Street Lighting at night

I have been researching how to have street lighting at night that looks right in TRS2019. I have not been able to find a DLC route that even has night time sessions to check how it is done. The only lights I can find that project a light are so unrealistic. Is there any realistic street lighting available? That is that lights up the scenery more like locomotive lighting !

The lighting I can find just has a white circle or oval which looks artificial, does not light up nearby objects etc. has no bloom or reflections. Given the new level of realism during the day in TRS2019, can anyone suggest any objects in DLC please that look right ?

render2017

I don’t think N3V are up to volumetric lighting for scenery yet, so I suspect you won’t find anything.

It's called point lighting I believe and I believe we will be waiting some time for it. :hehe: I hate light pools.
cheers
Graeme

Yeah light pools stink. That's actually one of the oldest ways of showing lights and we do need this updated at some point.

To make a light pool, the light sources doesn't cast light on the ground and instead just shines. Surrounding the light is an invisible cone and on the ground lined up with the light source is the light pool.

Back in the olden days, this was the bees knees, but with better technology supporting true directional and volumetric lighting, this truly is ancient today.

Yeah, that's one thing we need in Trainz, realistic night lighting. I tend to shy away from driving a train at night because of it.

Speaking of which, why do the "Night Mode" used in many assets stop working about 6:27 a.m.? And the locomotive headlight stops working a little before "daylight", too?

Trainz has shadows, reflections, the new Turf FX, speedtrees, etc. I think it;s time N3V started working on realistic night lighting.

Oh, and realistic TRAFFIC, too!!

Having recently started playing Farming Simulator, the lighting in that is surprisingly good - not GTA V standard but a good starting point for N3V to look at in raising the bar, for TRS2021...

Oh well . . . that is not good news . . but I guess I will have to abandon Night sessions for now . . . . . Thanks for confirming my suspicions . . and I agree with all of you . .about time they joined the 20th century . . . even Railworks had volumetric lighting ! but in just about all all other respects I think TRS2019 is way ahead . . . . .

I personally think all the old crap needs to either be updated or just removed. It really is crap and wouldn't even look good in TRS19. It doesn't even look great in TS12. N3V just needs to face facts and stop using all this old junk from like UTC, TRS2004 and TRS2006 for no reason. They could use JR content for heavens sake! They already are buddies with them and they could make some new or existing routes fromt their website, that are free, built-in. This is like if Dovetail started porting MSTS trains directly into Train Sim World. It would look comicly bad!

You should see the night lighting in American Truck Sim. It's amazing. Very realistic IMHO.

render2017 said:

I have been researching how to have street lighting at night that looks right in TRS2019. I have not been able to find a DLC route that even has night time sessions to check how it is done. The only lights I can find that project a light are so unrealistic. Is there any realistic street lighting available? That is that lights up the scenery more like locomotive lighting !

The lighting I can find just has a white circle or oval which looks artificial, does not light up nearby objects etc. has no bloom or reflections. Given the new level of realism during the day in TRS2019, can anyone suggest any objects in DLC please that look right ?

render2017

Click to expand...

I have been whinging on about lighting since 1 enrolled 10,000 years ago.

I have suggested to Tony on a mere 50,000 occasions that it is something they really need to look at asap as it ruins the effect and impact of scenes drawn, paricularly at dusk, but then on into the night.

Tony is probably sick of me comparing Trainz with XPLANE 11 but it really does make the point. Xplane is magnificent, splendid and othert glowing words.Trainz is very disappointing and TRS19 is the biggest disappointment in the World since the UK voted for Brexit.

With a bit of reflection you might think that a major improvement in lighting was actually more important than the changes in shadow. TRS19 shadows are World Class with a good menu to upgrade/downgrade to allow for performance and as I was involved in quite a bit of beta testing with TANE I can only begin to imagine the thousands of hours that have gone into the development of shadows.

I personally think that lighting should be raised virtually to the top of the "shopping list" but I haven't been a very good guesser because absolutely all the suggestions I have ever made have been totally ignored.

Yup, that sure does tell me something !!!!

I've spent literally hours trying to add night lighting to my assets, but it never looks quite right, so I'm at the point where I'm saying "Why bother?"

I've even thought of making streetlights as invisible locomotives placed on invisible track, with the headlight pointing down. I think it might work, if done correctly....

how about we add a moon at night too while we're at it... ?

edit: just don't make its apparent size 10x what it should be like the sun currently is

While we have the current crude night lighting . . . why bother with all the other great immersion products . . . as running at night is just so bad . . . . come on Tony get the ball rolling . . . . . it cannot be that hard . . . every other train, truck. racing car and flight sim has some sort of realistic night lighting.
render2017

davesnow said:

I've even thought of making streetlights as invisible locomotives placed on invisible track, with the headlight pointing down. I think it might work, if done correctly....

Click to expand...

It's been done.
light1,<kuid2:119692:80030:1>

SailorDan said:

It's been done.
light1,<kuid2:119692:80030:1>

Click to expand...

But only the locomotive with the focus illuminates surroundings... or has that changed?

Edit: I'm actually fairly happy with light pools - maybe I'm just easy to please on this subject.

They might have been acceptable in 2002 or in MSTS, but this is supposed to be on the cutting edge of train simulation. I agree with MTH a few posts above. too late for TRS2019 but for TRS2021 or whenever, ditch all the legacy stuff and compatibility to unshackle the possibilities. That's what should have happened with TRS2019 with TANE been retained and maintained for the old stuff. Not much point using the new PBR textures on a '19 route if the factory sitting on top of them comes from UTC and has lighting effects that belong 20 years ago.