UK Screenshots for Pre BR Blue. High resolution warning.

Keep up with the experimentation, looking good.

Nice to see a WD Austerity working in Trainz & great pics also. Looks like the lines have split with another live veering to the left. Very nice & I often feel the Riddles Austerirty
gets overlooked despite being a large class. Also nice the tender lettered British Railways.

tailight98 said:

Nice to see a WD Austerity working in Trainz & great pics also. Looks like the lines have split with another live veering to the left. Very nice & I often feel the Riddles Austerirty
gets overlooked despite being a large class. Also nice the tender lettered British Railways.

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The pictures are from the Bestwood Colliery session and in that area on the route there are lines running in all directions. I'm still very much in process of learning where everything is since the GCR V15 route makes my Norfolk layout look like a one board scratch in the dirt by comparison.

I like the Riddles Austerities too and I have them working on my early BR Middle Vales borders route where about 80% of the engines are carrying BRITISH RAILWAYS on either their tank sides or tenders.

Keep up with the experimentation, looking good.

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Thanks Frank. TS2019 can be made to look fairly reasonable once that stupid environmental lighting can be figured out.

RE Post #3539 ALways good to see your amzing shot/work Ken !
Rail4Pete

Thank you Pierre. Would love to see your Quebec Central return in the near future.
re post #3545 KotangaGirl
Annie,hope you can come up with a solution to TS2019 visual problems, I just cannot get to grips with it.
This is a TANE screenie !!



Cheers, evilcrow

evilcrow said:

Thank you Pierre. Would love to see your Quebec Central return in the near future.
re post #3545 KotangaGirl
Annie,hope you can come up with a solution to TS2019 visual problems, I just cannot get to grips with it.
This is a TANE screenie !!

<picture snipped>

Cheers, evilcrow

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It wouldn't really be my first choice to persist with the GCR V15 route in TS2019 Ken. It's only because Peter Flindley made the choice to take the final V15 version of his GCR route from TANE into TS2019 that I'm doing any of this. My own TS2012 Norfolk layout project rebuilds are in TANE because I find that I can readily replicate the look of TS2012 in TANE where it's almost impossible to do that in TS2019.

Some legacy locomotive models take a real hiding in TS2019 with colour and definition being stripped out of their textures with others acquiring a weird unreal jelly coat shine and no amount of environmental lighting adjustment is going to change that. I operate a high percentage of legacy locomotives and rolling stock and I'm not at all interested in having them ruined by TS2019. N3V say they have to do all this lighting stuff and 'magic' jelly PBR texturing to be able to compete in the marketplace, but I severely have my doubts about it.
I'll keep on with trying for a bit longer to make the GCR V15 route look acceptable, but it really is under protest.

Your wonderful TANE screenshots definitely demonstrate that N3V threw the baby out with the bathwater with TS2019.

#3547 - yet another superlative screenshot Ken ; a wonderful portrait of an A4. What really makes it stand out (for me) is the seemingly metallic sheen of the locomotive rather than the quite matt finish on Cam's original. Is this a bit of post-production magic on the image, or have you somehow managed to tweak theTANE lighting to create that appearance in-game? Either way it's a testament to your skills and Cam's.

1949 - Nottingham Victoria - The ports to ports and an A3

Ken, #3547 looking good.
Annie, I downloaded the GCR V15 and did a bit of tweaking. I own hardly anything GCR so there is a bit of license going on here at Nottingham Victoria in the late spring of 1949. A3 60052 Prince Palatine is a new arrival at Leicester GC shed and has been allocated the Up Ports to Ports Cross-Country express from Newcastle and Hull to Cardiff, Barry and Swansea via Banbury. One set was provided by the L.N.E.R. and one by the G.W.R.




A veteran O4 is on the eastern goods line in the background.




A view from the ramp down to the up side loading docks.




A view looking south.

KotangaGirl said:

This might be about the best I can manage. I'm making adjustments to the lighting at the start of the session using the Unified editing thingy since I don't want to do any cloning with GCR V15 sessions just yet.
With this attempt I thought I had it too much towards green at first, but in Driver it was fine. I've got shadows switched off since I don't like their blobby crawly mould like appearance and in many cases they make assets just look plain daft rather than being of any benefit.

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My own TRS19 (Build 105100) experiments with the blasted (literally) lighting tends to confirm your own observations.

Turning shadows off reduces the overall glare but also the transparency of many foliage items from certain angles, particularly various JVC grasses. They look more solid albeit still pale & wan compared to how they look in TANE.

Add a cloudy sky rather than a blue 'un - perhaps a little rain too - provides a further move towards naturalism rather than that "I must be in the outback at midday" look. British routes tend to benefit from a less sunny look anyway.

Further tweaks of the colour wheels for ambient and sun, along with fog reduction and a tweak of the brightness slider can increase the colour saturation whilst keeping the overall light bright enough - for a rainy day in the disUK. But TRS19 is till too pale & wan overall, even on a colour calibrated monitor.

****
Like you, I feel TANE had the lighting right; better, at least. TRS19 needs a fundamental fix to it's washed out ghosty look, no matter what N3V blather in the way of excuses for it.

