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I have stumbled into a strange Lighting issue!
I placed a Drivable Police Car on the Track and the Circling Red and Blue Lights along with the White Strobe effects look very poorly as they animated reflecting off the ground in Surveyor, I can see the jagged Alpha Channels as they were not semi Transparent as designed to be. Typical of all Night Lights, Street Light, Flood Lights etc.
The Strange thing that I found was when I went into the Driver Mode, then cab View, and was looking out the police Car Windows the Strobes, Red, and Blue flashing Lights looked Beautiful with the correct Semi Transparencies. I was amazed on how great the Lights looked as they were reflected off the Ground. So I got out of the Police car with the arrow Buttons and moved to the side of the Car and they still had the Beautiful Soft Transparent look. Then I exit the cab View and returned to the outside World and they returned to the poor look again.
Something to do with Surveyor not functioning correctly with the Primary & Alpha Textures. Although all the outside Street Lamps did not improve when I was in the Driver Cab View.
I sincerely Hope that the Developers will pick up on this and maybe a easy Patch for the next Update for the Surveyor 2 that is scheduled.
Graham, cosmetic effects in coaches and people are the things content creators are good at. Environmental effects like accumulative snow, point lighting and skybox are handled by N3V's programmers. N3V will most likely prioritise on a "bang for buck" basis, due to the economics of being a business and all. We live in hope...and take the crumbs we are given.
cheers
Graeme
The best lighting that I have seen and used is by Arraial. Check out kuids :524343:6246:1, 6247 and 6249:1
That is because he uses coronal effects on his lights. That is not really the problem. The problem is how the light shines, or in Trainz case... does not shine on other objects. A street lamp lights up at night, however there is no light coming from the light itself unless a light pool on the ground is used. If a car is park on the spot of that light pool. The car will only see the light to the height that the light pool is set at, there is no real lighting in the game.
A simple explanation is a lit cone. The cone is lit up and shines, with a material on the sides to block the sides from shining at the same degree as the light spot. I used the same technique to light up the interior of a factory back in 1995 when I was using 3D Studio R4 for DOS.
That could work for a single light point light a street light if done correctly and the alpha channel is blended properly, but what if you have a building with 50 or so windows who's light is shining on the ground. It's not very practical. I don't see any 3D modeler taking the time to do that.
I agree it works well for streetlights and other single-point lights. With some of the incorrectly alpha-channel blended lights out there, we can see the cones pointing upwards to the light from the ground as if aliens ships were landing. As I said, this technique was used in the mid-1990s. With that said, we're a bit behind the times, ya think!
This i made end 2004, it has point lights
Yes, that was the point of all my statements. Trainz may be the best that is out there but in some respects it is falling behind the times. Night lighting is one of those. Another issue I see is pushing the casual content creators aside. This has been a slow process since the beginning. Some bigger examples I can give are speed trees. They went to speed trees, now nobody is making them because the program to make them is too expensive for the casual creator. I complained when they started with speed trees and was attacked for it. I'll give them credit for thinking outside the box on this one, but it backfired in a big way.
With the start of FBX and PBR material it has now gotten to the point where you have to be a professional 3d model builder just to make content at TRS2019 levels. There are very few doing that. Why? Because it's not worth the time and effort to go through all that work just to hand over your work to N3V. I believe most of the casual content makers have left. The ones creators that are still around are still making older stander content...like me. Just look at the current uploads on the Download Station, very little content is at TRS2019 standards. The majority is still TRS2012 and TANE standards. What was once Trainz strength is now being pushed aside and this is something the folks at N3V really needs to pay attention too. Trainz will end up being like Railworks...Some future younger person will find it interesting, mess with the game for a while and maybe even start his own project. Then only to find making his own content is too difficult so he looses interest and moves on to another train game. No more dedicated users, no more casual content creators.