PC Ongoing 'citywide Power Cut' Issues Within Tsw

I'll give hellblade a look. Thanks.

 

TSW 2 train lighting does not work on TSW 3 routes, as the former still retains its significantly weaker illumination values.

You’d have to wait for the developer or DTG to update the values, or see if a modder can do it for you, if you’re playing on PC.

 

I really really hope you just forgot to turn the lights on, do the lights on other tsw2 routes work when you activate them in tsw 3?

 

This is becoming all too common.

I’ve noticed with most threads which become a ‘hot topic’, DTG will shy away from them and pretend they don’t exist. This is evident when they manage to reply to other, quieter threads, but haven’t posted a single response in a heavily discussed thread.

 

It's probably due to the new tsw3 lighting. Remember, those locomotives were for tsw2 dlc and were just layered on without making the necessary light adjustments. Every light source would have been needed to have been updated to work with the new tsw3 lighting

 

Lights are on. I have tested it on bro and they do not light up the track like they did in tsw2. So it's probably down to the new tsw3 lighting which the tsw2 content have not received.

 

The LOD issue on some assets is because automatically made LODs are showing at too close a distance. There should be more manually made LODs until a significant distance away. Some assets are fine and some aren’t.

I doubt DTG would look into the lighting system again so soon after it has been done but they should certainly be updating assets to have night textures. They won’t reply on this thread saying they are doing something to improve the lighting just in case they then don’t do it and we keep referring to them saying it will be addressed in this thread. They will be seeing how much we are discussing it though.

 

My feeling is that DTG probably believe it's just a small minority of players who really care about seeing anything at night or want a realistic night time cityscape. And, unfortunately, they may be right. Since it doesn't affect sales, they're not concerned about it.
If it was a major issue to them, they would have fixed Cathcart a year ago.

It's the same with " Rush Hour ". I think it's a dead issue for DTG, even though it gets lip service on the Roadmap. Most players have either forgotten about the promises that were made or don't really care. So why respond to those few, like myself, who will keep bringing it up, even though we know it will never be addressed.

It's a business decision in both cases, I guess.

 

This is where I appreciate when matt pops in from time to time with a blunt yes or no.

 

I suspect hell will freeze over before anything from the past gets fixed.

 

Thanks for the reply. No, I play on ps5 so no mods for me
So, I guess they should do similar to this on all trains?
Class 465 on SEHS (TSW 2):




Class 465 on SEHS Extended (TSW3):




The screenshots are taken in the same place and with the same weather conditions. You can see a lot of difference, here DTG has done it very well and the results are very satisfying. Hopefully they do the same on all trains if it doesn't involve excessive work. On the Bremen route at 16:00 it's already dark, so there are many services that can't be enjoyed properly.

 

erg73 You can see how they've made night time appropriately darker in TSW 3, but just look at how everywhere looks like a ghost town/power cut.

You can see in both TSW 2 and TSW 3 that the white building on the hill has zero light sources. Along with many other assets in TSW.

 

I’ve uninstalled TSW entirely and gone back to TSC and it’s been a revelation, particularly with a 5800x3D. Having bought the recent DTG Leeds - Manchester line, a couple of 3rd party routes and some 3rd party rolling stock over the last week or so there’s no question that if you are prepared (and able) to spend the money it is a superior sim in almost every respect. To be fair DTG’s rolling stock content for TSW is much better than they ever achieved in TSC but it’s still not a patch on what is available from TSC 3rd parties. That’s not the reason for the post though.

The purpose of this post was to mention that car headlights do actually cast light in TSC. There is no ambient urban light as we saw in the GTA videos, but all the lights that should cast light do so (street lamps, buildings, industrial areas and so on) and stations are well lit at the right times of day. As a bonus, tunnels don’t flash and do random things when you drive in to them.

Who’d have thought it? The more than decade old DX9 game is able to do the ‘basic’ stuff without falling over due to lack of resources. If it could be done in TSC then I’m really struggling to see why not TSW? At the very least TSW should be as capable as TSC, the reality though is that it should be better, not worse.

 

This is also seen in Dresden a night-time Nahverkehr Dresden Verkehrsverbund Oberelbe service either passenger or freight.
Pictures

 

Create a praise thread and DTG are all over it, create a criticism (even when constructive) thread and they run for the hills!

 

It is rather laughable that there still hasn’t been a single reply in this thread from them.

Even if it’s only a small explanation, it’s better than complete silence, as well as handpicking threads as to which ones to reply to and which ones to avoid.

 

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that DTG were straight on to the latest fanboy thread this morning whilst this one remains studiously ignored. Shock horror.

