PC Midland Mainline Tsc + Tsw3 Comparison Images

I agree

 

Thanks, but it's not the editing that bothers me so much. As you say there are ways around it.

The bothersome thing is the inability to post without it being referred to a moderator with no explanation and not being cleared for days, if at all.
Deleting and re- posting does not work for me.

After all these years, my posts should not be vetted in this way. It's insulting, frankly.

 

What bothers me most about many new TSW routes is the fact that the world outside of the stations still feels pretty sterile and dead. And that's independent of whether I find TSW generally "nicer" and "more intense".

Why can't you just add such lovely details to TSW3 routes:



That wouldn't be a lot of effort, but it has a great overall effect and shows that someone has thought about it. The Niddertalbahn has done it, future productions should be measured against this and not resort to this "copy and paste" procedure again.

If a new route doesn't even include the real features directly on the route (e.g. bridges), then the route somehow looks like any other. Of course you can also justify that with "we wanted to convey the Midland feeling".

So overall I can understand why some users are upset.

You can compare the whole situation with the Microsoft Train Simulator AddOns: There was also a bunch of DLC / routes back then that were only moderately detailed but sold at full price (e.g. the ProTrain DLC). Rarer, but there was, there was also DLC with much better quality (e.g. from Halycon).

As a customer, I want to feel that love has gone into a product, rather than just executing the standard mediocrely. Unfortunately, this is becoming increasingly rare these days and everywhere it is only getting more expensive, but the quality is rather poor (this is not only related to the gaming industry).

Nevertheless, I'm also excited about the new route, because the vehicles seem to have succeeded. However, this WOW effect as with the Niddertalbahn will probably not occur. That's kind of a pity.

 

Sorry, I have to admit that I don't know how to " DM ". The above post from the thread about the " Return of the SW1000R " is the most recent example. Can't imagine anything more innocuous, unless there's some British cuss word I'm unfamiliar with.

Appreciate the reply, though. I'll keep you " posted ".

 

For me and my own personal opinion - The TSC game and graphics look horrendous in this day and age. Yes it was great in its release day of course and yes some elements of the route may be a little more detailed but the overall quality of graphics in TSW are way in front of TSC ( hence why it was made, otherwise it’d have been kept within TSC ) For me, the game is dead in the water now. It feels very outdated. Every time I fired it up to test the 158’s physics I’d shut it down almost as quickly as I started it. Horrible experience *now* but as I say, spent many happy years with it before TSW came along, and a side note it was a few years before I changed over to TSW because that wasn’t brilliant when it first came out to be fair. The game is going from strength to strength recently. You can nit pick about the odd lamp post being slightly too far to the left, or the wrong shade of grey but overall, I think it looks and feels brilliant now.

But like everything in life, there’s always personal preference and subjectivity that comes in with stuff like this. We can all agree that the bridge might be the wrong colour, or placed too high, too low etc, but we each interpret the game’s strengths and weaknesses differently depending on our own personal preferences and interpretations, and that’s okay. It’s part of the wonderful privilege we have to be alive. Celebrate the differences and respect each others opinion is my motto .

 

Brake heat might be possible to script in TSC to a small extent, but it would never be possible to do it with the complexity and fidelity that is possible in Simugraph. Simugraph can simulate each individual brake pad. If for some reason (Wheel slide protection for example) a brake has provided less brake force during the brake sequence it will have heated up less and thus have different brake performance to the other brake pads. Simugraph simply has more degrees of freedom.

 

Speaking of simulation complexity in TSW. Notice how the main reservoir pressure needled wiggles when the horn is used at 0:32 in this video . That is the horn actually using air (and I have tuned the usage of the horn from both 158 drivers and a mechanic that work with similar trains). Safe to say there are more little quirks and easter eggs implemented

 

If used correctly, surely it's a big improvement. Anyway overall I have much more freedom of choice on TSC, and especially in terms of Steam TSW is a long long way behind.

What I find interesting in this discussion - and I am sure DTG are aware of this fact - is that for most users the "impression" a game gives them is far more important than the details. Or in easy words: Lighting is everything. As demonstrated, choosing the right time and weather, TSC can look just as good as TSW, but in other situations TSW can look a lot worse. (Overbright scenery when in cab on Cajon Pass e.g.)

