Railworks Technical Update

[DescendingSadly]

Does this mean a full day to night transition during the scenario will be possible?

[Darpor]

It's already theoretically there if you do a scenario long enough, the same with dynamic weather.

[DescendingSadly]

Hmm, perhaps so. But I find the night time effect does not really work unless it's already night time in the scenario and you've selected a night time weather theme.

[Darpor]

Yeah, the lighting will cause issues, lit horizons etc.

[phat2003uk]

Only the clear weather pattern allows a natural feeling transition from day to night at the moment and also natural lighting.

[TheTazman]

But we have that problem already? will they not try to fix that along with the lighting update?

Yeah, the lighting will cause issues, lit horizons etc.

[Darpor]

Yeah, I am talking about what we have now in response to an earlier query, not what we may have after the updates. Hopefully it is all fixed.

[TheTazman]

ok i would like to see some screenshots. It does sound an intresting update. The shadows on some of the models are just awful the black 5 is a good example of what i mean.

Yeah, I am talking about what we have now in response to an earlier query, not what we may have after the updates. Hopefully it is all fixed.

[Kariban]

I think the problem at the moment is having seperate texture sets for day/night? hence having to pick the night ones. If the game modified the hue/lum of each texture depending on time of day ( night is a different colour light, hence the hue ) that would be a pretty cheap way of doing lighting transitions, you'd only have to do that every few minutes in transition periods and once for each texture cached in memory ( and obviously if you need to load a new one ); that is not computationally expensive at all. That also leaves you open to adjusting the effect of different types of ambient light too, like a sunny summer day vs a cloudy winter one.

Sadly changing saturation to give some depth of field effect would have to be done at render time, and that's a bit more expensive.

[Kromaatikse]

I actually picked up on something in the update blurb: the fact that lighting is presently done on the CPU. Never mind that it can be done better by *any* GPU that fully supports DirectX 7, let alone 9c as is required by RW2. (Yes, Kuju sux, blah blah blah.)

I believe this is the fundamental reason behind RW2's enormous RAM appetite. Simply put, because each instance of an object could be facing a different way, it has to copy the object for every instance so that it can apply the correct lighting to it. That means if you have a few thousand trees on a hillside, you have a few thousand copies of however many polygons the tree has, rather than one tree repeated a few thousand times with different parameters (the latter technique is called instancing and is specially optimised on newer GPUs).

With any luck, RSC will take the opportunity to remove this extra RAM overhead when they put in the GPU-based lighting. That should allow us to say goodbye to most of the SBHH errors, especially on complex routes like WCML North.

[gnash]

...........

The shadows on some of the models are just awful the black 5 is a good example of what i mean.

What is it about the shadow volumes on the black 5 you don't like ..

?

[TheTazman]

Have a look at a simple shadow. On the side of the engine there is a railing on it. When the shadow is cast up on the body its all kind of warped and distored. If you look at it you;l see what i mean.

...........

The shadows on some of the models are just awful the black 5 is a good example of what i mean.

What is it about the shadow volumes on the black 5 you don't like ..

?

[gnash]

Have a look at a simple shadow. On the side of the engine there is a railing on it. When the shadow is cast up on the body its all kind of warped and distored. If you look at it you'll see what i mean.

ok , I see which bit you're talking about .. though you were refering to something else