It’s commendable that DTG allows robust discussion on their forums, but cherrypicking which threads to reply to and which to pretend don’t exist in this way is pretty iffy IMHO.

 

Apologies for being late to the party, but only a few months ago DTG were telling us how TSW3 has transformed the lighting in the game. What happened? Is it actually better than before or is it just lipstick on a pig?

 

In daylight, and especially sunrise and sunset, the lighting in the new TSW3 routes is wonderful. At night the problem is not the skylighting but rather the fact that few assets have light sources at all, and those are poor (aside from station floodlights, which just don't turn on in time). Oh, and loco headlights remain at nightlight strength.

TLDR: Day good, night still bad.

 

What's so annoying and frustrating is that DTG know how to do night lighting. They proved that from the very beginning with SPG. And some routes have decent lighting.

They simply cannot or will not apply it to every route.

US headlights? It's way past the time they should have solved that problem.

It's ridiculous that players have to avoid night driving on otherwise very good routes like CRR and BCC.

 

I may be completely wrong and if so I hold my hands up, but when DTG said they had ripped the lighting up and started again my understanding is that they seriously exaggerated what had actually been done.

As far as I can see they have turned on features that already existed in UE4, namely Volumetric Clouds, Dynamic Weather and Eye Adaption. I believe the majority of the ‘work’ was related to making sure these features didn’t cripple the console experience. In doing this though, it screwed the existing lighting because the lumin values that were set were far too dim for the new set up. As such the lumin values in TSW3’s lighting are set to be far brighter than it ever was in TSW2 (supposedly using real world lumin values) which is why some TSW2 routes look a bit funky. It was said in the pre-release streams that they had set up a workaround for the TSW2 routes to at least make them playable, but that it wasn’t perfect. Happily, turning on these features had an immense effect on the depiction of dawn and dusk which, although transformative, made the changes actually look more than they were.

To my mind ‘ripping up the lighting and starting again’ meant finally and forever addressing all of the long standing, fundamental problems with the game. For the avoidance of doubt that has not happened. In essence they turned on a couple of features and adjusted the brightness of lights. They did not address shadows, draw distance, occlusion (both distant and in-cab), station lighting timing, ambient lighting and the subject of this thread, environmental lighting. Unfortunately, in addition, the eye adaption is clearly not set up properly which leads to some of the painful to look at scenes we’ve all seen, particularly on BCC which is unplayable at times because of it.

I suspect this thread is being ignored because they are either totally disinterested in ever fixing this issue, or are actually incapable of addressing the problems. They stuck some lipstick on the pig and because it looks better (at times) than it did before they seem to have won over just enough of the player base to keep them quiet. The fact that the game falls far short of modern standards (and, lets face it, of their previous Train Sim) seems to go over many peoples heads.

 

JetWash It seems eye adaption was added but wasn’t actually tested properly. Sure, it may look ‘cool’ when entering and exiting tunnels but it’s completely messed up the exposure levels everywhere else.

Going in shaded areas/areas with a lot of foliage around you now looks so bad, because from a distance it looks shaded from the sun/dark in that area, however as soon as you enter that area the exposure will automatically be increased significantly. Which subsequently washes out everything, especially so the cab of your train. On several occasions I’ve had to quit the game because to me, it is such an immersion breaker.

The eye adaption has been set up to mimic a camcorder and not how our eyes see things in real life. If an area is dark, then I expect it to stay dark. I don’t want the game automatically increasing the exposure every time a dark patch comes along.

Next, whilst they’ve finally fixed the issue of night time actually being dark now, they haven’t fixed the underlying issues of the building assets not actually having a light source. In the past, this was overlooked as nights weren’t actually that dark.

So it’s either day time looking way too overexposed and washed out or night time looking like a post apocalyptic ghost town. Both of these issues NEED to be addressed.

Just like the popular thread of sounds and the environment needing to become more immersive feeling and sounding, DTG have yet again took a blind eye to these issues, by not even acknowledging the threads.

 

It’s like they’ve completely given up on night lighting - the only decently lit areas are the stations themselves. Everything immediately outside the vicinity of the station area is pretty much in complete darkness.

I think the issue is that route building is done during daytime conditions, with only the stations and platforms being tested at night. Places are barely recognisable at night because of how dark it is. Particularly on the approach to Birmingham where there is tonnes of light at night - it makes you wonder if the route builders have actually visited the place in real life?

 

the Birmingham route is also bugged to hell
The GSMR radio resets at Birmingham new street
The loco switches to saying "Not In Service" at Birmingham new street
I had the wipers stop working halfway through a run in a snow storm, had to drive the rest of the route outside the cab to see

 

It will be ten times worse if they make a route into the centre of London, like Charing Cross station or a Thameslink route. Because of the poor framerates I never experienced London To Brighton at night, how bad is that at Victoria?

