PC Enhancement | Wcml Over Shap - Environmental Lighting Ep

Do you wish night driving was a bit less like this...



and a bit more like this?



Then look no further.

Designed to significantly enhance Just Trains' West Cost Mainline: Over Shap route, this environmental lighting enhancement adds lighting to many villages, hamlets, houses, crossings, industrial areas, roads & farms.

Where areas were pitch black before they are now sympathetically lit, whilst the main towns around the stations have been further developed and enhanced. Intensive effort has been made to improve the look of the stock night scene, where pitch black buildings with perma-lit, all on windows unrealistically punctuate the night sky looking, frankly, miserable.

The pack uses some native assets from the route for street lights etc and custom lights for the rest, all set up as baked lighting to have (hopefully) virtually zero impact on performance.

Download here;

TSW5 | West Coast Mainline Over Shap | Environmental Lighting EP - Train Sim Community

 

JetWash, thank you so much for continuing to do these modifications for the routes.

 

Just drove a short night service with the class 45/1 and really impressed with this new mod for the lights done by JetWash. Thought I would post a few pictures. The first is at Kingmoor Depot and the second is coming through Carlisle station.

 

Was not expecting this mate! Thanks so much for everything you do to make this sim so much better!

 

Thanks. FWIW anything I did at Carlisle was outside the station itself (mainly adding some extra lighting to the buildings that suffered from the inky black building and bright white windows phenomenon - I literally can’t stand to look at it) on the approaches at both ends, and I didn’t touch either yard at that end of the line as they’re nicely well lit anyway.

As for the stations and surrounding areas themselves, the only area that didn’t get touched initially was the immediacy of Oxenholme (since patched), all other station approaches had a fair amount of work, Preston and Lancaster particularly, and a lot of work was done on the Morecombe branch which was all but pitch black. Virtually all other lighting you see on the route has been added as part of this pack, amounting to many hundreds of extra lights and light sources.

It’s an exquisitely well put together route, and I’m sure the only reason this stuff is missing in the first place is down to performance considerations on a certain generation of consoles.

 

Thanks for this JetWash. Hopefully this saves waiting for station lights to come on at 16:25 and the street lights to come on at 17:25 and with improvements.

I didn't mind the default night scene on WCMLos, it was just waiting until 17:25 to get the full effect.

 

Does this require the god mod and environment save (which for some reason I still can’t get the latest version working) or is it standalone?

JT have generally done a better job of the building and street lights on Shap than BPO but default still not enough ambient light. So four cheers and a virtual pint of “Evil Elf” for this mod.

 

This is physical lights and is standalone.

There are some areas that are undoubtedly lacking but it’s not JT’s fault, I blame Gen8 optimisations entirely. No way would it have been left like this were it not for that.

Some of the TSW stock housing assets look absolutely woeful at night because there is no ambient light. The structure of the house is ink black and all the windows have this weird emissive (but not in the sense that it actually casts any light) texture on them that just looks horrible. With this mod that should be gone for good, at least in visible areas.

I’ve been working this morning on a few areas I’d missed (I flew the route northbound and it’s not always easy to pick up all the southbound structures when doing that) so will hopefully push that out as an update today.

Scorpion71 I’m unable to tie these lights to the lighting curves (or at least I haven’t figured that out yet) so they are always on. Obviously invisible during day, they look cracking at night.

 

ps OldVern Remember the name of the GodMode file changes with each release, so the new will not override the old. If you haven’t deleted the old one it will sit above the new one because of the sequential naming and that is the one that will load.

Make sure you have deleted the previous version.

 

OldVern

Here's a perfect example of something I've just done with a before and after (screenshots from the editor)

Before



After



I've only added ambient lighting to the area you can see from the track but it makes a huge difference when driving along at night. That now looks like a small town.

 

WOW.

 

Thanks again, JetWash. In my recent DTG winter survey response I mentioned your work (and your colleagues) as an example of how DTG is skating by on taking the shortcut on new releases and relying on the goodness of the community to finish their work. I find now that I'm only running on routes that you and your friends have enhanced.