Lataxe

Forgive me if this seems like a silly question, but before you try to adjust the lighting in TRS19, are you "pressing" the reset lighting button first?

2995Valliant said:

Forgive me if this seems like a silly question, but before you try to adjust the lighting in TRS19, are you "pressing" the reset lighting button first?

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I've tried everything including pressing the reset button. Your suggestion is perfectly valid, but with the whole environmental lighting system being a mess in TS2019 it doesn't really help that much.

This is about as good as I was able to get the lighting adjusted tonight in GCR V15. It's better than a poke in the eye, but that's about all that can be said for it.
Possibly you might be wondering what I'm complaining about since the screenshot looks presentable enough, - BUT it shouldn't be this darn difficult!

re post #3549 neville-hill
Hello Neville, open up a clone of the A4 using IM Editor https://contentcreation.trainzsimulator.com/im-editor-edit-im-files/ . Use the settings as shown in the attached screenshot. These are the settings that "edh6" used in his earlier loco models. Please note IM Editor is unable to open the latest trainzmesh format and some of the later im meshes. Trial and error will get you there in the end !!
I do use Post Processing Settings as well as the Enviromental settings and lately PaintDotNet's Photo Sharpening + at the lowest setting. The Trainz Portal hosting method seems a bit blury of late hence PaintDotNet.
All my shots are TANE. TRS2019 seems to be suffering from digital cataracts.

re posts #3550 borderreiver and #3551 KotangaGirl
Goodly shots from you both, sad to think Nottingham Victoria is now a supermarket and car park.

re post #3551
Thanks for the tips on the TRS2019 lighting.



Cheers, evilcrow

I felt brave this morning, took a deep breath and I did an install of SP3 beta (away from my working installs), at last I was able to open a route without a CTD!

..some shots from it using the built-in screenshot capture facility and then using Trainz Portal Gallery, seems to be some image quality improvements implemented.

I was impressed by the depth of field too.

Lighting, reset the diurnal, placed a new green dot at where the clock was stopped and saved that setting, then I adjusted only the brightness at each dot.







No textures were harmed during this experiment.

My install is just the standard one, not platinum or subscription.

Testing will continue...

2995Valliant said:

Forgive me if this seems like a silly question, but before you try to adjust the lighting in TRS19, are you "pressing" the reset lighting button first?

Click to expand...

In trying to improve TRS19 lighting I do start with the reset button, then select the various time of day points and change the various parameters. Before doing so, I've taken to setting the shadows to "off" in the main settings then selecting a cloudy sky in the Environmental Control dialogue. (A "Very, very cloudy" sky in fact). I also move the weather pointer over to the left so it's either a bit duller or spitting-on with rain. This is in July on the calendar, which is a typical British summer's day at that time of year!

In general, I tend to turn the ambient and sun colour wheels to maximum or near it, with the fog turned down (rain introduces some fog anyway) and the overall lighting also turned down. This stops most of the glare from lighter surfaces; gives a better saturation of colour albeit they're all still rather "flat"; and looks overall more naturalistic. But it's still not as good as TANE default lighting; nor can it be tweaked to give the range of lighting that TANE can give.

All this means you can't have a sunny-day TRS19 session, as turning on shadows and giving a sunnier sky immediately re-introduces the glare, washed-out look and lots of surfaces that have whited-out rather than remaining light grey, cream or any of the other lighter shades. Such lighter surfaces also lose their details in the glare - just like an over-exposed photo. You can make it all much darker but then it just looks like its always dusk.

I'm sure that TRS19 doesn't have to have this lighting fault. It's surely just a matter of altering various colour saturation values and black through grey to white values, in the spectrum referenced by the program. Why not keep the lighting and colour profiles that are used in TANE Environmental Control? They attracted far less criticism from users of all kinds.

Lataxe

PS I wish N3V had the same kind of lighting controls in Trainz as are found in Adobe Lightroom or Photoshop RAW processor. These controls are much more intuitive and provide an immense degree of control of every aspect of colour, shade, shadow and everything else.

In general, I tend to turn the ambient and sun colour wheels to maximum or near it, with the fog turned down

Click to expand...

I do much the same as you Lataxe only I have the blue level lagging an eighth to a quarter of a turn behind the red and the green.
As you say sunny days are out and the appearance of it being about to rain is about the only option.

#3555. The IM Editor is a wonderful tool and I've made considerable use of it to improve the appearance of older legacy engines.
I've never set foot in England Ken, but the destruction of the Great Central still serves to annoy me. How much of Britain's railway history ended up becoming either a carpark or a supermarket , - or both!

#3556. Bravery indeed Graham. I've been reluctant to let SP2 anywhere near my own work what with the reports of CTD's from other users, but if SP3 is indeed CTD free then that's an improvement. The screenshots you've posted look very good and are surprisingly glare free and with a cloudless sky too.

