What is the actual status of improvement of loco lights

[AndiS]

My only worries about lights is that if it does not pay for Derek to spell out things as clear as he did on this topic, he might get tired of trying it.

On 23 July 2009 Derek wrote:
"Hello,
Light beams did work in RS.
However, they only lit up the track and terrain so it was not ideal and more code needed to be written to light up assets too. There was also a visual bug that created ordering problems on assets with transparency so the code was commented out.
We also want more control over strength/distance etc for the beams, otherwise it would just look a little daft".


Adam

Hi,
Every member of the RS.com team know about lights, how they work and the goodness it would bring to RWs.
I can also say that every person on this and other forums has their 'this should be at the top of the list' feature.
This is good.
Some features may seem hard but in fact are easy to implement, others seem easy but in fact are hard.
When we have more to say on lighting we will annouce it.

Regards

Derek

Now I am a complete layman when it comes to computer graphics but I understood this after a few hours of reading random stuff on the net:

Rendering illumination is computationally hard. That is to say that you need good (expensive) hardware to achieve good results, because it is not easy for the computer to calculate how much light falls on which pixel of each object. It is easy to formulate for humans, but it requires a lot of computation for the computer.

Given the above, when you are using today's standard PC hardware, you achieve good results mostly by cheating. This means that you pre-render objects to look perfect as long as the lighting does not change. If you use them in a outdoor simulation where the position of the sun changes during the day, you lost, unless you provide a separate texture for each hour of the day, for each object. If your objects move, like vehicles often do, you loose again. Therefore, cheating does not take you as far for railway simulations as it takes you for other genres.

Now some of the technology that could make lights look better is already on the market. But remember the alarm about MSTS2 only running on Vista and DX10. I am glad that RW runs on my machine, which has none of the two. I am sure that RSC management read the market reviews every month to determine when it is time to sack the late adopters like me. But I know that I am not alone in this community, and I am glad that they support me driving in the daylight rather than owners of the latest hardware driving in the night. Of course, this is my personal view, and, like Derek said, too, everyone has his own favourite and most find it hard to understand others' priorities.

Finally, you could demand that they support both the old-fashioned DX9 users and the advanced DX11 users. But rewiring the game to do that would cost them as much programming effort as rewriting the AI, and my own priority would be that they do that first.