Made the trip at night, around midnight. It was disappointing that there seemed to be a lot of stars in the sky, but they were not very bright. I have a suggestion to DTG, increase the brightness of the stars and add the Milky Way. I think the pleasure of traveling at night would increase by 50 percent. The Milky Way in the night sky looks very beautiful.
From the ground, unless you are in the deepest, darkest countryside, you can see very little by stars with the naked eye. In built up areas you can see virtually nothing because of light pollution. The brightness of the stars is already too much as it is, the last thing the game needs is for them to be even brighter!
I know what you mean. To display the correct night sky, including the Milky Way, you need a 360 degree night sky map. The good news is that you can download high-resolution 360 degree night sky maps for free from the NASA website. The bad news is that this has not yet been integrated into TSW and a preset night sky has been used, where certain stars are lined up as tiles and repeated over and over again. If the moon and sun are displayed correctly, a correct night sky should also be possible. In MSFS and GT7, this is also a standard feature.
It’s not realistic though! We can’t complain about lack of detail on the one hand, then say ‘give us a totally unrealistic night sky’ on the other. The stars, as they are at the moment, are already far too bright in most circumstances. FWIW if you use my lighting mod you can control the brightness of the stars should you wish. re Night lighting, what really is missing is ambient light and light pollution. They’ve made a couple of attempts at the latter on a German route (I forget the name, but it’s the one that shipped with the diesel) which is definitely better but it needs much more work. Also, and you’re just going to have to take this at face value, the night skies in MSFS2020 are absolute bobbins. They are nothing at all like the sky looks sat at 40,000ft in an airliner at night. In fact, for such an accomplished product they are so unrealistic it is laughable.
I'd be already happy if the German sunrise in April would NOT take place at 3:00AM. Yeah, I'm easily entertained...
That's right. The earliest sunrises in (northern) Germany are around 4:30 a.m. in June. Before the sun rises, however, you can see the dawn slowly setting in, which photographers also call the blue hour. So the brightness should not rise until 3:30 a.m. at the earliest, unless you're in Denmark or Sweden. In April it doesn't get light until half past six...
I agree, you don't need a complete HDRI night sky, as you usually only see the brightest stars. But you should be able to see the signs of the zodiac, like Orion. The fact that UE can also simulate light pollution over big cities is more of a distant dream and negligible at the moment. What bothers me most is the unrealistic tiling, which is why I recommended the NASA night sky environment maps. TSW doesn't have to become an astro simulator, but improvements are always welcome. BTW: I also think that MSFS 2020 isn't super perfect in night sky representation. In my opinion, the best star representation is offered by Space Engine, where you can switch between HDRI and eye adaptation perception and also have various setting options. But that's a pure astro simulator.
Get all the routes up to TOD4 and have solid lighting first (so it's not a black hole at night) first.... then worry about luxuries like star gazing =-)
I can see this becoming a slippery slope like everything else in TSW. If they DO institute this, some people will say it's "ruining everything." Others will say "You coulda done something else instead of wasting all that time!" while yet others will immediately say "Well it's not accurate enough. The Big Dipper should be X degrees on this date at this point on the globe and it's only Y degrees.... how can I play this game if it's BROKEN LIKE THIS?" =-) That's why we can't have nice things.
They sure make nice "open sky" drives that's for sure. Maybe we can get some AMTRAK action out that way to revitalize those maps a bit too =-) I've kinda always wanted to take a train trip out west irl for that reason... gazing at the stars out the top of the "observation" car.
Sure, but what is all the excitement about the superduperhypernuclear ToD4? Sunrises/sets are completely off. High noon is a wash out on a clear day. Driving against low sun with long shadows that seem to "fly and follow" over the train is unbearable on most routes. Even if you set up a bit of fog and 80% overcast, hard shadows are still cast on the ground. The shadow drawing distances are a complete immersion breaker even on high performance systems. Let's not start to talk about more than deficient night lighting even on more recent routes. So, what is it with magic ToD4? Correct star constellations were already a thing back then in FS9. It wasn't perfect, but the (moving) constellations were there. In 2004!