It is easy to point the finger at Beeching, though he was given permission to look at wholesale decimation in order to try and reach the holy grail of profitablility. Some closures he proposed were never progressed while others he did not recommend were progressed at a later date. Having said that, the Freightliner concept, the InterCity business and eventually the HST125 all had their roots in his recommendations. The mendacity of Marples cannot be ignored though, holding an interest in a road construction business while overseeing the railways is a putrid piece of British political history.

However, railway closures had been going on for a considerable time. However, prior to the grouping in 1923 they were often small in scale, down to alterations in routes, either due to new building drawing away traffic, new technology drawing traffic away from the line or the failure of the industry which had provided the impetus for initial construction. Colliery railways had faced the first and third threats almost since their inception, while the N.E.R. faced the second threat post-1900 on Tyneside with the rise of the electric tram and they countered it by electrifying the lines to North Tyneside.

The L.N.E.R. faced the second threat right from the start, with motor omnibuses literally exploding post-WWI while drawing on a supply of vehicles and ex-military trained drivers. The motor wagon drawing off goods traffic seems to have not exploded in the same manner until post-WWII, with the same impetus of surplus military vehicles and ex-military drivers. The passenger service to Dunston fell to buses as early as 1926, with a glut of passenger closures around 1930 (Amble being an example where bus services could match the time of the train to Morpeth while beating it on price and frequency). More passenger services went in 1939, with the Lanchester valley branch being an example there, though passenger traffic had been falling relentlessly since 1921. Despite the village centre location of Lanchester station and the proximity of Witton Gilbert station to Langley Park the passenger train service frequency was low and Blackhill station was not as attractive a destination for shopping or business as Consett, which was reached directly by the frequent bus services. A change of train was necessary at Blackhill in order to reach Consett station (or a mile long walk up a steep hill), but the change meant that the journey time from Lanchester was hopelessly uncompetitive compared to the bus.

British Railways picked up a poisoned chalice upon nationalisation. There never was enough government money, the railway companies had seen their equipment run down again during wartime with the government short-changing them on the funds to make good the depreciation. Some rural services would have been cheaper to run by operating a taxi from the junction station to the branch destinations! British Railways were not without sin though. If they wanted a line to close one option was to provide an abysmal timetable (missed connections, unattractive times) and then say that there was no demand for the trains. Rural lines were the usual target but if your main line was a duplicate of one built by a bigger pre-nationalisation competitor then there'd likley be some shenanigans in the chase for substantial savings. Examples were delivering the G.C.R. London Extension to the London Midland Region and the L.S.W.R. main line west of Exeter to the Western. The Midland main line to Manchester was culled beyond Matlock and gradually strangled beyond Leeds to Carlisle. Closure of the Settle & Carlisle was missed by a whisker in the mid-1980s and that was partially down to some "counter-shenanigans" by the district manager! The Waverley route in Scotland did not have a similar manager in place in the late 1960s.

Trains will probably never return to the woodhead route since the new tunnel now carries a 25KV power line and there appears to be no political will to take the rebuild of the Exeter - Plymouth line via Tavistock, despite the "money no object" promise in the aftermath of the Dawlish troubles. The East-West Rail project between Oxford and Cambridge has been derided after the government de-specified electrification. As usual, the treasury will grasp with both hands the idea of saving a pouind now, even when acknowledging the five pound cost of dealing with the consequences of their saving down the line. Once again, the training and skills gained by the latest crop of electrification engineers since 2010 will be allowed to drain away and force, for the fourth time since 1970, the business to start from scratch and relearn the consequences of mistakes the hard way. I could go on but it will bust the character limits.

What an excellent Blog regarding closure & modernisation of British Railways & I agree a kiss of death was handing a rival route to a competing region such as Great Central to LM Region & the LSWR route to GWR Region. Under the LM it took five hours from Nottingham to Marylebone in fact at one stage there was talk even of the closure of Marylebone Station. The Woodhead section the first electric main line in the UK. I do not understand the closure of March to Spalding now resulting in an underpass North of Peterborough ao freight can reach the joint line via Spalding & Lincoln without crossing the ECML. that closure wa sin 1982 & a negative move a sit has turned out. No one expected the popularity of rail travel until the Covis hit last year.

D16/3 62614 of 31C Kings Lynn on branch line duty.

Hello Taillight98, the dive-under being installed at Werrington is meant to reduce, if not eliminate the conflicting movements where down freight trains from the former GE lines bound for the line to Lincoln have to cross both lines of the ECML on the flat. The cost is somewhere above £100 million. There is a fly in the ointment though, reported in the latest issue of Railway Magazine. Most freight trains from Ely and points south thereof bound for Lincoln, Doncaster or Immingham via the joint line are operated by GBRF. The Peterborough GBRF depot is located to the east of the ECML UP line, so GBRF locomotive and crew changes at Peterborough will still require down freight trains to wend their way across the ECML on the flat and then wend their way back across the ECMl to the Down line before reaching Werrington!!!!!!! It would seem that nobody considered moving the GBRF depot to a new location to the west (or southeast) of Peterborough to eliminate these movements. A lot of sound and light for the dive under project and a ton of money but a less than optimal outcome. All in all it begins to look like a simpler solution would have been to reinstate the March - Spalding direct line.