Night is too Dark

[KonstantinMMRR]

Is it possible to make the night time brighter? I remember on Trainz 2012 I could still see to switch cars in rural areas at night. It was about as bright as when there is a full moon in real life. In Trainz 2019, night is so dark that I cannot see in rural areas with no lights.

Thank you for your help.

 

[Dinorius_Redundicus]

In the Environment settings, make the Ambient colour lighter at every marked clock position in the night time. I think you then need to save the Route and the Session to keep those changes. Others might clarify on that.

 

[pware]

The Environmental Settings are strange set of tools in that any changes you make can be saved with the Route, or with the Session or with both, depending on what else you change.

My rule of thumb is:-

To save an Environmental setting with the Route:-

	Load a Route into Surveyor
	Change any Environmental Setting
	Edit the Route (e.g. edit a Route Layer object or the terrain - moving a tree a few centimetres would do)
	Save the Route

To save an Environmental settings with the Session:-

	Load a Session into Surveyor
	Change any Environmental Setting (except the World Origin which only affects a Route)
	Edit the Session (e.g. edit a Session Layer object, a commodity item or Session Rule)
	Save the Session

To save an Environmental setting with both the Route and the Session:-

	Load a Session into Surveyor
	Change any Environmental Setting
	Edit both the Route and the Session (make changes to both)
	Save both the Route and the Session

 

[Dinorius_Redundicus]

23 years with Trainz and I have never properly understood that Route/Session save system. It’s probably logical, but never intuitive to me. Pware, I will be taking a copy of that lovely summary for my future reference and sanity preservation.

 

[KonstantinMMRR]

Thank you for your replies. I was able to get the night brighter, although not as bright as I would like.

I agree with your comments about routes and sessions. I don't understand them. Typically, I always run a continuous session that lasts for months or years on end.

 

[Dinorius_Redundicus]

Have you adjusted the sky settings yet? Sky colour/brightness is separate from ambient (ground) and sun. The horizon, middle and upper parts of the sky are independent of each other too. So you need to click on the part of the sky you’re interested in (in the Sky section of the environment control panel, not the sky itself) before adjusting the colour dials.

I also forgot to mention, if you’re in TRS19 (or 22 probably) there is a “general screen brightness” slider located at the right of the colour dials.

Complex system isn’t it? I wish they had sliders with number scales instead of those temperamental dials, but “it is what it is”.

 

[pware]

Complex system isn’t it? I wish they had sliders with number scales instead of those temperamental dials, but “it is what it is”.

With some of the new features they have changed that dial-centric approach. RGB Colours are now entered with numerical values - unfortunately, in one case, as values between 0.000 and 1.000 (that works out as 1000 different types of Red, for example, when only 256 actually exist!!). I have posted a "bug report" on that and they have acknowledged the issue and passed it on to the devs for their attention. In other cases the RGB colours are now entered as the more usual hexadecimal values (which I admit is confusing to non-techies but more accurately represents the actual colours). The RGB values in the Environments Tools are still dial based.

Small changes and sometimes two steps forward and one back but at least in the right direction.

 

[pware]

Further to my post #3 above on how to save the Environmental Settings in a Route, a Session or both. There is yet another layer to the feature - an order of priority.

Using the date as the example setting (but this applies, in general, to all other environmental settings except the World Origin):-

	If the Route and the Session are saved with different dates, then the Session date along with the set latitude (in the World Origin) will decide the visible season.
	If a Session does not have a saved date*, then the Route date along with the set latitude (in the World Origin) will decide the visible season.
	If no date* has been saved in the Route and the Session, then today's date along with the set latitude (in the World Origin) will decide the visible season.

* By "no date" I mean that when you load the Calendar in the Environmental Tools it shows today's date.

The most obvious effect of the "Visible Season" is in the appearance of SpeedTree assets - most of these come with built-in summer, winter, spring and autumn (fall) foliage. Other assets may have a snow effect layer which will only appear during winter.

Note that setting a year has absolutely no effect on the resulting environmental conditions.

 

[Dinorius_Redundicus]

Other assets may have a snow effect layer which will only appear during winter.

Winter is a season. Snow isn't. Trees may lose their leaves in winter season, but not necessarily become snowy. At least if configured correctly.

Snow effect should only appear on scenery and the ground in parts of the route that are above the set snowline altitude.

 

[pware]

At least if configured correctly.

Snow effect should only appear on scenery and the ground in parts of the route that are above the set snowline altitude.

And therein lies the problem.

A few short years ago I was surprised to see snow suddenly appearing (on the first day of winter) on the ground in one of my semi-arid region routes which was about 1500m below the snowline, At that time of the year the minimum overnight temp would have been well above freezing.

An investigation revealed that the creator of just one ground texture asset had set the snow-altitude tag to 0m. Clearly this had overridden the Environmental Snow Altitude setting. I could have easily edited the config.txt file to fix the problem but anyone who downloaded the route would still get the original faulty texture asset. Further investigations revealed that the creator had set the snow-altitude in all his texture assets to 0m. I decided to remove all his texture assets from my system, a pity because some of them were very good.

 

[Dinorius_Redundicus]

Further investigations revealed that the creator had set the snow-altitude in all his texture assets to 0m.

I’ve never heard of a tag called snow-altitude. I can’t find any mention of it in the Wiki either. Is it a new thing in TS22?

As far as I know, the altitude at which snow-equipped assets display their snow textures is not controlled by any asset. it’s controlled by Snowline which is an Environmental property of the Route.

What can happen is that creators make their winter asset textures snowy, which is not correct in the Trainz seasonal convention, but it doesn’t trigger a fault or even a warning. If the asset was like that, you made the right decision to delete them in my opinion. But I don’t know if that situation fits your observations on how the assets behaved.

 

[pware]

I’ve never heard of a tag called snow-altitude.

I did a search and you are correct. I was "almost right". The tag is actually "above-snow-line" - my faulty memory.

The original thread where I posted this is at seasonal-pbr-surprise and you were the second to post in that thread.

It seems that setting this tag to "1" makes the texture behave as if it is above the snow altitude set in the Environmental Tools even if it is not. According to the Wiki at season-selector_container#above-snow-line

Desc: A conditional tag which tests whether the asset instance is above the snow-line. If set to a true value (eg. 1) then asset instances will evaluate this condition as (asset-height >= snow-line-height.) If set to a false value (eg. 0) then no test is performed

 

[KonstantinMMRR]

Thank you for all of your help. My transition from years of running Trainz 2012 to my new Trainz 2019 has been quite frustrating at times. I was able to adjust the light and the sky to be clearly visible for switching at night, yet still appear as night, about light when there is a full moon. I also appreciate the comments about sky adjustment. I was able to make some very nice sunsets and sunrises.