I've been playing the TSW series from the very beginning and have watched the game grow to how it is now and the release of the brand new lighting effects in Train Sim Worlds 3 have been (in my opinion) quite the game changer! The routes that use this newer lighting system are way more enjoyable to drive as I am a sucker for in-game lighting and this got me thinking... Why can't the previous routes from the two earlier games get their lighting up to date? I will be honest, I am no way in any shape to be a professional game developer and have no idea on the intricacies of game design/development but what's stopping the developers from giving the previous routes some of that newer lighting look? I understand that there are ALOT of routes that would have to be updated but I feel it would make these older routes like brand new!
Not being an expert on this, but their method in setting up the lighting was very much a questionable and unflexible thing. All material properties had to be tuned to the lighting model - so by changing the lighting they had to rework all materials used. In TSC you can easily swap the ToD files yourself - that's what Armstrong Powerhouse did with their Sky and Weather Enhancement Pack. While some may not like the looks of TSC, the game engine was definitely well planned and laid out by Kuju to be very flexible and customizable. I bet they did not expect their game to be played almost two decades after planning and coding started in 2004. TSW was a lot of trial and error development, leading to dead ends, that's why you have three different versions of the game, TSW2020, 2 and 3 - and probably TSW4, who knows. So don't expect this to happen any time soon.
It's a lot of work to do since there's close to 70 dlc now. Like above mentioned, every single asset and light emissive need to be updated to be compatible with the lighting or the lumen value increased. Whether the legacy routes will continue to get it, nobody knows. But it would be nice to have it for the most popular routes.
From what I've sen on the streams regarding this, in the old lighting system there were "4 levels of lighting" so there wasn't the flexbility and capacity to change things very much. In TSW3 they increased this to closer to a thousand, but this meant that all the old routes had "very dark, dark, bright, very bright" on the new scale, so they put a transform in to allow TSW2 routes to run on TSW3 at all with any kind of lighting flexibility (or being able to see) So why can't they change this easily? As the others have said above it's down to the way that assets were (and possibly still are) made when it comes to lighting, light emitting, reflectivity and so on. So for the old routes to be brought into the new system they'd have to have all their assets "retuned" to the new system, rebaked and then put out to all the users. That's a lot of work at cost that they wouldn't recoup. So nice for the users who get a new skybox and lighting, but little reclaim for the company