Good to be able to play both games, and looking forward to DX12 implementation for TSC. Still TSC is a universe compared to the Train Sim (small) World, and that upgrade is deserved and welcomed.

So let's hope for constant improvement of both TSW and TSC.

 

I want to push back slightly on this statement. As can be seen from this thread, the view that TSC lighting looks better is controversial (not everyone agrees). It's been a while since I played TSC and when I did I never really used mods that changed lighting except for the AP enhancement pack, so keep that in mind. I always disliked the lighting in TSC and think that it is way better in TSW3 (3, not so much 2 or earlier). I like the "overbright" lighting as you phrased it (as long as the eye adaptation works realistically, which it doesn't all the time or at least didn't in the beginning). I don't understand the sentiment that TSW3 is too bright. On a sunny day the real world light intensity is orders of magnitude brighter than anything TSW3 (and certainly not TSC) can achieve. After all sun glasses are a thing

My biggest criticism of TSC lighting is/was that it always looked so "cold" and gloomy, even when the season was summer and it was midday. Sunset and sunrise was less of an issue (to me) in TSC.

I'm not saying that you or Jetwash are wrong and I'm right, just that it's quite subjective and down to preference

 

TSW is too bright because the so called "Eye Adaption" does not work like the human eye, but more like the "Auto Exposure" on a camera.

Two shots from CP, same situation from inside and outside the cab. It looks very ugly from the inside, while natural in outside view



So to close this topic, I think the lighting's overdone on TSW. I prefer how SCS set up their environment lighting in ATS/ETS2 using their own game engine, it always looks natural no matter what time of day.

 

I’d have said that essentially that comes down to the engine. AP have worked wonders with the S&W EP v2 which has transformed the game and it can look incredibly warm, but there’s no denying it’s running on DX9 with a sky system that is dated. I hope that work going on behind the scenes is going to lead to leaps forward in that regard.

So it goes without saying that TSW3 should look better than TSC by virtue of the fact that it’s running on UE4. It’s not the lighting per se that is the problem, to be absolutely blunt it’s the cack-handed way it’s been set up. You can be driving along one minute thinking ‘this looks pretty good’ then you turn your head and are presented with a building with zero shadows on it. I talk about lighting as a catch all term which covers environmental lighting, buildings/ stations etc, the trains themselves, ambient lighting from populated areas, occlusion in the cab (not having light sources incorrectly illuminating the cab, in this instance third rail sparks, clouds, sun behind the cab etc), eye adaption, shadows, distant scenery etc.

Watching that stream the other night it was simply riddled with the same old problems that have blighted this game since inception. I posted a thread a while back showing ‘The Bus’, a UE4 simulator that it’s absolutely streets ahead of TSW when it comes to all of these things. Sometimes TSW can look stunning, too often it is mediocre and far too much of the time it is downright awful. Not across the whole scene, but enough of it to make it off putting. Not pulling any punches it is beyond unforgivable that this MML route appears, based on the stream the other night, to have gone backwards yet again and does not have environmental lighting based on ambient light but on a binary time of day. How has that been allowed to happen again?

Of course though, this thread isn’t about the engine or the lighting. It’s about the route building and what is there to be rendered by the engine. The quality of the assets and the care and attention that has gone into their placement are undeniably better in the TSC version of the route. Again, 6 years in to this franchise is a fob off along the lines of ‘we went for feel rather than reproduction’ good enough? We all have our own view on that but mine is that it isn’t.

 

IMO the only thing in wich TSC is way superior than TSW is the amount of content available, no matter if you play UK, US or German stuff. So many years of DLC's, third party and mods has made the game great. You can make TSC looks better with some stuff but is not even close to TSW.
I own almost every German and Austrian content available for TSC, any route can be full of real life services but there isn't a timetable, you have to create your own scenarios, download from the web or the workshop, and then download all the skins and stuff used too. It's too much time consuming just to play 1 scenario, and after all that, you have to pray so can run the whole scenario without any problem (crash, red lights).

 

That's not a fair comparison, most workshop scenarios do not require a lot of DLC or web reskins. Maybe 5% of all available.

