Working Headlights

[RailX]

But - someone seems to think it may tax the graphics system too much if anything good is worked out. Would this be correct or not ?

hi Jim McDermott

i don't think so because we don't talk about "real" voluminous light effects. the "real" voluminous light effect itself is really
hardware hungry. you can find those effects in many modern games like crysis etc. but there are other ways where you don't need high end systems or windows vista to have very good fake light effects. i can't tell it often enough, the best example for good fake lights is rollercoaster tycoon 3.
this game came out in 2004! in the editor you can tell the lightsource how strenght it should illuminate the near object, the illuminate distance etc.
with those options you can create hundreds of different lightsources, otherwise it would look too monotone. beside the lights there
are many buildings and attractions on the map, and a few hundred visitors, but still the game runs smooth. to have something like that
in RW, you need to write more codes into the engine, as derek said it before. also there was a problem with buildings(assets) who have
an alphamap. i think it's time to highlight railworks from other trainsimulator games, at least in the light section, because
it's too bad that this beautiful graphic has no good lights.

of course this is only my opinion, and i respect every other argument

regards

Rail-X

[Ghosttrain666]

Well
I can only compare with the old MSTS, and there i don´t loose a single FPS with the lighs on.
And one more thing: Most modern computers has more than enough Graphic power to handle lights on the trains.

Cheers

[davveb]

Regarding reflecting signs, since there are dedicated night texture, and LODs, you could certainly get pretty far in finely tuning the appearance of the reflecting parts to become brighter and brighter as you approach. Just no one sat down yet to do it.

That's a clever idea, hadn't thought of that.

Regarding lighting the other surrounding, it would be an interesting experiment to put such a plane vertically in front of the plane and tweak the alpha channel (i.e., the shape of the blob/ellipse) to make it look from the cab as if the front lights would light up the surrounding. Moving to the side in the cab might spoil the illusion, and it certainly will only work for moderate lighting, and not US-style very intense spotlights, because they lead to colours to be seen, too, not only the brightness going up.

This would work to an extent, but I think it would look a bit strange as it will create the impression of a tunnel of light extending all the way to the horizon, i.e there will be no falloff in light intensity over distance.

But anyway, a range of people will be pleased, just like the above shown modification definitely makes a part of the community happy, which is all you can wish for.

Extending what I said in my first post in this thread - I create freeware content, but will be unlikely to implement these sorts of features, simply because personally they don't concern me (I like to drive in the day:-) ). Now there is clearly some pretty strong demand from a section of the community for this sort of feature, but those people need to either convince the payware producers they represent a sufficient market to justify the costs of producing this sort of thing, or, as the old saying goes, if you want something fixing, then do it yourself

Dave B

[m5abv]

Well I for one would really like to see this implemented. I find the night time scenarios really suffer from the lack of it. I know this is an old graphics engine in RW but this was a feature of MSTS in 2001. I cant understand why it was never implemented originally and it's been long long long overdue.


regards

William

[AndiS]

Regarding lighting the other surrounding, it would be an interesting experiment to put such a plane vertically in front of the plane and tweak the alpha channel (i.e., the shape of the blob/ellipse) to make it look from the cab as if the front lights would light up the surrounding. Moving to the side in the cab might spoil the illusion, and it certainly will only work for moderate lighting, and not US-style very intense spotlights, because they lead to colours to be seen, too, not only the brightness going up.

This would work to an extent, but I think it would look a bit strange as it will create the impression of a tunnel of light extending all the way to the horizon, i.e there will be no falloff in light intensity over distance.

Then you need some SubtractATex planes 50, 100, 150m from the engine (vertically, with modes alpha values, to create an increasingly dark impression balancing the Add component.

Alternatively, you could have black fog at night, easy to define in the weather (or time of day?) blueprint, but takes away moon and stars.

No idea whether it would be SubtractATex of AddATex with black plane. Anyone got behind the blobby shades? They are darkening the ground, don't they? A plane with such a shader but user-defined alpha mask would be useful during daylight for much better shadows than the default blob, while still staying under the computational effort of stitched shadows.

[Paul_Boland]

From the sounds of it, the RW's engine is too limited to support headlights which is a real shame because looking at the screenshots above, it's fantastic!!! RSDL, don't follow the Auran route and stick to one game engine year after year after year (the latest Trainz releases are shockingly dated which drove me away from them). When you decide to do a new railway sim, might be time to retire the current engine and embrace a new one.

[RailX]

From the sounds of it, the RW's engine is too limited to support headlights......

hi paul

who said that? did i missed something? for me the engine is great, we have many fantastic shaders to create nice
objects. the main question is, what the developers can do with the tools and the codes in the future. it seems that here are some
small problems when they create lights who lightup assets too, but i hope that the problems can be solved soon.
many RW users want to see this feature, me too.

regards

Rail-X

[Paul_Boland]

Actually from the debates on these forums a few months back, many here don't want it, they want the lights like on UK rolling stock which don't illuminate the way ahead but are more just a light for anyone on the track to see a train is coming.

As to the quote, read some of the replies about. Using lights on the loco is causing a significant frame rate drop so if you were in a scene with many locos it would probably become a flick show. From reading some of the posts above, it sounds as if the current Rail Works engine is limited in the lights department.

[CaptScarlet]

From reading some of the posts above, it sounds as if the current Rail Works engine is limited in the lights department.

Derek has mentioned the problems they have to sort out with how they want to implement projected light and that it could do it now but it is not 100% working in that there is z fighting with alpha textures and it would only light the track and not other objects properly. Again it comes down to how it fits in with the other things that they want to enhance to improve what is there.

John

[RailX]

hi

sorry, but do you want to use realistic lights only for locos? then it's waste of time. with those new effects we want to create different
assets. for example(police car lights, realistic station illumination, a virtual las vegas) a little more imagination please
in the actual situation you can't create something that looks realistic. the night maps look boring and they all look identical.

greetz

Rail-X

[AndiS]

I guess we are back to discussing priorities, again.

The lighting of stations can be prerendered in the modelling programme.

For police cars (not too important, I guess, for a range of people), well, the blue light on the floor could be implemented like the front lights, I guess you can use that shader with UV animation (or whatever the name of that would be), anyway, you can have moving blue light on the ground. If you need it elsewhere, it only works for the standing car, sorry.

Las Vegas, well, do they have a railway there (or railroad, for that matter)? I know that there are several amusement parks near railway lines, but myself, I would prefer it if the colour of the lights on these colourful lamps along the track would show the right colour and only later I would consider real-time light effects of freely arrange amusement park objects.

But besides the extremes, I think that you certainly can do something about the night textures, if you take the time. But boring, well, for me, night scenarios will mostly be boring. I could imaging some very nice looking scenes, but managing the hues at near darkness is even more difficult than getting the textures to look good in daylight.

[RailX]

hi

about the police car, it was only for example. and everyone has different priorities for this game, sure. someone likes to drive with the loco
from day till night, other people want to create something new and test new features. yes you can prerender everything in the 3D modeller, but
in the end every effect is only "planar". you can do what you want, in the end there is always a planar effect, is this realistic? for some guys
maybe its realistic enough, but for me and other users not. for las vegas it's not mandatory to have railways, it's about creating
scenery realistic scenery is the most important thing for a map, in this case especially for a night map.

as i said it before, everyone has different needs about RW, some guys want better shadows, and some other want better lights.
we always want the best for RS/RW, and for this we want to give the developers some ideas and suggestion.

greetz

Rail-X