Are clouds good enough in TSW or do they need a complete overhaul? Depending on the season and time of day clouds in TSW can look relatively good, but still not perfect and artificial at times. VERSUS Can you tell which two are not TSW pics, of course you can. The difference is night and day! It’s obviously which game does the sky and clouds better. I would love to see some improvements in the later versions of the game and if DTG need to scrap dynamic clouds in order to achieve better realistic looking skies, so be it. I’d sacrifice dynamic clouds over photo realistic static looking clouds any day. What are your thoughts, are you happy with the current sky and cloud’s implementation in TSW?
Honestly, overall the current sky and clouds are perfectly sufficient for a train sim (in my opinion anyway). There are far more important areas in the game needing improvement than the sky. I'd rather see efforts made to improve how the dynamic weather changes are implemented rather than the clouds themselves.
The last 2 pictures are not from TSW I guess, the first 2 are. The sky is not bad in TSW, especially not for a dynamic sky. It's is not disturbing or ruining the look of the game in my opinion. So for me, no overhaul needed.
The realistic weather mod works great with the sky. Now I can't imagine playing without it. The weather and sky seem unrealistically artificial.
I think the way the sky and clouds look is just fine in TSW. It’s very pretty for the most part. I’d rather DTG somehow revamped the dynamic weather system it has though. It’s horrible as it changes the weather far too frequently and it loves choosing Fog more than anything else. I always choose custom weather settings before starting a route. I just can’t stand the dynamic setting…
Sky probably not. But lighting and distance fog definitely yes. First of all I will start with fixes for extremely contrast shading at sunrise and sunset. Then it will be cool if they remove fog in cloudy weather. Because for now if you add clouds, you also get distance fog for free.
Having invested a lot of time in TSC whilst having the AP mods installed, I’m honestly blown away at times by some of the cloud formations as it really adds an extra layer of immersion. I really hate the TSW overuse orange/pink sky you get in evening during spring and summer as to me that doesn’t feel realistic here in the UK. If they want to adapt that in other countries with warmer climates that’s fine, but fine tuning each region should be done better.
The colors can be to much indeed, but I think this is something introduced with TOD4. I can't remember seeing this on routes pre TOD4, overall I can't say I'm the biggest fan of TOD4. TOD3 also has it's negatives, but in the end it looks more natural in my opinion.
I think the first route I saw it on was SEHS, one of the scenarios in TSW3. I feel the biggest problem with TOD4 is that it looks too gamma intense, clear skies/ sunny looks like you’re in the safari desert. The only thing missing is you frying an egg on the nose of the train. I’ve started using winter months with medium or more clouds. That lighting with the more realistic looking foliage looks better imo.
I am certainly happy with the Sky and Clouds, they look quite realistic. I’d rather they work on getting the scenery accurate, where it has been poor.
Dynamic weather transitions are shocking, at least on console. In one frame you go from mist and fog to bright sunshine!!
Could probably do with work but not over more pressing graphics needs such as more options built into the user settings - brightness, contrast, gamma, degree of darkness at night, adjustable (or preferably killswitch) for adaptive eye.
On several months and moments of the day, the foliage and trees looks quite unrealistic, to much high lighted, causing a unatural and cartoony look. The shadow pop in makes this even worse. But I think it's also depending on the route, some do a better job then others.
Well, of course there's always room for improvement, but the clouds and sky are pretty good right now.. As Vern said, what's really needed is more player control over graphics in general and lighting in particular, especially at night, and a way to disable that dreadful adaptive eye feature.
I think the TOD4 skies themselves are fit for purpose, but some tweaking does need to be done with the lighting itself as the game looks really washed out in certain weather conditions. When the lighting isn’t under conditions causing it to wash out, the game generally does look really nice. Speaking of weather, it’s about time the visual effects of rain, snow and blizzards get an upgrade. The rain droplets look especially awful when the lighting is washing out or in headlights at night. When I’m not playing Journey mode, I stick to custom weather and set it to patterns I know won’t cause lighting to look off.
This helps a lot, its not perfect but at least it doesn't look like your about to enter warp drive every time it rains https://www.trainsimcommunity.com/mods/c3-train-sim-world/c19-patches/i2789-better-rain-v2-tsw6
I very rarely play TSW with the weather being set to rainy. My god the default rain at night looks terrible. You can hardly see anything. It’s too much almost to the point it looks unplayable. The mod makes it look way better. DTG really need to make an adjustment there lol.
Although I doubt TSW will ever get new lighting, it would be nice to see some major visual improvements to the game. Last time I believe there was a major visual improvement was TSW4? With volumetric lighting & fog?
That's plenty for me. I'd rather focus on performance and bringing older routes up to current standards.
I think they are good enough. AP's Weather and Cloud EP smash TSW's weather out of the box, but in all fairness AP utilises skyboxes which are still images while TSW has clouds that are actually generated.