And the timetable mode gets boring soon, it's just the same A-B runs on different times. I can do that via TSC's quickdrive - which also adds randomness. I prefer well constructed scenarios, that add scenery, with unforeseen things happening. And stuff like the great workshop GWML extension that lets you drive from Paddington to Swindon. We can travel the full ECML on TSC. It's the content that does it for me, and the graphics update will come - the assets are not the issue.

TSW is still too limited in what I can do. ("Matt, can I have consist XY on route Z pleeeease!!!")

And comparing Epic's DX11/12 UE4 renderer vs DTG's TSC DX9 engine doesn't make any more sense here.

So to get back on the thread topic, UE4 can make lower quality content more appealing to players. But not for everyone.

 

As long, as DTG wants to use real luminance values for light, some kind of "Auto Exposure" is necessary, because the range of brightness in the world is just too great. So, in the first screenshot, if the outside was be darker, then the cab would be even darker and barely visible. This also happens IRL, it is just that our brains can compensate, and basically have different exposure levels for different part of our vission.

The question then might be, why to use this approach, if it has this drawback? Because it makes transition between weather and time of day states much more natural. Which is one of the area the new TOD system shines at.

If you make your scene out of "made up" luminance levels. I.e. so it looks right on a bright sunny day, so both cab and outside world look great with single exposure level, then there is a big risk that all of that falls apart once you change the weather/time of day, because all light sources were balanced for that one particular scenario. Which I feel is one of the reasons old routes can look really weird at night, or with overcast skies.

The fact that standard monitors don't really do brightness changes, but rather color changes (so brighter means moving the color to white) also doesn't help much.

 

The eye-adaption and luminance levels are fine in theory, it’s just that it would appear that it hasn’t been implemented correctly.

If it’s not the brightness of signals, it’s the lack of shadows and occlusion on so many world objects. That in turn makes the world seem far too bright under a wide variety of conditions. That is exasperated by the lack of occlusion in the cab, so the cabs are always generally too bright as well. They take way too long to go dark on entering a tunnel and don’t go dark at all when passing under bridges. When exiting a tunnel the eye-adaption has been set up to mimic how a camera lens reacts rather than the human eye.

There are also issues with light baking, where some areas get missed entirely or the lighting levels chosen are way out. Look at the stock E2G route and then see it with LondonMidland’s mod applied. If he can do that in a couple of days without the editor it is not on that the route ships in the state it’s in from the developer.

The screenshots on page 1 also show that, yet again, the ‘lighting up’ time on MML has been set up incorrectly by SkyHook. Despite being told this would change for new DLC going forward a few routes back it goes without saying that of course it hasn’t. The ambient light levels should determine that the station, world and building lights should be on, but clearly they’ve just gone with the old system of a single lighting up time. That simply isn’t good enough.

It’s not the UE4 engine or the intention that is the problem, it’s either lack of skill, lack of care, lack of time or all of the above.

This game is 6 years old now, these problems should not exist anymore. The only thing in this game that is consistent is the inconsistency.

 

I just upgraded TSW to TSC. New DRA has longer extension and wider field of view. The house is very beautiful!

 

I think the main advantage TSC has, apart from the steam content is length of routes. For example you can have the route from Dresden to Leipzig as mentioned above, but the came in two parts if I recall.

I do think eventually we will have longer routes on TSW, in the early days of Railworks there were complaints about the length of routes compared to MSTS. Now in TSC you can have London to Birmingham and Penzance etc. I do think eventually this will come to TSW.

 

So, the ‘first look’ vids are out. In his words, ‘I’m trying to be nice here, but…’ Not really anything here to make me revise my opinion. I’m surprised to the see that the stations are also missing lots of detail, it all just looks very generic. Such a shame.

On the plus side the 158 looks to be the standout element of the pack.

 

Need to stop letting fledgling studios experiment using landmark routes. MML, the 158 and HST have been put in the game now and we’ll be stuck with these representations.

 

Ain’t that the truth. If only Just Trains had done it *sigh*

 

Slightly OT, but this This bright and oversaturated look really has become a thing amongst some developers.
I recently purchased PGA2K23 on PS5, and the lighting is absolutely awful. On a sunny day it's blindingly light, made worse by shadows from trees that are so dark, there are occasions on the green that you cannot see the hole.

