Horseshoe Curve Lighting Has Gone Nuclear?

Has Putin used a nuke in Horseshoe without us noticing. Stock ini and look at the lighting here....

 

Memento mods you are using - the one for new sky on older routes

 

No mods at all for this route no.

It seems to be something with the eye adaption from what I can see. When you look at the sky and then back to the ground it appears normal but then settles on being blown out again.

 

Putin swears blind the Americans nuked themselves!

Havnt got an answer for the lighting problem though I'm afraid.

Try disabling all mods briefly?

 

A lot of the preserved routes (tsw2020 and 2) have a lot of bloom to them. There's mods for reducing the bloom over on the mod website which reduces from 2.5x to 1x

 

Despite what someone said to me in another thread earlier, the core changes *have* affected how older routes look. Usually for the better, like RSN, PC or NTP, but not it seems in this case!

 

Just took this and it does look a tad washed out. Before anyone asks, I do not use mods.

 

With my earlier screenshot it got a bit better as time progressed but it was still completely blown out with the sky highlights

 

I saw this on HSC even in TSW2, anytime you're looking in a direction where the sun is. Definitely seems a bit overdone.

DW

 

Would you say it's at certain times of the day it looks worse? On other routes it seems at certain times of the day or night the lighting is somewhat different.

 

I'm not sure to ge honest. I have a feeling it's summer mornings it's most prevalent

 

I get the same on sos at times. If you look towards the sky it looks ok. Look towards the ground and its overly bright.

 

Agreed. I think the lighting on sos is atrocious. It's also been unacknowledged when feeding back too

 

It kinda seems like dtg have washed their hands of sos. I hope they give its some love soon.

 

Did DTG confirmed that? I mean, maybe it was not intended but still would be nice if they would say a word about it.

 

Matt said before launch they had rebaked all the old routes (lighting), that's why you had to redownload them all as new files. So there is bound to be some affect on them, whether really noticeable or not.

I don't use mods either and refuse to use mods to fix/improve issues that are DTG's to fix/improve.

I'd got the impression their development and publishing approach was get the stuff out, leave it because not many people are kicking up a fuss and modders are doing the job, so move on and make more money instead.

I'm glad to see, with the updates and fixes to save (finally!), the tide seems to be turning. At least in some ways they seem to be taking this development business more seriously.

 

Personally, the more I dig into TSW3 the more it seems like something has been massively dumbed down, the old game ran everything at ultra with heavy ini edits at 60fps on a 125% resolution at 1440p.

Now I am fettling more than I am playing trying to find that again and the mid to long distance graphics seem to look awful most the time. I love the game but somethings not bubbling right in this one.

 

Not to mention the significant proportion of players who are on XBox and Playstation and can't use mods to fix stuff that's broken

 

Well, exactly. So let's hope they really don't think so little of a large portion of their chosen markets.

 

Thanks, I've must have missed that info.

Do you know if it is applicable for old routes in TSW3 or also in TSW2?

 

Just TSW3. TSW2 versions remain the same.

 

Cool, thanks for clarification.

 

thats how TSW3 SEHS looks on my PC

 

Ok, Matt, thanks for your detailed clarification as well.

 

Ah, my faulty memory mixed up cooking and baking. That's why my cakes never come out right.

 

Is it possible this is related to the passengers who are "bringing us love"?

 

This is from SEHS, both stock. To me, when you look at the building in the middle it appears lower res on TSW3

TSW2
TSW3

 

TSW 2

TSW3 - Train appears really washed out here.

 

TSW2


TSw3



To my eyes, as londonmidland stated (if i read right) its that centre horizon point your eye is drawn too that just looks off to me and lower detail. I'll find some pics

 

TrainSim-Matt I think one other thing, especially on SEHS for TSW 3, is that the eye adaption is very aggressive, often making scenes look far too over exposed and washed out, which makes distant assets loose all of their detail. This is especially apparent on a fully cloudy day. It just doesn’t seem dark enough as the game is trying to constantly increase exposure, even when it shouldn’t.

I’ve noticed TSW has always had an issue balancing out the sky and terrain exposure. Try a medium cloudy day and notice as you point the camera to the sky, you see a lot of detail in the clouds. As soon as you point the camera back down, all that detail is lost, with it just turning into white blobs and the ground gaining too much exposure.

