Hi All
A few things I remembered whilst out walking the dog tonight
The first is a little example I made showcasing the affect of Sun/Direct Light, Ambient Light, and the 3 'levels' of the skybox colours:
A bit strange looking for sure! But the colours are:
Blue = Sun Colour
Green = Ambient Colour
Red = Bottom skybox colour
Purple = Middle skybox colour
Yellow = Top skybox colour
The second part is something a few might find useful, but slipped my mind as I was dealing with a few other things when writing my earlier reply.
You /can/ configure environment settings in your sessions. This is good news, as you can also clone/edit those sessions to point to a different route. We don't have in-game support for this, nor can we provide technical support for issues that may occur with this, but with some editing of the session asset you can achieve a workable solution for the time being.
Doing this does require a bit of work to do, but you can generally achieve this by:
1) Create a new session
2) Configure your environment settings as desired
3) Save the session under an appropriate name (ie 'sunny', 'cloudy', etc).
4) Exit Surveyor
5) Locate the session in Content Manager
6) Clone this session
7) Go to 'open for edit' under the filter dropdown at the top
8) Right click on the cloned session (it will likely have 'new asset' for the name), then go to 'open' and click on 'edit config file'
9) In the config.txt change the kuid number in the map-kuid tag to that of the route you want the session on (also change the same kuid in the kuid-table to match)
10) Add the route's name to the end of the name in the 'username' tag (this helps avoid multiple sessions with exactly the same name
)
11) Save the config, and close your text editor
12) Submit the asset
13) Now try loading the session into Driver or Surveyor on the route you set it to use, and see if the environment settings work.
I have done this a couple of times, but haven't specifically worked with this recently.
But again, it is important to have your monitor configured appropriately. You may not like hearing this, but it is extremely important, and the issues mentioned by at least one person in this thread (specifically about it looking washed out at any environment setting) are going to be very much related to this. This is something I've actively encountered as a creator, and had to find a solution to (initially doing interactive calibration, and then eventually having to find better ways to actually calibrate my screen, etc), as the cheaper screens were extremely washed out, and definitely affect any game I've put on them (as well as movies, and even live streams from friends).
Another part that I had missed previously is also the colour profiles, which have been mentioned previously. This affects how the colours are displayed on your screen. I've just had a bit of fun with discord (watching a friend's live stream of Trainz); there's actually a point when it's on both screens that you can make it switch from one screen's profile to the other, causing a very obvious and dramatic colour shift on both screens.
Some games may have their own colour profiles configured in them, which can help make them look better on some types of screens, but this can cost a lot of time/money to achieve, and is still going to vary a lot depending on how accurate your screen is. Some also work with NVidia/AMD to have a colour profile made for their game, to be included in the drivers, but again this does cost to do.
Regards