 

Proof it can be done. Remember when someone actually cared? There's even cable trunking.

GWE, released March 2018

 

Well, to be honest, it still looks pretty model railroad like and thats one reason why I don't want to switch to TSC graphically anymore.

 

I suspect that they are lighting them based on HDR- but not everyone's TV, monitor or console has HDR implemented, and the result is as you describe.

 

Playing on an LG 55 inch OLED, I expected better. But I agree, the HDR craze has not transferred well to the gaming arena.

 

I think you've hit the nail on the head there. TSC does certainly have a model railway vibe for me.

 

And with all the issues regarding MML, I'm happy to focus on my mighty "model railway" again. TSW is dead for me, its shiny looks can't fool me. Overdone lighting, underdeveloped and boring content. I hope people do refund because that's the only way to teach DTG.

I'm out of here, enjoying TSC

 

It's called "fake HDR". High Dynamic Range is used in photography when you want more control over the lights and shadows. Digital cameras, even the high end ones, still can't match the human eye so in a lot of situations you end up with an overexpose or underexspose image. Since a few years ago, there is a huge "fake HDR" effect used in a lot of games, they just push the contrast and color saturation to create a high impact image but doesn't feel real.
HDR is not realism and shouldn't be in any simulator game.
I, as a photographer, had a hard work to get the game graphics near to reality (it's what I like). Lots of tweaks to ini file and screen settings, and color saturation reductions. But at the end of the day, it's a matter of taste.

 

If the developers bother to script it. And I imagine most of the time they don't...

 

Game development is a lot of work and that probably takes a really long time. It's every single brake pad that would need to have the code and simulation which could mean less time in other areas

 

I say this actually feeling sad that I wasn’t proved at least wrong in part, but I told you so.

The cycle continues. As always the hype train ends with the release the forum is alight with annoyance and disgust at yet another poor DLC, with a significant number of people having claimed a refund. More than I can say I’ve seen before. Many of us saw this coming of course. As I said, and was criticised for, some of the people who were defending DTG and Skyhook are now ‘complaining like hell’. Give it a week or two and all this will be forgotten and the cycle will start again with the hype train for the next disappointment.

I actually wish I was typing this post and saying how glad I was that the TSW MML DLC had proved just how far ahead TSW was, and that although TSC had had a good run it’s time was over. As things stand it couldn’t be further from the truth and I think, given recent developments in TSC, DTG know that too.

This thread was about the quality of the route building on a 30-odd mile route. The route is short, but even so on the whole there is no care, no love, no attention to detail. You could almost forgive that if everything else was amazing but other than the 158 it looks like a mess. On that note, and no disrespect to the guy involved in it (I forget his username), but what use simulating every brake pad if the rest of the route is this poor? Additionally, by all accounts for a route so short the much vaunted ‘time-table’ mode is virtually non-existent. For the marketing people to claim this route has GSM-R functionality is, in my opinion, the very definition of false advertising. How can they get away with this?

This game is trying to be all things to all people and is failing miserably at all of it. It is either a ‘sim’, which means it goes for as faithful a reproduction of the subject as possible, or it is a game aimed at more casual players (nothing wrong with that) with collectibles, action points etc in which case the ‘feel’ of a route is ok. This jarring of purpose becomes more clear with every release. DTG need to decide which it is and make it the best it can be. It cannot be both.

 

TSW isn't a HDR title, so there is nothing HDR in TSW. If it would be HDR it would look much better (on HDR monitors), because it wouldn't need to shift the colors to white for them to appear "bright".

HDR in monitor technology means something different than in photography.
In monitor technology it means that a monitor also get luminance information for pixel. The issue with non-HDR monitors is that the brightness is set globally for the whole screen, in the monitor option menu. The game/movie/... has no control about how many lumens a pixel has. It can only affect pixels color. This means monitors (or rather game engines) have to use tricks to make something appear brighter for our brains, and that trick is to move the luminance in HSL color. But that shifts the overall color closer to white. So if you need something really really bright, it will end up... white... As we have currently in TSW. This is done by UE, when it tries to map the in-engine luminance values to the limited sRGB color space.

