I've been playing the new East Coast Mainline route and noticing a weird thing with the appearance of the trees. When they first appear on the horizon, they look pretty solid. Then, as they get closer, they suddenly change and become almost transparent-looking. A second or so later, they become more solid again. This happens with most of the trees, and causes them to appear to 'flash' as you approach them. This effect is really difficult to show in a screenshot, so I started looking at other objects as they approached. Most of them were fine, but then I saw that the same thing happens with fences. One long continuous fence illustrates the issue well, as shown in the picture below. Note how the furthest away part of the fence is solid. Then the next closest part is more transparent, then more transparent still, then solid again, then on the next part the mesh is completely invisible, then the nearest part has a visible mesh again. You can just about tell that the same thing is happening with the trees on the right, but it's much less obvious than with the fence. Do others have the same problem, and if so, has anyone found anything which helps? Thanks.
Either LOD is busted (would affect everybody) or your GPU driver might be playing up (affects you only/others maybe with same driver)
I noticed the weird trees on the ECML instantly. Surely something went wrong because they look absolutely hideous. Hopefully this can be fixed so the trees no longer transition from solid -> transparent -> solid etc. when approaching them.
It's bad enough that tree LOD is handled so badly with morphing shapes (they really need to research how other developers handle smooth transitions between distant and nearby detail levels) – now trees are getting more issues. What happened to the concept of continuous improvement?
It may be time for some newer tree models as well. Just playing around with the editor it seems DTG only have a palette of 4 or 5 variants - this could start making upcoming routes a bit samey. Trees are quite difficult to make when balancing performace against quality though (in my very limited experience with Blender).
I also noticed on a couple of ECML streams that their seems to be an awful lot more ghosting than normal as well. If (for example) a telegraph pole passes by then any trees behind it split into vertical strips for split second before retaining there original shape. It's not a huge deal but when it happens multiple times it does look a bit messy. Around the 3min 30sec mark is a good example - but it's present pretty much all the time.
Thank you all for your responses. It’s reassuring to know it’s not just me (even if that means there’s no way of addressing it currently). Hopefully DTG will fix it at some point.
It is one of those things that is really annoying but just about able to ignore and forget it is like that. It would be great if something could be done about this though.
I was playing this tonight and noticed its still the same.. perfect timing to see this thread bumped! for sure not an Indvidual hardware issue. in-game settings on ultra and using jetwash's ultra preset for improved visuals and it still occurs. :/
The fence issue on the OP I’m pretty certain is standard sighting on series x. As you get closer it becomes better kinda thing and because of that it becomes noticeable if you watch it. another point to Xbox on graphics issues
Me personally I wouldn't count on that being fixed because if DTG fixes it they're going to want to call it a new game and charge some outlandish price for it like they did when stuff about tsw3 was mentioned they fixed it and called it tsw4. Here comes tsw5 now that graphics are being mentioned.
I've noticed lately that trees at certain distances in certain lighting almost shimmer like they are covered in a swarm of bugs or something. I could reproduce it on both the PS5 and Xbox. I feel like the graphics and texturing issues have gotten worse in the last month or so. I am having all kinds of texture issues where the cab or signage will drop to some low res blurry mess (I mainly play on Series X but I've also seen people mention it for PS5).
