Well... not here for some reason. I wish it was, as it would solve one of the.... lost count now.... 1... 2...3... four problems I now have with this pack.
Its disappointing to see these problems. Its certainly put me off buying the pack. TS is unstable enough as it is.......Also I have loads of Weather v1 scenarios from the ATS web site and some I have used script to write myself following the instructions in pack 1. I can't be bothered to change all of these out. But its worse and more involved than that. I am now unlikely to install any ap updates or download scenarios (from anywhere) that use the new weather pack (all of them?) I also cant update RW enhancer for the same reason. So effectively the release of this pack has frozen TS classic in time for me (no more purchases or downloads). Despite the lack of the promised editor, TSW3 now is a lot better imho but certainly needs further work on the weather. Perhaps ap need to make peace with Dovetail Games and work on that now. Maybe I am being contentious but I think lack of backwards compatibility is a massive (and very inconvenient) mistake. My advice to ap would be to resolve or urgently move on to to TSW3. Good luck to all in resolving these issues. I wish I knew how to do it.
Yes, the worry is that this is proving a disaster for AP. One flawed DLC can be left if it’s a train, but SWEP is integral to their whole product offering. If every other product scenario is being updated to incorporate SWEP2, then there’s going to either a lot of customers frustrated at its many issues, or customers totally put off updating any existing purchases or wanting to buy new ones. Such a shame, as it was looking so good.
I would like to express my opinions on these situations. Firstly, Pookeyhead and his borderless situation where the game appears darker and it's actually the opposite for me. The game is darker when I use fullscreen, and since I discovered that long ago I have always been using borderless so I never experienced any of these bugs with the new Sky and Weather Enhancement Pack 2.0. Here are comparisons, the difference isn't huge but it is there. Here is a comparison with the images split in two down the middle. You can see the shift from Borderless being slightly brighter to the slightly darker Fullscreen setting. Here is the basic section of my graphics settings if it helps. The only issue I have experienced with the Sky and Weather Enhancement Pack 2.0 was a quick drive bug where night time fog and stormy quick drive conditions showed as a bright light blue colour, but that was fixed once I reported it to Armstrong Powerhouse. Since then, luckily no issues here and I have been enjoying the pack. Based on multiple peoples experiences with the pack so far, it seems to be a roll of the dice whether this new Sky and Weather Enhancement Pack 2.0 will work on your system correctly or not which is not good. As mentioned before, I also dislike that there is no backwards compatibilty however even though Armstrong Powerhouse has said that they could not implement that, I feel like a solution would've been to keep the original Sky and Weather Enhancement Pack on the store and Armstrong Powerhouses' scenarios will have downloads utilising 1.0 or 2.0 for people who don't want to spend the money for 2.0 or 2.0 does not work for them. This also would be good for scenarios using 1.0 when a scenario creator has not updated them to support 2.0. The only issue I can see with keeping 1.0 on the store is that it may create some annoyance in the Armstrong Powerhouse support section. Some people may be reporting bugs on the Sky and Weather Enhancement Pack and not reporting if 1.0 or 2.0 is the pack they're using.
To be fair, my experience seems far from typical. The only thing that seems to be a universal issue, is the need to run in borderless or scenarios that use dynamic weather will collapse the game to the taskbar while loading. Every other issue I've had seems to be unique to me so far as I can tell, so I wouldn't let my bad luck be representative of the product as a whole. nah.... just far too limiting in terms of what you can drive, and where you can drive it.
I wish I knew what causes this for some people. My basic graphics settings are not much different from yours.
