Shadows are a wonderful thing except for

The addition of shadows brought a enhanced sense of realism to Trainz. However there are things that should not cast shadows like the "camera". The camera casts a shadow which looks like, at least to me, a pre-historic bird upon the ground, which in some cases can be distracting.

There are other situations in which shadows tend to distract from the scene such as roads and track which don't quite lay flat against the terrain, even after smoothing the spline.

Is there a way to selectively disable the shadows for certain assets? It would be nice to have a "no shadow" command you could add to the config file to accomplish this.

Or maybe there is currently a way to do this that I am not aware of.

Paul there have been many threads on this issue - particularly on roads casting shadows which, when you think of it, real roads actually would if they were floating a few centimetres above the ground, as they always have in Trainz (but without shadows you rarely noticed it). You have to partially "bury" the roads below the terrain height to remove the shadows, but this is not always possible on uneven terrain.

On the bright side, they seem to have fixed some of the old shadow problems that have plagued Trainz since shadows appeared - such as the train casting a shadow but buildings and, more noticeably, spline bridges not casting a shadow (but there are still a few exceptions).

Perhaps it will all be fixed when a ray tracing version of Trainz is released for the new Nvidea RTX cards??

It would be nice to have a "no shadow" command you could add to the config file to accomplish this.​

Click to expand...

This exists. There's a tag that can be placed in the mesh-table to enable or disable shadows on a selective (per mesh) basis. Applies to anything that uses a mesh-table and with a build number of 4.1 (that's T:ANE CE-1.2) or higher.

http://online.ts2009.com/mediaWiki/index.php/"mesh-table"_container#does-cast-shadows

Of course, there will be thousands of pre-4.1 legacy assets that can't use this tag and many others that could/should use it if only the creator had been aware of it. For those ones, you can do a local modification of the config.txt, but as I said, it will only apply to your local installation of Trainz.



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Does anybody else suffer with dancing shadows?
When you are viewing a scene, the shadows are still dancing back and forth to an inaudible metronome!
Plus, we still have shadow gaps under fences unless you are really close, no matter how much you bury the fence.

Ultra shadows use a higher precision method and are quite an inmprovement - but you'll need to turn something else down to offset the performance penalty.

I always run shadows on Ultra at 4096 shadow resolution in both TRS19 and T:ANE because the alternatives are not pleasant to behold.
Like Euromodeller, however, I find dancing shadows remain an issue, even at Ultra shadows settings.

Yes those dancing shadows. I'll have to measure their motion against my metronome and see what speed they're moving at!

My issue with shadows is in Surveyor. Placing catenary and other things like that becomes very confusing due to the shadows and I end up lining up the spline ends with the shadow rather than a catenary poles!

It would be nice if there was an in-Surveyor option to hide shadows only in Surveyor. With an optional setting, a check box in the preferences, the shadows could be allowed or not on the fly rather than needing to exit and return each time the shadows are turned on and off which is a pain.

N3V will surely provide this option as a gift to the members of Trainz plus programe I bet...