Night time

[TheTazman]

Something i absoloutly love is seeing railways at night in well light towns etc where the rails reflect the street lights and signals etc with really vibrant colours. I am sure there are a million photos on the net that depict this but would be very nice in a KRS.

Regards

Tazman

[CaptainBazza]

Yes, you do see some very atmospheric lighting effects at night - remember "The Night Mail"; but I'd really like to know if KRS will have little lighties in the sim's refrigerators and will they shut off when the fridge door closes.... Just one of those nice little touches that will lift KRS above its peers.

[bigvern]

I can remember back in the days when M$ were previewing Train Sim and I asked their PR for some night shots. Was told they weren't keen on issuing these as they can tend to just look, well, dark. Now a night-time video clip would possibly be more meaningful, particularly if it showed off the lighting effects.

[KlausM]

Others surely see this differently, but I personally don't understand the joy of driving at night. And it is even worse to view screen shots of scenes at night. There might be nice ones with lit buildings, places and so on, but seeing a nearly black train with a black background and black sky with some white (stars, headlights), red, green, yellow (signal) spots on it does not fascinate me.

Just my two cents

Klaus

[AndiS]

Cent 1: It might be difficult to rate the rendering of night views from screenshots as the difference of perceptions between a moving image and a still should be bigger for a night view than for a day view due to the large contrasts.

Cent 2: Current display hardware might struggle to represents all these hues of the same color (mostly blue) that you see at night. This could be a reason why they look just black where in reality you could discern something (if not much). Of course this does not excuse the absence of reflections on rails etc. but these are only part of the cake.

Like Klaus, I would not be too fond of driving in the black, but a moonlight night could certainly be romantic (in particular if the illumination of the mist from moon and city lights is implemented nicely ). [Before someone says, I ask too much: The end was a bit ironic. ]

[KlausM]

...in addition, LCD monitors (like mine) generally have problems making different shades of dark colors not looking the very same.

Klaus

[bigvern]

Certain routes in MSTS, driving with a steam loco or vintage British diesel which wasn't fitted with a halogen headlamp it was quite literally pitch black. What I would like to see for nightime is better implementation of ambient lighting, e.g. street lights or platform lights should illuminate the area around about not just a cone of light projected from the lamp.

[tads1970]

I would like to see towns lit up at night along with some streetlamps,as for the signals, should be bright from far away fading as you get up close.

@CaptainBazza,I remember the nightmail,only seen it once thou b/w if i remember,would love to see it again,never came across it on the net:(

I second the notion for some night shots or even better a video just to fill the gap until its release

Daz

[Crosstie]

Yes, having grown up watching locomotives with blindingly bright headlights beaming day and night, I never quite understood the absence of headlights on British engines. I remember some activities that were pretty much unplayable unless you added a fake "sphere of light" to the engine file, a somewhat unnatural effect.

There are very few places in the world where there is a complete absence of ambient light, even if only moonlight is available.

Regards, Stu.

[jpantera]

I love driving in the dark, you really have to know a route properly, it was only in the early 90s that all engines on BR had to have sealed beam headlights fitted. The railway ran perfectly fine without them for 150 years or something like that.

[SamWBA]

Well, if Kuju are promising us all such good graphics, does this mean then that it will need a hi spec machine to run it on. I hope not. Perhaps even like on FSX a realism choice, but then again I hate the one on FSX.

[bigvern]

Well...without going OT, with FSX M$ seem to have created a monster which cannot run to its maximum potential on any existing hardware. IMHO they dropped the ball big time and while some of the forums have the usual sycophantic fanboys springing to its defence, there is a consistent undertone of dis-satisfaction at what Aces/MS have done.

And without significant optimisation there is little or no way the FSX graphics engine could be enhanced to serve, ahem, any kind of rumoured new land based transport sim from M$.

We can only hope that KRS is slightly more modest in its system requirements.

[AristaM]

Well, Flight Simulator, with its long release cycle, has always been designed such that, on release day, it wouldn't run properly on existing hardware with all the sliders maxed out. The benefit of this is that when you buy a new computer, say, 1 and 1/2 years later, your then 'old' game can actually benefit from it in useful ways (eg. with better visuals, not only by going from 30 fps to 90 fps). The downside is, of course, the usual uproar right after release, when people are used to run the previous version with all sliders pulled to the right, and everybody has already forgotten that the situation was exactly the same when the previous version came out.

I seriously hope that Kuju is far-sighted enough to do the same, so that KRS will still have reserves to benefit from the top-end computers that will be available towards the midpoint of its useful product life, for whatever that will be.