After a little more tinkering, it would seem that for some reason, "Dynamic Clouds" keeps switching itself back on every time I change a setting and hit save. This would explain the lack of AP weather in quick drive. Does anyone know which file TS uses as it's main config file for such things? I could be wrong, but there appears to be a lot of missing stuff from my Railworks folder, as if the game is part installed where it should be, and part somewhere else. It's like when I installed the sky and weather pack, it unpacked certain things in the wrong places (or not at all... but I suspect the wrong place). Is it possible for Windows to change an assigned drive letter randomly? I have another Railworks folder on another drive, and it's not my back up one, and I have no idea where it came from. Something really weird is happening here. I think I will re-install TSC later with just one drive plugged in so it has no choice but to put things where they are supposed to be. Apart from the difference in brightness between full screen and borderless, I am starting to suspect all my issues here are being caused by an underlying hardware or OS issue, and unlikely as it seems, it's just a coincidence that it's come to light now... or actually, seeing as I hosed everything clean and started again, perhaps not that unlikely.
Yeah Windoze often decides that my steam vanilla install is my default and all installers no matter the vendor want to point to D:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\RailWorks instead of my modded game in E:\RailWorks, I'm forever having to use that JT regfix thing.
I've only ever had one Railworks folder though... well... intentionally that is LOL... I think later on, after I've been shopping for my dear old Dad, is I will remove all drives except C and D (both SSDs)... format them both, and put Windows back on from a back up from last week, reconfigure Steam to use D, and re-download everything. Once it's all done, and tested, I will then, and only then install the other drives. If that doesn't sort this mess out, there will be a PC in my recycle bin by this evening..
Good luck, it's far from a pleasurable experience, I'm still haunted by my disaster of 2021 (PSU fried all my drives, even my optical) Edit, well tbf it fried everything, my beloved 980Ti and my Mobo too, only good thing was I got a cracking upgrade and a really good deal on a 11GB 1080Ti when GPU's were scalpers and bitminers folly and not a gaming usage one to be found, very lucky in that respect
Just a note to try and stay the mass panic: This thread has turned into a "let's fix Pookey's AP Weather" and it may be giving a skewed representation of the AP weather pack. Apart from the need to run borderless to prevent the game from collapsing to the taskbar, all the problems I am having seem to be unique to me, and my system. I'm fairly confident that these issues are not universal to the product. Please stop with the doom and gloom re: AP Sky & Weather EP v2. If I didn't think it was a good product, do you think I'd have spent the past two days trying to fix it?
I'm so well backed up I will lose nothing... it's just a pain in the backside is all, but thanks for the kind wishes
This is anything but a ‘disaster’ for AP. In the overwhelmingly vast majority of cases the feedback has been nothing short of exemplary. I’ve not seen a single issue mentioned on ATS Facebook page that wasn’t patched by AP within 48hrs. Those comments have now stopped and everybody is waxing lyrical about it. This too from a community that doesn’t generally hold back if something isn’t up to spec. It was exactly the same with the SignalEP, I think it’s fair to say that wasn’t a disaster either. PH is having a bad time of it but clearly has something else going on outwith the AP pack & fingers crossed he can sort it out today. As it stands there is nothing wrong with the pack that I can see. Regarding backwards compatibility, why? Richard has already said it was hugely complicated to do. v1 scenarios work with v2, it’s only really the dynamic weather that has any sort of issue. In my experience only 5-10% of scenarios ever used dynamic weather anyway so it’s hardly a big loss. Should the desire take you, editing the dynamic weather in a scenario to work with v2 is much simpler and easier than it was with v1. It takes a couple of minutes max. If this is the price of progress bring it on. The same goes for DTG’s move to bring TSC on to DX12. It’s going to break some old stuff, much will be fixed to work, but if that’s the price to pay for things to come in the future being far better then let’s get on with it. All IMHO of course.
I had the collapses to desktop AND the graphics card “white sky” issue and I have to say the help on here seems to have mostly helped with both. Now running borderless having changed the resolution a bit to make it full screen again and it seems to be working ok now. No more collapsing but possibly a bit more stutter in the scenarios I’ve tested so far. I could probably tolerate the window closing on loading if it meant better performance during play even though it’s a real PITA. If I had my time again I would have delayed buying the pack I think.
Phone Off: Check New 2TB SSD: Check PC building/repair toolbox: check Glass of single malt: Check Loud angry music: Check I'm going in. Full manual install of 5 year's worth of DLC.... see you in a few years LOL
I’ll report it to ap. Looks line you have dynamic clouds ticked. Untick it and you should get ap weather in qd.