I mentioned in another thread that I believe it’s the way eye adaption has been set up. It’s been set up to recreate what a camcorder sees, not human eyes. Also, it seems that camcorder does not have high dynamic range, as it cannot support the detail of the whole scene (sky, terrain and distant terrain)

 

I would second this and it would support what I have seen whereby when you just stand and pan the camera up and down in some weathers it blows all the picture out which may attribute to why my pic of horseshoe vs yours looks different perhaps?

 

I just did a side by side on my two XBoxes and identically configured monitors on HSC and while the bloom is more aggressive in TSW, with every single shadow being a washed out grey that makes textures look much flatter as a result, it doesn't necessarily seem to be an eye adaptation thing as looking between the ground and the sun and back doesn't seem to do much.

Honestly my bigger complaint here is how as I observed loading both games up to do this comparison, it takes three minutes longer to get into the game on TSW3, with the age it takes to load to the main menu, followed by how long it takes to set the time of day to match in spawn on foot mode, as it does not automatically pick the current time the way TSW2 does, and the clock takes an absolute AGE to slowly scroll through to get to it. (it really needs speed options to go by hour, minute, etc. maybe a clock you can just move through the digits and manually set the time with the up and down inputs.)

 

Thats exactly how SEHS looks on my PC (RTX 3070 TI)

 

This example shows a difference. Exact same scenario on each game.

TSW2 - The histogram shows a lot more detail in the shadows, not much midrange and the whites are blown out as seen in the sky.



TSW3 - A much more consistent histogram which isn't bad to be fair but in this example even before you get to true white it appears to be blowing the highlights out.

 

chieflongshin When doing the comparisons, have you kept both games completely vanilla?

If not, then I recommend temporarily removing ALL ini tweaks when making the comparison shots.

 

TSW2 - You can see here, a lot of shadow in this scene, not a great deal of detail in the centre of the histogram which you would expect with a shadowy scene



TSW3 - With this one can see it's not hitting the shadows as hard but its introduced a lot of midrange detail and I think (welcome others thoughts introduced too much light in the tunnels.

 

Currently are both vanilla for these.

 

The general theme with TSW 3's lighting seems to be it blowing out the highlights and/or being way too overexposed, as well as there not being much detail in the shadows. They simply aren't black/dark enough. Specifically under bridges and where buildings block sunlight.

 

To me and I'm happy to be wrong but it seems like TSW goes in hard on the shadows or highlights and loses the detail in the mid range a bit. I don't know if that's why things seem off?

TSW2




TSW3

 

Which route(s) are they?

 

I think from the histograms there is detail in the shadows or the values wouldn't be so high but I don't know if its the low to mid tones which need the bump.

March Hare Hamberg lubeck and Sandpatch here< Just trying some of the others.

 

All I know is that clear weather looks decent, but as soon as you add clouds, it just makes things look washed out and lacking any detail. Specifically trees and foliage which turn bright green with ZERO ambient occlusion and/or shadowing, making the whole scene look flat.

 

TSW2 - As you'd expect under shadow the histograms more to the left but there is still some detail in the roof .


TSW3 - Blacks are blown out but you can see the loss of detail in the low midtones.

 

this is what surprised me so much when TSW3 came out and everyone was saying how much better the routes looked and all i was seeing was the same as chieflongshin. just washed out colours it must be a taste thing but I prefer TSW2

 

Same here. It appears that brightness has been ramped up with no attention or care given to calibrating the image. This absolutely adversely affects the overall quality, impacting on texture detail and colour/shadow depth. This, in my opinion, appears to be a lazy development approach. Sorry, but it does. Lazy development approach is the impression I have got about many aspects of this title/franchise, such as the poor and ultimately broken save game implementation – for literally years.

As attention is now being given to the save game, and there is talk of optimisation in progress, I would like to think this marks a turn in the development attitude, under the guidance of Matt as Executive Producer.

So, let's see this new direction applied to lackluster areas such as the awful flat, washed-out look of SEHS, for example.

 

Yeah, honestly I find it looks similar to when I was experimenting with HDR on my XBox before giving up and leaving it off. Some games it looked great, with vibrant colours, bright highlights, and nice deep blacks. And it was easy to calibrate those games to my monitor using their HDR config menu settings. But some of them were simply impossible to get into a place where they didn't look extremely washed out and grey with far too much light obscuring all the detail and colour (Assassin's Creed Odyssey being a chief offender here, making the entirety of Greece look whiter than the promo pics for SKW. Ironically all the wonderful statues in period-accurate paint jobs looked more like their modern day museum counterparts.) In the end it was too much of a nuisance turning HDR off at the system level each time I loaded a game with this problem and I just left it permanently off.

 

Call me crazy but this example looks considerably better in TSW3