Because the routes without it are even worse than the "no big deal?" It's certainly something that would be "neat" but over 99% of people won't even notice it. Few even drive at night, and how many of those bother to look up? Unless it were route-specific as a gimmick, that would then need to be applied to ALL the routes retroactively which is more work. (Or just tacked on whenever they're "remastered" It just seems like a lot of work for something few will ever see. Then again, DTG have a habit of doing a LOT of unnecessary work virtually no one will see. (Tracks to nowhere, whole sidings populated that you can't even SEE from the mainline and aren't accessible normally) *shrugs* It's "neat" but a lot of work for little payoff. I could see doing it for ONE route as a cool gimmick to sell that route.
An observation car we could ride would be a nice addition, especially if it came with a Rocky Mountain route.
Now THAT would be a cool gimmick route. Maybe model the "northern lights"? Or would that be too much? DTG already has the AMTRAK contacts and the trains in game. Could be in the US or Canadian Rockies (Amtrak does both) That would actually make use of the whole "avatar" thing in TSW too, which other games like TSC don't have. You could literally ride along as a passenger and sit under the stars. A "day in the life" journey mode that starts with mountain sunrise, continues through the day, features a scenario with dusk/sunset on the rockies then a night sky ride....
It would be wonderful and interesting if we can see the Milky Way in future routes even that it's only visible during certain scenarios. However, the Milky Way is only visible in those rural routes like Cane Creek, Sherman Hill or maybe the Bernina, for those urban routes, I think it's more important to fix the nighttime lighting.
It's a shame, I was looking forward to the new SpaceX DLC, where you can unlock a Tesla Roadster in space as a mastery reward. Jokes aside: adjusting the night sky would only be possible with a core update, as the tiled stars would then be automatically replaced on all routes. I don't think that the starlight intensity would necessarily have to be adjusted to TOD3 and TOD4 routes. The moon and sunlight are crucial and would be adjusted anyway. Good point about the American landscape routes in the west and southwest. A clear night sky with the Milky Way would be a great photo opportunity over the Grand Canyon or Sherman Hill. I think the more players want this, the more attention will be paid to it by DTG.
Well, black holes are already carefully modelled in TSW. Refer to Cathcart or SoS night lighting as examples.
Very beautiful sky! That's what I'm talking about! If the artists would work on the colors of sunsets and sunrises, it would be worth it!
Again though, you would never, ever, see that from the ground with the naked eye. The sky just doesn’t look like that, it’s simply not realistic!
I don't understand why you're attached to realism? It's a game! It's supposed to be exciting! Captivate! Be beautiful! I'm just asking for a beautiful night sky, not a Saturn in orbit.
The whole point of this "game" is to simulate real world railway operations. The word "simulator" goes hand in hand with realism.
It would look completely ridiculous and totally unrealistic. I don’t understand why you’d want a fake image plastered all over the sky, it’s a sim (quiet at the back), not a game. Why not apply a nice dragon motif to the daytime sky? It’s just as valid as plonking something that can only be seen with a deep space telescope all over the night. We could replace the passengers with zombies (I won’t say it again, quiet at the back!) and give the drivers an assortment of weaponry to take them on. Make the trees pink and so on. All equally ridiculous, and all out of place in a simulator.
I don't think there's many places on earth you can see the milky way with the naked eye. I'm all for some constellations but do you really want dtg messing with the sky?
To make night rides more beautiful! That's why, and yes we need to change the night lighting, that too. But I suggested an easier way out.
The night sky appearance would vary greatly depending on the location. Factors would include proximity to artificial light pollution, altitude, relative humidity, etc. Urban areas such as London and Los Angles have so much light pollution that only the brightest stars and planets would be visible and sky glow would make ambient light look like a cloudy day. TSW is way too dark as it is now depicted in game for these areas. The desert areas in a route like Cajon for example would be very different. In rural areas away from cities with high altitude and low humidity the sky would be very dark with thousands of stars, including a prominent Milky Way visible. Sky glow would be very prominent on horizons in the direction of cities. Ambient light would be much lower, similar to the way TSW has it now. Making this all blend seamlessly in game would be difficult I believe and would probably eat up a lot of processing speed.
