Hi. Finally, after being a bit frustrated with many route's skies, I decided to buy the AP Weather Enhancement Pack - and do not regret it. It offers what I wanted - realistic sky colours and ambient light and shade colours, something I'm happy to use as a standard for all routes (I was trying to make my own blueprints but it is not easy having all colours and values match to look real. But while doing this, I discovered the <TimeScaler> value for testing your skies by speeding up time. Which in turn was wanted by someone who plays his endless Freeroam and wanted time to stand still because he didn't wanna play through the nights - it's possible.) One thing - it uses the same Azimuth values for every route if you use the basic method of applying it by copying the TimeOfDay folders to the route's asset folders - which is not a big deal for most european routes as the different latitudes do not make a big difference. AP season files are made for routes around 53 degrees north, so they are centered on the locations of Manchester, Birmingham, Dublin, Hamburg, Bremen, Berlin, and southern Canada. I decided to use it for American routes like Tehachapi, Donner and Cajon Pass which lie far more in the south - and have the sun standing much higher in the sky at noon. To adjust the files, very little work is needed. It is the value named "AzimuthAngle" in the SunInfo section on top of the Season file. (Spring.bin, Summer.bin, Autumn.bin, Winter.bin). I do not bother with the Moon Azimuth here as it differs from day to day in reality. There is one compromise TS is making - no matter what season, the sun will always rise exactly in the east und set exactly in the west, whereas in reality we have it rising NE and setting NW in summer here - I'm living at 49 deg N. Only the azimuth (zenith in this case) and the sun rise / set times can be specified for each season. Which is fair enough. So here's how to get the numbers (simplified), I will use Cajon Pass for example, as its sky is broken (no sunlight cast on 2nd run) and looks outdated. (It's one of the original Rail Simulator routes and probably the first 3rd party route ever developed, so fair enough. Although I checked my original RS copy - it used the (still being used) RailSimulatorCore sky first - The RailSimulatorUS sky was introduced later.) Cajon uses the assets from Kuju\RailsimulatorUS. So copy the AP\WeatherEP\TimeOfDay folder to this folder and edit the Season files: 1. Get the latitude of the route location (either from the templateroute or from a real map) 2. Cajon Pass is located approximately 34 degrees North. (Only 11 degrees away from the Northern Tropic, where the sun is exactly in zenith on midsummer - casting no horizontal shadows) 3. To calculate the angle of the sun's azimuth for each season, we need the angle of the earth's axis tilt (=Inclination) in relation to the sun for every season (using solstice and equinox as we can only specify a season representing 3 months - using solstice makes the summer season represent the longest day). Earth axis is tilted roughly 23 degrees, with the North pole facing the sun in summer, and the South pole in winter. (Apologies to everyone from Down Under, I'm referring to Northern hemisphere "summer" and "winter" here ) Summer = Latitude - Inclination = 34 - 23 = 11 Winter = Latitude + Inclination >> 34 +23 = 57 Spring, Autumn = Latitude = 34 Now we only need to convert the angles into radians - the value TS is needing. The formula is Rad = Degrees * ( ¶ / 180) (there's quick online converters, just google "degrees to radian") This gives the TS azimuth value of 0.19 for summer, 0.99 for winter and 0.59 for spring and autumn. Note: put a minus in front of these values, else the sun will traverse the northern sky. The numbers have to be NEGATIVE for routes on the northern hemisphere. (Tehachapi uses positive numbers by default, so the sun goes from right to left...! ) For routes in the Southern hemisphere, use positive values. The max value is +-1.5 which would be a winter's noon in mid Norway (theoretically it could be ¶/2 (= horizon) but this is a technical restriction.) Hope that is of interest for some of you, I found it to be enhancing the "hot desert" feel of these routes at noon. I chose not to mess with the sunrise times - as changing these too drastically would need editing of the 8 daylight definitions including sky gradient heights, this could mess things up - I will find a good method maybe someday using an excel spreadsheet which just needs you entering a latitude, giving you all needed values. If there is demand, I can post a list with route specific azimuths here. Of course, you can apply this to all routes - this is not only AP Enhancement specific. Most standard route season files already have correct values, but not all. Lot of them with wrong positive values... Remember using 3D weather in conjunction with Dynamic Clouds uses a different 3rd party sky/weather engine that has nothing to do with the season files (SilverLining). I find these skies to appear a bit boring and "flat" in daytime - but they have the nice feature of clouds hanging in the mountains and being able to drive through them (experienced that first on a Semmeringbahn scenario), which is only possible with DynamicClouds, as they are real objects as opposed to bitmaps in 2D Standard weather. AP uses good SunGlare values to produce great sunsets Btw, TS uses radians too for the Cab Cameras' horizontal and vertical movement freedom. I've seen values as high as 1080 in some blueprints - unnecessary, as any value greater than ¶, like 3.15 gives you unrestricted horizontal head turn. Vertical freedom is limited to ¶/2 (1.57), so you can only look up and down 90 degrees. A camera position that has its direction set to backwards and uses horizontal value <3.141593 can result in a strange camera spinning bug, where you reach the right horizontal limit and suddenly are looking to the left, I've seen it in some coach passenger view.
I have applied this to Livonia Sub - Alexandria Monroe too which lies even further in the south than Cajon & Tehachapi. It used the same core Season file for all seasons (the antique default.xml). Ok it has very little changes over the year in sunrise/sunset. And of course Pacific Surfliner and the southernmost US route Miami - West Palm Beach which is almost a tropical location (by 2 degrees) where the sun goes down almost vertically in summer, meaning hotter but shorter days than up in the north in summer, but almost 12h day/12h night cycle throughout the year. Also shorter dusk/dawn periods because of the sun's vertical path making it appear and disappear very quickly as opposed to the more tilted path when moving closer to the poles. Try to imagine how the earth would be if the axis were not tilted - which is due to the moon. No seasons at all... no polar days. No snow. I first started to think about all this when making trips with my car and tent to Norway and saw the midnight sun. It is a magical experience - you really feel like being on top of the whole world although it's just a random spot on a globe - nature is incredible. I'm really missing Scandinavian routes for TSC, those I could find are pretty old and of lower standard. Something like Malmö-Göteborg-Oslo would be nice, or the ore lines in the north.
