floodlights

L

llewelyn

New member
Can anyone save me a little time by suggesting a floodlight tower which gives a good widespread light? Tried 3 or 4 which are built-in on TS12 and they all make little bright spots in an otherwise dark world. Even one which is 40m tall with 10 lights on - a little cluster of bright spots around it. The issue looks to be that the lights themselves are much too narrow a beam.

The train headlight manages to illuminate a big wide spread - I'm looking for something to illuminate certain yard areas at night - a light spread of something like 50m or more. Same kind of effect you get in a football stadium, they have 4 light towers typically wich spread light over the whole pitch. These that I tried would be dandy for illuminating just the goal posts :/
 
Station Light Steel 6 <kuid:77641:23116>. If thats the one I think I'm using (Route I'm workin on atm has over 2500 assets listed atm), it has good spread. I'm using about 4 of them to illuminate big swaths of a Container Loading Yard atm with further uses in the future.

Falcus
 
Something else I could suggest is to look for "Light Pool" Assets. These are pre-created "Light Pools", the same as what you get with any "Light/Lamp" Asset at night anyway. I use a few Splined Roadside Light Poles, and these light pools (ha ha), work great in that regard. Just if you use them, remember that the pool is an asset that appears at whatever height you set it to (Default of course being ground level). If you put one on something raised, say a YARN road for instance, or an Uneven surface, the Light pool will be buried or half hidden. You have to take this into account when setting these up.

Good Luck,
Falcus
 
yeah I saw a couple of those. Still yet to find what I actually want, mind. station light steel tall is the least-bad so far.

Pretty much all the lights I've found so far have a much too intense spot of light, much too small. The wash out the bit immediately under them, and don't illuminate the area around. Worse, some have a kind of dark shadow around the light pool which, if you overlap them, looks complete rubbish. Also it's not a light in the same way as the loco lamps or the sun, in that it's at a fixed distance - I tried lifting a lamp up high and it made a flat light spot in mid air :)


I know the game has the facility to do what I want: the loco headlights light up a massive area (in fact, more than they would in reality - plus, I noticed today, they shine through scenery (or at least, through unpainted scenery: might be if it's painted it's opaque but I'm not betting). So it shouldn't be a problem for there to be say a 40m high tower with floodlights that gives a wide angle illumination over, let's say, about 80m radius. It should of course not be totally uniform - it'd be brightest near the tower and fade out, no telling if the game actually allows for that. The loco headlamp pattern looks suspiciously like a flat light field, but even that would be better than small spots of light all over.

Looks like I've found (another) frustration point in Trainz :(

How much hassle is editing objects, anyway?
 
The narrow-beam "light pools" that comes with most lampposts are usually just a bright part of the asset only visible at night - not an actual light. This has no relation to the actual locomotive headlight, which illuminates object and terrain albeit primitively. I'd suggest just sticking around to see what the next generation of Trainz brings us, since dynamic lighting is a cornerstone of this new game engine.
 
Aye, mebbe. I've got plenty more to work on with this route I'm doing. Next item to hunt: 1950s era (or earlier) US terminal station with 2-4 tracks. Not found anything I really fancy there, either. :confused:
 
Yea, Thats why I said what I did about being careful about the height you put the pool at, it is just an object. Unfortunately, as Nicky pointed out, Night lighting is an area that hasn't been very well implemented in TS to date. We've mostly gotten buildings figured out (Kind of), but open exposed illumination is very limited.

As far as 1950's stations go, theres tons.... BUT, it'll depend greatly on the architechtural details you're looking for. Clapboard, SouthWest, Chicago Gothic, etc etc.

I will also add, is that it sounds like you might be being a bit too picky (IDK for sure, but thought Id add this anyway). Unless you're getting custom buildings made, gotta remember that you're never going to find the EXACT building you're looking for. Route Creation is more about approximate representation then actual world copying. Sometimes you just gotta go with whats closest to the real object in your mind and be glad you could even find that.

Falcus
 
How much hassle is editing objects, anyway?
Click to expand...

Light pool textures are relatively EZ to edit with a average paint program.
EZer if you know how to use AssetX.

You can edit color,brightness and density but not size.
 
llewelyn said:
Can anyone save me a little time by suggesting a floodlight tower which gives a good widespread light? Tried 3 or 4 which are built-in on TS12 and they all make little bright spots in an otherwise dark world. Even one which is 40m tall with 10 lights on - a little cluster of bright spots around it. The issue looks to be that the lights themselves are much too narrow a beam.

The train headlight manages to illuminate a big wide spread - I'm looking for something to illuminate certain yard areas at night - a light spread of something like 50m or more. Same kind of effect you get in a football stadium, they have 4 light towers typically wich spread light over the whole pitch. These that I tried would be dandy for illuminating just the goal posts :/
Click to expand...

I made a floodlight based on a loco's headlight a long time ago. It was incredibly involved and clumsy, but it worked. It was an invisible loco, so it had to sit on a piece of track perched at the top of a tower. The track had to be vertically "U"- shaped, otherwise the invisible loco fell off the track! But the principle is there, so someone with real creation skills could definitely make a practical floodlight.

Mick Berg.
 
My favorite lamp is LampCB1. I use it all over. Has a great light pool that isn't overly bright and looks pretty realistic. The pole can easily be hidden inside a building so it looks like its part of the building.


I like the idea of using a loco light as a spotlight. Much more realistic lighting. If you need to light a huge area thats definitely the way to go. Loco lights actually light objects.
 
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