Greetings, I'm playing tsw3 on series x and the "morphing-line" just a few meters in front of the train (well it really is a circle around the camera) is driving me nuts. I tried HD mode but it's just the same. Then I figured that, with the Xbox version, I automatically own the windows store version on PC. So I tried that with draw distance set to ultra: it's the same. Then I tried the engine.ini fix r.ViewDistanceScale=5 and it didn't move the line further away. Is there any way to resolve this problem? For me it really kills the immersion. I'd rather have no cars driving around and no people in oncoming trains than this line of horror. Also on PC the Fullscreen windowed mode is locked in 4k (my desktop resolution) and the windowed mode constantly changes my resolution, which is also very annoying. Sorry if there are some mistakes. English isn't my native language.
As far as I know (from research trying to get rid of it myself) it is not possible to change, unfortunately.
UE4 was never designed to be a fast paced train simulation engine. It's a fine engine, but not for universal use - a bit overhyped. Developing their own engine was not an option for DTG it seems....
Developing your own engine to do something that an off-the-shelf engine can do 85% as well is a huge undertaking of resource and is also a very hard specialisation to recruit for. Unless you're in AAA games and expect to use an engine for very specific things (so the investment is because another engine can't remotely do what you need) or across multiple very high-selling games (because then the investment into a proprietary engine will save you money on fees to Epic, etc) then it's not really feasible to do. What a lot of mid-sized developers will do is adapt an existing engine to allow them to do what they want it to, and I believe this is what DTG have done - although there are still limitations. Honestly, if it was straightforward to do, I would imagine they'd be all too glad to get rid of these issues already.
SCS Software (equally sized as DTG) did develop their own engine and are constantly updating it. The tree LOD popping in TSW is almost unbearable (and the worst I've seen in any game ever - check TSC's great Münster-Bremen and see how smooth scenery can look on an ICE ride - without relying on Motion Blur to cover up issues), ETS2 does not have this issue or stuttering even on high spec PCs. It has good night lighting and very soft eye adaption. And almost all issues reported on Steam forums are user / mod errors. These screenshots were made on my old PC with 100% scaling only.
If it's not possible to improve the draw distance on shadows on the tracks, can we at least have an option to disable it? The 20 feet draw distance of the shaddow doesn't really make the game looks that good so I guess it would be better to let us have the option to disable it on consoles.
Indeed, and when they started on this path it was a gamble to invest, but they had access to the blossoming Polish dev talent locally to be able to pull it off. What they have achieved (albeit that the pictures you posted are of the game in recent history, not when the engine was new) is fantastic and shows what's possible when it all goes well (the lighting update a few years ago for example!). It's too late for DTG to go this route now, unfortunately, but I guess my point here is that building your own engine is very much the risky and maverick route to go. So while it's totally fair to point to SCS, they're more the exception than the rule. In other words, it's completely understandable why DTG didn't do it (especially when they consider Simugraph to solve their no doubt most pressing need for realistic physics simulation).
So considering all of this, I'm just taking TSW as it is. If you're consistently in a state of hope and expectation, you're just bound to be disappointed - which is not what I'm buying a game for. Too many people consider it to be a feature-on-demand game ("I want this!...Why are you not doing it?... You don't care for us...I'm done..."). Not good for oneself getting into this mindset
Correct me if I'm wrong, but these sims do have their own engine: Zusi 3 Train Simulator Classic X-Plane Run 8 Train Simulator Loksim3D (started with that, now pretty outdated though, went into obscurity because of a terrible community at odds, fighting over asset distribution) TrainZ SimRail though is based on Unity, as is UBOAT and Reentry - An Orbital Simulator. Which do their job very well and look better to me than UE stuff. But that's subjective.
Oh there are hundreds of games based on proprietary engines, but tens of thousands of games are not (at least in the past 10-15 years). And not very many of the proprietary engines are so straightforward for porting to consoles, which would have also been a consideration (although some proprietary engines, especially in AAA are of course designed for this from the ground up).
Yes, indeed - no slight intended. Farming Sim is another huge success with a proprietary engine... maybe simulators are actually better-suited to building something from scratch, but I would assume that based on their experience with TSC they just decided using UE4 would be better.
I personally would like to see the skybox revisited. Beautiful as it is not every dawn or dusk is purple is it?
Well, as I said, I'm also on PC since you automatically own it on all Microsoft platforms. I would really like to know about that fix.