... or for some reason AP couldn't install its weather patterns to RailSimulatorCore\Weather - maybe you've set the files to write-protected (AP needs to overwrite RW_Clear.bin, RW_Cloudy.bin, etc... [note that this may have changed - V1 used to do it that way as these are used as the non-DynClouds fallback QD blueprints]
After two days of almost non-stop installing, apart from a few reskins which I will install when a scenario asks for them, everything is back on, and tested. No more OOM crashes, and my settings are saving with no issue now. Sky & Weather works just fine. Thanks for all the help and advice.
Happy Days! I played a couple of the AP amended scenarios today and this new weather pack really is a game changer. The more I see of it the more impressed I am, sure you’re going to love it now it’s working.
Just a heads up. The “weather at startup” trigger actually works in QD as well. Only sometimes you have to push restart to kickstart it the first time you load the drive. This means that ALL standard weathers (even those with transitions) can work in a quick drive. Haven’t had time to test, but probably the pass trigger works as well.
So I presume you have switched back to fullscreen as well? I am pondering a clean reinstallation myself as borderless window seems to affect my fps (as well as the brightness issue). If that's the case, it's probably the way to go.
Yes, I'm using full screen. I don't mind the shrinking to the taskbar thing, and it only does it with scenarios that use variable weather. I also have issues with borderless. I mentioned them earlier on in the thread, and it's just too much trouble to try and overcome them just because occasionally I need to click on the taskbar icon.
I know this is a double post, but i thought many of you would like to know this. Untill now we’ve only really had 7 weather patterns in quick drives. But the AP weather pack 2 has expended the possibilities a lot. Though it might be by accident, since it is not mentioned in the manual: Been doing some testing, with surprising results in regards to quick drive. 1: Dynamic weather DOES WORK to some extent in QD. Simply use the Ap swep trigger, and input the trigger name of dynamic weather pattern you want to use. Not all dynamic weathers have full functionality, but they are not looking broken either. The Shower patterns are beautiful. The thunder pattern works. 2: All standard AP weather patterns fully work with the AP swep trigger in the same manner as described above. I just made this work (and remember, this is in a QD(!). Try it your self: Put an AP swep trigger in the QD scenario. Write “AP Fair Cloud” in the speed limit box. 1km up the track, in the path of the player train, place an Pass trigger. Write “APFairCloud-Overcast20” in the speed limit box. (Notice that the latter is a dynamic weather pattern, and these are unsupported in quick drives) Now within 20 minutes the beautiful sunny scenario will turn to a chill overcast. What a huge improvement to quick driving this is. DTG JD All we need now is for quick drives to fully support dynamic weather patterns, so we can get them visually on par with time tabled scenarios.
There have always been nice weather patterns with changes, even before AP. I remember when I was new to TS, playing a long scenario on the Black Forest Journeys. Starting from Freiburg with a V200 on a dusk snowy foggy winter day, climbing up and then about 40 minutes into the scenario at Donaueschingen the sky would clear up and you see the white hills and the blue sky - but not for long and the fog comes back! Was quite in awe back then. There's a similar one on Stevens Pass, where you're making the delivery up to the Boeing plant. What I would suggest is to move on from the whole scripted weather and to introduce a (player not author controlled) Rain Probability slider, just as in ETS2. This preserves a randomness while leaving you to control how much change you want to have. Makes sense as in ETS2 a delivery may take some days and nights, so weather changes are reasonable. But then I think TSC is in a state of preservation more or less - don't expect any core engine changes (or anybody to touch the source code who has full knowledge of the game engine). We might see some updates to the UI graphics possibly and to the renderer and shaders though.
Yes but the news here is that it is in quick drive, and that it’s really easy to make. Basically untill now, we’ve been limited to 7 weather patterns in quickdrives. The visuals of quick drives is on a whole new level now.
If you've played too much TSC: Getting up in the morning, drinking my coffee on the balcony and thinking: "Nice AP weather today!"
