I would like to preface this post by saying I absolutely DESPISE the winter effects it TSW. You know the one, when you drive a Journey service on a wintery night, and the snowy wind flickers before you train. It's probably enough to give one an epileptic seizure. (Boston - Providence is a prime example for this effect as almost entire Journey takes place in winter. So I've flicked through the preview stream and - What the heck is this? Why are you so fixated on these obnoxious effects? It's not enough that lights on many locos are next to useless, we must obscure the vision more with wind and fog effects. Question for DTG - can this effect be toned down or disabled entirely, even if it's through an .ini file edit?
Welcome to Bat Simulator: navigate your environment using sound, like a bat! #vision-is-overrated P.S. I was driving an ICE3M on SKA, and I had to use the outside camera. From the driver camera, it looked like it was night.
I wasn't impressed by volumetric fog. So far the only underwhelming new feature for me. But I'm not concerned by the fog, I will give it a try but I'm pleased with the fact that I can turn it off as every performance gain is preferred over performance loss learned from the footage yesterday. Not gonna discuss performance at the moment as there were no promises made towards performance but I don't think this game can handle more new features like volumetric fog that only add performance loss.
The effect is this bad because DTG is simply using basic spotlights for headlights. Just look at the image below. This is not how a train (or any vehicle) headlight works.
Note that OMSI had this "volumetric fog" since the beginning, and it worked flawlessly there. So it can absolutely be implemented in a nice and realistic way.
Could you please provide more information about what's bad with spotlights? What to use instead? Bulbs? Rects? Or what?
Honestly I am not that familiar with UE, but let's just say whatever method other games use for vehicle headlights. There are plenty of examples. Or what techinque that single train on that one german route (Dresden-Reisa maybe?) is using for realistic looking headlights. A quick google search will offer you a pretty good solution to fix the fog issue from above. Set up a narrow dummy light cone that does not actually produces light, it's just there to produce godrays in fog. Then set up a wider light cone that actually shines wider and further to get proper illumination in front. If combined with the technique used on that one german EMU, I think the overall headlights would be pretty good. But long story short, it is a well known fact that simple spotlights without any trickery cannot produce realistic headlight effects, because vehicle headlights don't work the same way as handheld flashlights.
But how can you tell then that a simple spotlight is used for it? Not only one train is using that. The BR101, ET423, VT612, VT628, BR401 and since a few days all TSW4 DRA vehicles using that now. They actually using a IES light profile. I spent a week, crawling through 80k files to find one fitting IES for train headlights and brights. There are none for trains per se. But there were some of real headlights from cars and trucks. One set of them i'm using since then in every train that goes through my hands in TSW. So, no basic spotlights there. They also using inverse falloff, lots of older DLC don't, what gives those unrealistic evenly and wide spread headlight beams. The fog in TSW might be a tad to think i guess. I didn't tried yet to change anything on that since its core tech i will not put my hands on at all.
I think this could be the problem in the behaviour we are seeing. I have a nice reference video, which is not the Flirt1 and I am also aware that you can not always judge from a YT video what the real situation was like and how comparable it is to what we are looking at here. However, it does show that train drivers are using high beams in foggy conditions and it still seems to enhance thier vision enough, rather then just using the normal lights: Nachtfahrt, Führerstandsmitfahrt von Sorsum nach Lehrte West - Im Nebel durch Hildesheim Hbf - YouTube At around 18:10 you can see them driving through a station, where he switches back from high beam to normal lighting. Also, from the time the station comes into view I would assume the fog is thick enough to roughly compare it to the fog we saw in the stream (if not even thicker). It is these visuals I would like to see in the game, as, otherwise, I am not sure the new effect has made the "driving" part of the game worse to before. Therfore, I would hope that the developer of the core game would also take note of this issue.
The fog is way to self reflective and so the light scatters too much in it what makes it thicker than it is. Probably a downside for saving performance. Make the fog reacting better would maybe need way more power from the graphics renderer waht could end up in 0fps then with a real time lighting environment like TSW is. Other games using baked lighting and that way "cheaper" even with good looking volumetric fog.
Naah, environmental sounds or lack thereof a bat would die quickly from collision damage in this game.
That’s really interesting. So TSW uses real time lighting? I understood an awful lot of it was baked in. When did that change, any idea?
To me it just looks like the light cone angle just needs tilting down which has been a problem forever in TSW - clearly evident when you have snow and windy weather as the headlamp just reflects back, but I'm not an expert in DB traction so it could be like this in real life.
Since the beginning. Realtime weather and ToD only works with real time lightning in the manner how TSW needs it. Only stations and tunnels are baked in some mixed sort to allow real time headlights to work in. Of course, you could bake the whole game in pieces of maybe 1 minute ToD difference. Then you end up with tons of data to generate (would probably need half a year for a pack of 3 routes) and you need to store that data in memory somehow what is impossible. Wider ranges, like every 30 minutes, would not work at all and even that would produce lots of overhead data to generate and store. Such a game can only be done with real time environments and that is for sure a problem performance wise. All the neat optimisations that other games do, don't work in such a game at all. It's all already quite cheap in consuming performance what is the reason some things don't look that good as you wish.
Gees, that’s actually quite depressing. I know early on the lighting was dynamic and real time but they changed it back with GWE to rectify the really poor fps. I didn’t realise we were now using mostly dynamic lighting, but if we are I’m surprised it’s as poor as it is. The default lighting in TSW3 and now TSW4 is pretty poor, imho. The preview streams have shown the same over-exposed, over bright lighting that has been the hallmark of TOD4. Such a shame.
Question for DTG - can this effect be toned down or disabled entirely, even if it's through an .ini file edit? The answer to this is yes, on the stream we had the fog set to 0.5 (of a scale up to 1) on the settings, you can lower this to a value you prefer if it's too much, and disable to fog if you'd like.
If you’re on PC God Mode is your friend. Whatever the weather if it’s snowing you can kill the wind and that gets rid of that rank blowing snow effect. As far as the normal/old style fog goes you can control that as well. The scale might be different in TSW4, but in TSW3 you would be changing fog along the lines of 0.01, 0.02 etc. 0.5 would be very thick. Of course, fog is generally patchy and is very rarely just a uniform blanket of the exact same visibility for miles on end. I’m assuming TSW4 doesn’t simulate this which is a bit of a shame.
Here you go: 1.0 2.0 3.0 I would suggest looking at it that the visibility with the setting at 0.5 is comfortably under 75m which is incredibly rare, almost unheard of in-fact and as such I’d say it’s total overkill for a standard figure for fog. I’d actually go as far as saying that 0.05 is even probably too much to be honest.
Ha like it, ta Seems to decrease the curve of intensity past 1.0 which is interesting That aside, would be interesting to see a trip past a few stations in that pea souper