 

You can see the lights on Battersea power station coming out of Victoria, albeit they look a bit blobby, but have to say yet again there is an absence of ambient light or light "pollution" on the route. The whole section from Victoria to East Croydon is essentially an intensely built up conurbation, should be awash with light but as usual you might as well be running through Siberia how dark it is.

 

Pretty much what I expected then... One or two buildings lit up but the rest pitch black. Not good enough.

 

Im pretty sure DTG have read this thread. They don't have to respond but even if they did respond, who knows if they will ever sort these issues out. Perhaps they will but charge us for these fixes in a "new game" which is what they essentially did with TSW 3.

"Train Sim World 4. Release Date: September 6th, 2024. Features include new environmental lighting. Light pollution. Improved dynamic weather. Improvements to draw distance. Track joint sounds. Improved passengers. Improved eye adaption, a improved training center that actually serves a purpose and much more features that we could've added to tsw3 but decided to charge in TSW 4 because we are a money hungry company and adding these features are so expensive even though they are built into the game engine."

"TSW 4 will be available on Playstation 5, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox Game Pass and PC and can be yours for the wonderful price of $59.99 for the standard edition and $64.99 for the deluxe edition."

"Train Sim World 4: The Future of Train Simulation...again."

 

Earth to DTG. Anyone there?

 

Unfortunately DTG seems only to reply on those kind of "hot threads" in the very release phase of a dlc / route.
I was watching this phenomen since a while and the time this forum has most activity (more than a roadmap), is short before and after a release.

So if you cross the Hype castle of a devs upcoming business case cashing into money, you certainly get an answer by choosing the right time.

I think this topic belongs into the preview streams of next routes, when its about players decide to spend money on the route or not.

 

Shame to hear you uninstalled tsw, i always liked your enhancement packs. Gave all the routes a real immersion booster.

 

The lighting of the BR 612 is totally messed up at BRO. Not just the headlights but the drivers cabin light and the drivers desk light, too. As mentioned here before, this is caused by the new light setting on TSW3 and DTG didn‘t adapt the 612 to this. I opened a support ticket for this, but to be honest I don‘t believe they will handle this as a bug.
I love driving at night, but on some routes and with some of the rolling stock it is impossible, for example with both ICE 3. And I don’t understand why DTG didn’t include something like a system setting to enforce the game to use the environment lights by day, so that the player can decide if a train station is lit up in daylight or not. It’s ridiculous that the scenery is completely dark at 4 pm in winter without a single light. On the other hand I must admit that the new skies in TSW3 are looking great in dawn or sundown

 

What kind of reply would satisfy you?

There aren't easy answers. It's a fundamental issue that cannot be quickly solved. Even if future routes will have all of these issues addressed, we can really only see one release at a time whether these changes stick or if they fallback to mixed quality routes. (Ignoring any third party routes)

Not even mentioning the giant backlog of existing routes which may never see any 'fixes' or take a very long time.

 

Any sort of reply would be better than nothing, to be quite honest with you.

 

Any sort of reply is better than plain ignorance.

Bit like my landlord when I text to say I have he's rent money and instantly get a response then ask about my leaking roof and get ignored.

 

I have Matt's authority to say*:
"We hear what you're saying, and agree with much of it. It's on the list to do, but no timescales."
Happy now?

* No, I really, really don't

 

Turns out UE4 can do night quite happily and not look like a sack of garbage, so it’s not the engine that’s the problem. Who’d have thought it?

Waits patiently for someone to say that this is also not a fair comparison…

 

WOW, that sure looks impressive. I had lots of business to do in this neighborhood around 2017-2020. The buildings aren´t fantasy, they´re the real deal. Perfectly recognizable. Amazingly flowing. Superb lighting & shadowing. Just WOW!

But no .......No .......NO .........people of Berlin are not depicted correctly. They would use umbrellas in this miserable weather! There you have it.
And that´s why we love TSW3. And that´s also why you can´t compare these two simulators.

Right?

 

TML studios is a very small studio as well.

 

Now that clip from "The Bus" is quite impressive, just might have to buy into it again. Though TML do have a less than sterling rep with some of their stuff, World Of Subways particularly coming to mind.

 

It isn't even just that. Bus Simulator 18 for the PS4 also had rather good night lighting, and had far denser scenery than TSW.

 

That " Bus" video looks very much like the night lighting we should be getting in TSW. Even the headlights have me drooling with envy.

Anyone care to speculate why that isn't happening.

 

Because, unfortunately, DTG.