In HDR monitor, with HDR content, the monitor alose receives luminance, so it can produce a saturated red light, but brighter (more luments). Like a braking light on a car is bright, but it is not white. HDR monitors can replicate this, SDR cannot. On OLEDS, where each pixel is individual light source it looks phenomenal. And there is nothing fake about it. In fact, it is much closer to IRL, because brightness is not color, brightness is how much lumens something produces. Bright stuff with saturated colors, like fire, look much much better on HDR monitors (with HDR content).

 

I think it's like screenshot from cab video.

 

The route isn't poor, it has some bugs which require fixing but it is hardly a mess. I have had a couple of runs on it without problems and the route looks good.

It is the timetable I have an issue with.

 

I'm amazed that you think a route with dodgy roads, cars driving on the wrong side of the road, bridges not lining up, and the barest and plainest lineside scenery I think I've ever seen in a TSW route (no cable trunking, no clutter, no cabinets, very few custom bridges; basically just grass, bushes, trees and track) to name a few, looks good but I suppose beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

 

This route should have been done by JT. Skyhook didn’t do this route justice the way jt would have done it

 

Amazing!

https://forums.dovetailgames.com/th...d-enhancement-mods-for-tsc.60965/#post-557191

 

No No No. TSC is awful. Done, dead. Obsolete. Terrible graphics, looks like a model railway. Did you not hear? TSW is where it’s at now.

That’s from OTS right? The same guys that build for Just Trains. They build this stuff in their free time, for free.

 

For a model railway, that's quite decent. Lol.

I really feel a bit sorry for those that don't know what TSC is capable of.

 

Mind sharing your ini modifications? Did you manage to get an "kind of universal realistic look"?

 

Exactly.

 

Sad to see yet another dlc released 2 months too early. So many issues left and "will be fixed later". And it's a shame many people just accept this poor development. I'll just mention 1 obvious bug that is the first thing you notice in the class 158, the windows reflection. Why isn't this fixed on release day?

And one more thing, DTG doesnt gaf about their simulator at all, thats pretty obvious by now. Where is the statement after 5 of the 6 last DLC releases having a average of 40% rating on Steam?

It's a bloody shame with such a great engine to build on and ruin it like this!

 

Wow, that YT video is superb, just shows how accurate that route is in TSC. Tom did a great job.
There's definitely life left in TSC.

 

Are we supposed to be impressed?

 

Apparently so!

It seems TSW users need to be re-educated so we see the error of our ways.

I mean some of us have been using train simulators since the early days of MSTS!

 

I have to say, much as I prefer TSW that is a bloody good stab at making a mirror of the route in TSC

 

I would just advise people that are seriously considering jumping onto TSC after that video to atleast spent some time on the TSC classic forum here. The grass is really not greener on the other side... and DTG didn't magically became this company with atrocious post launch support - that is something that existed in TSC, forever.

I'm not saying you cannot get a great experience in TSC, especially if you're interested in UK content. Just be prepared to spent quite a lot of money for the required enhancement packs, traction, and routes. Just Sky & Weather pack + RWEnchancer will push you back some 45€, a good loco, like the AP Class 37 is around another 30€, the add the route ... and then be prepared to spent some time tweaking and either finding or building your own scenarion...

 

Wise words.

To get the best out of TSC you need to spend money because on the whole, DTG’s route building is quite good but their rolling stock is atrocious. On UK (non-Steam trains) content that means Armstrong Powerhouse, Just Trains and Alan Thomson (other excellent studios exist too). However, if you own all the DLC for TSW the purchase price of all of that would have bought you a very satisfactory TSC experience indeed, particularly if you take advantage of the frequent sales.

 

TSC is a very nice sim in it's own way. The graphics engine is outdated but external tools can update the graphics a bit. If (and thats a big if) DX12 makes it's way to TSC a lot more can be done with the engine (also with external tools but with more features)

But... I'm not sure DTG will release it, even if possible (I hope i'm wrong) their track record on promisses isn't that great and why compete with yourself..

Edit: Haven't tried Nvidia RTX remix yet on TSC but will see if it's possible.