receive this print screen..) View attachment 101006 - Plus plenty more. I agree with everything that Reef has said. My TSC installation is huge. The cooking time is not that bad and I do other things on the pc while it is doing it. I find it VERY well worth the wait. This is still in development anyway and constantly improving. I did pay the premium price because I wanted to support the developer first and foremost.
This is obviously dependent on the speed of your computer, as it maxes out your CPU. So if you have a low power 4 core laptop, it will take ages, but if you have a Ryzen 7950X, it will rip through it in about a minute or less.
Blazin - Thanks for the info I wasn't sure on that point IMO the Cooking Time will also depend on the number of Assets and Routes that you have installed. I have 65,000 Assets Folders and 180 Routes which is what takes cooking time. Last week I had not cooked in about 10 days, I downloaded an update and started cooking and it took 25 minutes, during the day I installed a Windows update - opened RWE2 - cooked 90 seconds. I am just saying had I minimized RWE2 during the 25-minute cook then it would have stopped and I would have had to restart it - that's all. I am an intermittent user so my cooks tend to be longer, I also move, copy, and modify my Assets and Routes regularly, so any cook will take longer. I don't believe that there is any real cook in 53 seconds but rather the program is ensuring that the files are as they should be, and it doesn't need to do anymore to run. Even the instructions state that it uses 100% of your PC resources whilst cooking and I do not know of any PC that can multi-task when it is using the total of its resources on a single app. If I am wrong I apologize but I am just relating my experiences with RWE2 and why I switched back to RWPro. Both are excellent programs but one is much easier to use for me without any visual loss.
"Cooking" is what the RWE2 program does whenever you load it up and want to change settings or use the audio enhancements. I am not sure what it does exactly but it is basically just like a game loading up but for the program. It aims for the program to have a complete and processed list of all your assets and content you own in Train Simulator Classic.
Why when i try to install RW2 does it take literally hours to install, I must be doing something wrong but I’m not sure what, any suggestions please.
The initial download is only a small file are you talking about the process it does when you first run it and it converts files etc. This will vary depending on the size of your TS install etc etc mine took between 90 minutes to 2 hours iirc but honestly it is TOTALLY worth it
I upgraded to RW Enhancer 2 Yesterday. I have followed the videos and instructions but neither the HUD nor passenger announcements are appearing in TS Classic 64 Bit. I am running TSC64 in borderless mode. RW Enhancer 2 must be communicating with TSC as my the Quickdrive I set up in RWE2 is there in TSC64. I get a brief flash of a screen which looks like RWE2 with a green and red square button but that immediately disappears. I have raised a support ticket but wondered if anyone had any suggestions I could try?
After playing around with this for a couple of days, I’m going to put it aside pending another update. The HUD elements need a lot of work, particularly the speedometer, and the user interface is not suited for high resolution. It’s definitely an improvement over the vanilla menu selection but not worth the hassle of quitting the TSC process each time that I want to load a new route or scenario.
Hi 390001 , Sorted RW2 out I had a conflict between Comodo Anti Virus program and skys latest update which was causing me a lot of problems, it’s taking about 10/15 minutes to cook before playing game only minor problem is that I get a bit of buffering during play can you suggest a possible cure for this .Bob
When I finish running a scenario in TSC, I click on the "Finish Scenario" button that drops down at the top of your TSC screen from RWE2 which automatically takes me back to RWE2 where I can choose another route/scenario to play. You shouldn't need to restart RWE2 for each scenario you play. At least that is how it is working for me. Also, if RWE2 doesn't see that you've completed a scenario successfully, which can happen, the RWE2 drop down button will say "Cancel Scenario." You can click on that, which will take you back to RWE2 where you can click on the completed box in RWE2 to keep TSC and RWE2 manually synced regarding scenario completions
This is how the HUD and user interface look on my 2560x1440 monitor... I'm not sure how RWE2 looks above or below that resolution.
This is correct.. Once you've launched RWE2 and TSC you can play any and every scenario in your collection without having to restart either RWE2 or TSC, just as KodiakJac has explained. Only if you change shader settings or add more DLC/3rd party routes or rolling stock would you need to restart both.
Although my download problem has now been sorted , how can I stop buffeting problem when I’m actually playing the game. All answers will be much appreciated. Bob.
I am a long term and aged player but an amateur compared to you lot but I have to agree with all KodiakJac says. This program is still in develpoment and the hud does not yet reflect the needs of steam haulage. Author also says steam audio is yet to be implemented although I have no problem with it.
I am really enjoying RW Enhancer 2 i purchased it after a very kind person whom i wont name incase they get hit with messages from others donated to me on live stream to purchase the product after talking about it. It really does change the whole enviroment of the sim 10/10 from me.
When playing RW Enhancer 2 my FPS drops quite a bit causing buffeting effect ,is there any way I can improve this situation.