This particular example is not a knock on DTG because you've enhanced an already spectacular Just Trains route. But every other UK release has gone from marginal/good to excellent, but only because of freeware add-ons. I know in most cases you're really doing the work for yourselves. But we in the sim community are the grateful benefactors of your generosity of sharing.

 

Oh I'd much prefer them to be always on than be off when it's pitch black and it's also better having them on when it's darker due to clouds and heavy rain. I thought DTG were supposed to sort it when the enviroment gets to a certain level of darkness, lights were supposed to come on, never saw it happen! So thanks for the mod.

I don't suppose there's anything you can do about the default AI 87 horn, it's waaaayyyyy too loud for my liking

 

Thanks everyone

I’ve finished the update hopefully and just testing it now. A fair bit in it as it turns out;

• Enhanced the lighting around the approaches to Oxenholme
• Better iIlluminated a good few hamlets and villages so they look correct when heading south as well as north
• Improved the area just north of Preston
• Added light to the town shown above (Warton, to the north of Carnforth)
• Added a bit more lighting around Morecambe and the fairground. Tidied up some areas of the branch line
• Some minor additions & adjustments around Preston
• Added/illuminated some more hamlets and farm buildings in the Lune Gorge/Valley
• Illuminated all the motorway signs on the M6 where it runs parallel to the tracks

Hopefully will have it out by the end of the day

 

Well, as we wait for the update from JetWash, here are a few shots at Morecambe and on the run to Lancaster. The first one is departing Morecambe station, the second is looking back at Morecambe with the signal box, at Bare Lane, next is the approach to Lancaster lookinh at the bridge and last is Lancaster station in platform B1.

 

hes a good lad is Jetwash. No bags of coal for him this year.

 

The update is now available on TSC. Enjoy!

TSW5 | West Coast Mainline Over Shap | Environmental Lighting EP - Train Sim Community

 

I’ve just had chance to look and am not sure it’s intentional (if it is I’m not sure I understand), but the mod isn’t installed in those images. They’re all default lighting.

 

That is an interesting comment since the 12/4 pak file is installed when I took these shots.

 

you probably did not activate the mod in your mastery rewards Sharon E

 

This is a pak file, you shouldn't have to activate it anywhere.

 

Yes you have to! Go to Mastery Rewards in Game and you need to set the green button to activate. Its the same like the Salzburg Rosenheim upgrade packages

 

Xander1986, OK, I do not know how I missed this instruction, since most pak files are active once you put them into the dlc folder.

 

It’s quite prominent on the download page to be fair…

It was either that or two separate pak files, so ticking a box is the lesser of two evils

 

JetWash, thank you, I was just careless in thinking, it's a pak file, drop and play, further not fully reading the instructions..

 

It can happen Better that you point that out otherwise you missed the nice addition of this mod.

 

Absolutely splendid, tip top job. Will be doing more night runs on this route now.

Of course it does beg the question, if the facility is within the game to display this much better lighting, why aren’t the devs doing it at source? Including JT, notwithstanding the superb job they did on Shap this would make it even better.

 

Well, I think I have it and just did a class 47 run as light loco from Carlise to Preston and took several shot, so does this look like the mod is installed? Thank you for the help in getting me to be able to enjoy this work.

 

Have fun!

 

Go to Morecombe. Is the roller coaster lit up? It’s the quickest and easiest way to tell.

 

is it because of the mod I have snow around coaches glowing in colors( red, gree, orange)?

 

Nope, absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with this mod. It doesn’t alter trains in any way at all.

 

TSW5 | WCML Over Shap | Ambient Lighting Mod Timelapse

 

Have not run Morecombe since I activated it. Will do that line today.

 

Hi all. I've just updated this mod for what will likely be the final time. Enjoy

TSW5 | West Coast Mainline Over Shap | Ambient / Environmental Lighting EP - Train Sim Community