These things aren’t nice to have, sitting on the ‘to do’ list after over 5 years of post-release development. DTG expect you to keep paying £30 a throw for their DLC in the hope that they might, one day, actually drag this game up to the baseline of most other titles. This is BASIC stuff, the inclusion of which should be a given in 2023.

Isn’t it amazing how in ‘The Bus’ rain looks (and sounds) realistic, as does the way the moonlight plays across the road and buildings. The interior of the vehicle is lit as it should be with no bizarre unidentified light sources, no crazy bright flashes, no washed out looking glass, no light shining through the superstructure of the vehicle. Buildings have interiors that also look amazing and are lit properly. No dead stations with blanked out windows everywhere you look. Also, God forbid, real world brands can be seen. ‘The Bus’ looks like every other game released in the last 5 or so years, it is TSW that is the exception, not the rule. The only variable I can see here is DTG, and I’m hacked off because I’ve spent hundreds (it maybe more, I daren’t look) of pounds on a busted flush.

I’ll say this quietly as well, because it’s enough to give you a headache. The Bus has an in-game editor, in UE4. How can that possibly be? Surely it can’t be that DTG are telling porkies. If I’m wrong, then tell me/us why.…

I really enjoyed TSW when it first came out because it was an enjoyable way to pass the time and had an optimistic future. It’s now turned into this featureless DLC rinse and repeat fest and all that promise has vanished.

People keep buying this line that ‘TSW is complicated’ or that it’s somehow a special case, a niche product, and as such we should be grateful to have a Train Sim at all. Well, ‘The Bus’ is a recently produced vehicle simulator, made by a small dev company, running on the exact same engine as TSW and it is a bus simulator FFS…it doesn’t get much more ‘niche’ than that! The parallels are as exact as they are sad to see.

It should also be pointed out that that video is a year old. As of today the game is still in early access and costs the same as one TSW DLC. Ever feel like you’re being taken for a mug?

 

To be honest, I don't understand about game development. But I get the impression that a game like TSW is much more complex to develop than a game like The bus, or ETS for example. Physics, sounds, signalling, traffic, timetables... I think it has a lot more gears working at the same time to make everything work properly, and maybe that's why there are less resources available for the graphics.

In my opinion, I don't think it's fair to compare these two games. Beyond the fact that they pretend to be "simulators", they don't seem to have anything to do with each other in terms of how they work.

That said, I think TSW has a lot of room for improvement in terms of graphics, or night lighting as has been made clear in this very thread, and I hope DTG reverses that. It's not about copying anyone, this game has its own style but it's obvious that it hasn't progressed much in the graphics department since its first release and that was several years ago.

 

Nothing personal, but this is like Stockholm Syndrome.

We’re not allowed to compare it to GTA V, RDR II, MSFS and now we can’t compare it to another sim on the same engine.

How about we compare it to TSC? Because it doesn’t fair well there either.

 

I’d say this game is approaching photo-realism. The attention to detail on almost every surface is fantastic to see and the rain really looks amazing, like actual rain rather than a low resolution drawing of rain. It’s also funny how the eye-adaption actually works when it’s not been set up with completely incorrect values.

 

The Bus is much more appropriate for comparisons than the ludicrous suggestions of $100m+ GTA V, RDR II or MSFS.

 

A bus or truck game also has to factor in other vehicle and pedestrian behaviour, something a train sim generally doesn't have to do. However the complexities of a railway network should not really impact on how the environment looks. Are we really trying to make excuses for lighting that looks like it was pulled from a 1992 Amiga game, on the fact that, "Well it's trains, innit." As stated above, Stockholm Syndrome.

 

The simple fact is that no modern game in this day and age should have such poor night lighting that TSW presents.

Even the spot lights placed in yards look so amateurish looking. It looks like a big torch shining directly down, with no even and natural looking light spread over the area. Just a very harsh light confined to a small area.

Still no reply from DTG of course.

 

One thought - usually when a company doesn't say anything, it's because there's a decision that's maybe pending or recently made. Silence is not a "yes," but it's not a "no" - I noted that in one recent stream DTG had changed position from (and I paraphrase): "We have no plans to revisit lighting in old routes" to "we may take a look to see what it would take to revisit lighting in some old routes."

I need to go check on SEHS night lighting to see how that looks after yesterday's update, just to see if they're trending in the right direction on a TSW 3 route. Hopefully they're learning all the time.

I worked on a game a few years ago that was an online couch co-op game. Networking challenges to ensure low latency were known in advance, and other companies had clearly done this well (eg Brawlhalla, Gang Beasts, etc) - but it still took a lot longer than expected (or wanted) for the devs to actually *solve* those problems themselves.

So knowing a challenge and knowing what's possible doesn't make it easy to fix/implement. I just dearly, dearly hope that they do.