For the price AP is charging I would really have hoped they'd created a "global" version with different ToDs for use on routes in the US, or generally more southern routes with different sun azimuths and sunrise / sunset hours. AP TimeOfDay is based at around 52 degrees north. So it does fit the Northern American and Canadian routes as well, I'm using it on routes like Stevens Pass, Marias Pass, Montana Hi Line, Canadian Mountain Passes, Yellowhead Pass, etc - everything near the US/Canadian border (~ 49 deg) is ok. It would also fit New Zealand if you just set the azimuths to positive as the sun is going E-N-W there. But I've found an issue there with a tilting cloud layer exposing the skydome background - don't know if this has been addressed in V2. Or maybe adjusting weather pattern wind direction could fix that, haven't tried that as it just came to my mind while typing. I've done this myself, creating files for 30, 35 and 40 degrees northern latitude which I've then applied to mid and southern US routes. Azimuth value calculation is pretty easy, I've shown how to do it on this thread. https://forums.dovetailgames.com/threads/ap-weather-extension-adjusting-the-azimuths-guide.56087/ Then adjust sunrise and sunset (the more you approach the equator, the less difference in daylight time between the seasons, so you'll have a 6am sunrise and 6pm sunset roughly throughout the whole year entering the subtropical latitudes). Cajon looks crunchy with the sun being almost directly over your head and casting only small shadows at noon. Only then can you feel the heat (or use 3D weather , but I don't like the overall colour brightness (pale blue sky lacking a gradient) and lack of distance fog in 3D because it exposes low distant terrain textures - the rain or foggy 3D is OK though - let's see if there will be a SilverLining update coming up with the ongoing core rework) If there's interest, I'll post an excel sheet with values to modify (I won't upload modified AP files as one big part of the package you are paying for is obviously the carefully composed colours of each time of day phase so buy the pack if you want them. If you ever tried to set up a TimeOfDay blueprint you know that it can take ages to finally look good - plenty of colours and shading values to set up.)
Hi everyone, I had to resort to a clean reinstallation of TSC to deal with the "Failed to create vertex buffer" error in fullscreen. Running on a clean installation with just APSWEP 2.0 and no other enhancements, everything works like a charm. However, as soon as I install Reshade, the crashes come back each and every time I hit alt-tab. So I was wondering, is there a kind soul that has dealt with this issue or has a Reshade preset that works reliably with APSWEP in fullscreen?
I've not had that issue yet, and I run Reshade. Does it always do it? I hardly ever alt-tab while I'm playing, only ever at the menu screen.
With Reshade installed, yes each and every time. I mostly alt-tab when building scenarios in the editor in order to look at schedules etc, but the issue occurs both in the editor and when driving. My graphics card is a rather outdated GTX 1070 with the latest drivers so video RAM should not be an issue. Before APSWEP 2.0 I used to run RWEnhancer Pro and Reshade along with AP Weather Pack and this issue occured once in a blue moon, to the point of not being worth bothering with. So my guess is something broke when APSWEP 2.0 came along, but have no idea what it might be.
Does it do it with Reshade installed, even if you disable all the shaders? Just trying to work out if it's the program, or the shaders you are using.
Good point. I just did this and it still occurs with all shaders disabled. So Reshade 5.7 is a no-go for me. I'll see if I can find an older version and give it a try.
Mine worked fine with reshade up until a few days ago when I Alt-Tabbed to the desktop as I was leaving the game for an hour or so and couldn’t save it (185 scenario). I came back to this error and it’s been stuffed ever since. Since then I’m constantly getting this blinkin error whenever either I tab out or the weather pack minimises to the desktop. I’ve tried reinstalling Train Sim, reshade and run a scan to check for corrupt files in DX12 with no joy. I’m now basically forced to run the game borderless which is fine except it means I can’t use render scaling therefore effectively doubling the power draw and temperature of my GPU. The interaction of reshade with the game and tabbing to the desktop is definitely the issue. It’s a PITA. edited to add; This may well have coincided with changing from 5.6 to 5.7