I’m sorry, and I don’t mean to be rude, but that is simply not true regarding the Milky Way. I spend my working life sat at 40,000ft, most often at night and all over the world, and these sky vistas people are talking about simply do not exist. If they don’t exist at 40,000ft they sure as hell don’t exist a ground level, certainly not to the naked eye from the lit cab of a train. It isn’t about faking it to make the game more beautiful. It should be realistic, and what the night skies need are ambient light, light pollution and a more realistic simulation of the night vision of the human eye. I don’t even know if UE4 is capable of the latter, but just plonking an image of something that CANNOT be seen from the ground in the sky to make it look nice is not the way forward imho. That’s not even considering the fact that adding it wouldn’t increase the ambient light on the ground anyway! DTG made a good stab at adding elements of this in Maintalbahn and it got barely a mention. I noticed it though, and it was a vast improvement.
It's okay. We just have different opinions, and yes I agree with you, night lighting needs to be drastically improved and day lighting too.
To conclude the topic from my side too, my Sherman Hill comparison example was a montage with a long exposure night shot. An HDRI night sky would not fit graphically with the rest of the TSW graphics, that's true. SLR cameras can take such shots, although the human eye has to constantly adapt to the lighting conditions and you can't see something like that in light-polluted cities, no matter how hard you try. But it's still possible to see the Milky Way and a starry night sky with the naked eye, far away from light-polluted settlements. I had this experience myself on a vacation in Egypt. An off-road tour (while visiting Bedouins) through the desert while it was already pitch dark on the way back made this possible for me. I never saw such a clear starry night sky again when I returned to Europe. The band of the Milky Way was clearly visible to the naked eye, and planets such as the red Mars could also be seen. In any case, the current tiled stars in the TSW night sky are only an interim solution. If you like real realism, not just in terms of railway simulation, you can't get past a real night sky representation. Of course we don't want an HDRI variant, but at least all the signs of the zodiac and a narrow, bright band of the Milky Way should be included. HDRI maps should be able to be set in the UE so that they come across as realistic...
You're right about nigh sky views from inside a vehicle. The internal reflections from instrumentation on the glass, attenuation of light passing through the glass tinting, etc. only allow visibility of the brightest celestial objects from within the vehicle. Standing outside with an unobstructed view is a very different story. As an avid astrophotographer, I can tell you from personal observation and experience that in a Bortle 4 or better sky location, thousands of stars and the Milky Way are not just visible, but can be very striking and prominent features that are unavoidably seen even to the uninitiated person. When I bring friends and family to a dark sky sight like Everglades National Park for an evening under the sky, they are often awestruck at what they see with the naked eye. Most are accustomed to the light polluted view of urban or at best suburban skies and find themselves somewhat disoriented by the dark sky view where they are barely able to pick out familiar constellations among the thousands of stars they can see. Whether that is something worth depicting in the game will most likely have opinions all over the place as we see here in this thread. Check out a very good graphic of the Bortle scale here:
The Magellanic Clouds, with significantly less surface brightness than the Milky Way (because they're about twice as far away), are an obvious feature and clearly visible from dark skies in the southern hemisphere. From dark skies in Europe and NA, the Andromeda galaxy is a naked eye object, if you know where to look. But from inside the cab of a loco (still less from a brightly lit passenger carriage), no chance! I can recall a school trip in March 1969 on a sleeper train out of Paddington, and being able to clearly see comet Bennett low over the fields of the West Country, an impressive sight with a long tail.
I agree with you in regards to the game but even flat places in the middle of Iowa with no light pollution can give you insane views of the Milky Way… no telescope needed. Typically June to August are the best months. It’s also dependent on cloud cover, latitude (too far north and I believe you can’t see it), nearest light dome (aka city, light pollution spreads far), moon phase, etc. Would be a gigantic waste of time and resources to try to make this work in any sort of detail. Dev focus needs to be on trains and route building, not something so niche like the Milky Way.
