Re: Railworks 3: Train Simulator 2012 88 AddOn Pack
Nereu Theiss
Lighting in Train Simulator can make a massive difference in how the sim looks. I have been working and discovering all of the different ways this can be adjusted to create more realistic scenes, and I have gotten to the point where I want to share what is possible.
Below you will find a series of tutorials/downloads to enhance the look of Train Simulator. These enhancements take some advanced steps to install and are not simply a copy-replace. I have tried to detail out the install process as easily as possible below. Because of how train simulator files work they will need to be customized for each route. Hopefully my tutorial here helps folks get them installed if you are interested. Please leave any questions and I will try to answer as best I can.
The largest change you can make to the look and feel of your sim is by tweaking the Time of Day files. Every route contains a Time of Day .bin file for each season. These can be found in the main directory of the route in the Time of Day folder. They are typically named :
Weather blueprints can dramatically change the look of your sim and make some interesting conditions to navigate. I have redone items of the core default weather files for better looking environments. I have redone the specific weather conditions that correspond to the Quick Drive weather selection. Once installed, these files will effect any Quick Drive scenario. Any custom scenario will need to be edited to make sure they use these conditions.
Reshade is a widely used gaming enhancement to allow you to change a wide-variety of 3d Settings as well as add many enhanced graphics. Using Reshade with Train Simulator allows you to sharpen the image and create a greater contrast of colors. My profile for Reshade is designed to give a realistic but vibrant experience. I have used many of the lighting plugins within Reshade to make a much more realistic picture.
Our passion is the art of prototype modeling from the long lived traditions of scale model railroading which is our goal to bring to the train simulator gaming world. Studying the history of American railroads and duplicating what we have learned to teach and preserve the history of railroading in the 3D realm.
The new texture details improvement effect will make everything more detailed and sharp. Surfaces will now have more depth and will reveal more fine details than before. This effect has been carefully made to not add any noise artifact due to the added image sharpness.
RW Enhancer 2 software comes with a configuration section that can be used to fully configure everything. You can enable/disable various graphic effects, restore the default Train Simulator shaders and you can even enable some special optimization settings if you want to have some performance gains. Every setting is explained so you can understand which effect you want to enable or not.
A full fledged audio engine is integrated into RW Enhancer 2. This audio engine is made to work as a layer on the Train Simulator audio engine and is based on FMOD technology and therefore can provide precise and complex DSP effects such as reverb or occlusion simulation.
We are planning to extend audio engine capabilities in the future so users can add their own sounds and make interesting and complex sound mods.
RW Enhancer 2 train audio enhancement system is designed to add some new audio effects on Train Simulator rolling stock existing sound effects. By using the internal RWE 2 train simulation system, the audio engine can add numerous audio layers based on complex real time simulation data.
Those added sound layers are 100% dynamic are adjusted according to hundreds of simulation variables. This add a whole new layer of immersion to your drive sessions ! The audio environment will sound much more dynamic/organic than before.
RW Enhancer 2 world ambient audio enhancement module is designed to add some new ambient/environment audio effects. This will add numerous new effects during your drive sessions. Every sound effect is triggered/adjusted in real-time according to the current weather, season, time of day and numerous other variables thanks to RW Enhancer 2 Train Simulator communication interface system.
Scenario selection is now improved, you can quickly search for a specific route with the very fast search system (by route name or route UUID), or even filter your routes by countries. Or use efficients filters to quickly filter scenario by difficulty.
With RW Enhancer 2 you can use real live weather data for your quickdrive drive session. Just one click and you will drive with the real current live weather conditions where you want to drive anywhere in the world.
You can now select intermediate passengers stops (depending on existing quickdrive configurations) and select stop duration for every configured stops. No more driving from point A to point B only !
You passenger stops will be handled by RW Enhancer 2 gameplay systems and will appear as tasks to perform on the RW Enhancer 2 HUD !
A brand new HUD was made for RW Enhancer 2. This modern style HUD is designed to be modular so you can keep only the elements that you really want.
This HUD is rendered as a layer on Train Simulator window and you can still keep the old style original HUD of Train Simulator or even drive with both (but why would you want to do that ;)).
The new HUD is designed to less occlude your cab controls and to help you to drive more efficiently with useful informations like the accelerometer that will greatly help you to handle gradient changes for example.
The service sheet window accessible from RW Enhancer HUD top bar will give you very useful information for your services. Briefing, current consist viewer, detailed infos about your consist length and mass and most of all every tasks that need to be done for your current service.
For the first time in Train Simulator you can enjoy the universal onboard Passenger Information System of RW Enhancer 2. This system is automatically playing audio passenger announcements while you drive. Based on your realtime service informations available from the RW Enhancer simulation engine, this system is compatible with all existing and future Train Simulator passenger service based scenarios and no edit is required.
Here is an example of things that the PIS system can do:
Like the onboard PIS system, RW Enhancer 2 also provide a station Passenger Information System. This system is automatically playing audio announcements inside stations. By using the RW Enhancer 2 audio engine, it can ajust reverberation and occlusion automatically depending on the station size and you current point of view (inside or outside the cab).
RW Enhancer 2 feature a radio system that can be used to communicate with the traffic regulation operator. This add a great gameplay interactivity. You can even request to pass a signal and everything will be done automatically, no more TAB key to press ! You can issue requests by a simple button click or bydirectly by speaking trough your microphone with the advanced voice recognition system !
The Content Explorer is a nice way to explore all your Train Simulator addons collection. You can see every rolling stock (engines, wagons), consists, routes and scenarios that is currently installed on your computer.
With the various search tools and filters you can quickly look at a specific content.
A new consist editor has been integrated into RW Enhancer 2. With this consist editor you can easily create your own consists to be used by the quickdrive mode.
This new consist editor offers some significant improvements over the default Train Simulator one:
Specifically made for rolling stock developers, the Control Values Monitor is a very useful tool that will display in real-time all CV's of the currently driven train.
You can set various filters and even display some graphs of the CV's of your choice.
TS 'Content Cooker' is a central system of RW Enhancer 2. This system is designed to import all Train Simulator data into memory so RW Enhancer can access this data for all it's systems. This process involve extracting and processing tens of thousands of your Train Simulator assets files therefore is designed to use all available CPU core to accelerate the cooking process.
RW Enhancer 2 can be easily updated with just one click, thanks to it's integrated self updating system. RW Enhancer 2 is designed to be a regularly updated software. We have plenty of cool new features planned for the future
Few countries can claim to have their railways as part of the international image, but Japan can proudly claim that honour. Justly or unjustly, the Japanese rail network has a reputation on a par with the Swiss for efficiency and reliability. Unsurprisingly there is a lot of interest in Japanese railways both at home and abroad, but outside Japan that interest has not converted into an interest in Japanese train sims.
MSTS had little impact in Japan, as far as I can tell. While fully translated it attracted little attention and seems to have failed to draw users away from native train simulators. It did however manage to attract the attention of two Japanese payware developers; a company named Twilight Express produced five payware addons featuring a variety of Japanese routes; these apparently were somewhat above the quality of the default routes but not by much. Another company named Aerosim, predominantly active in the flight sim market, produced two more payware routes. Some (but I believe not all) of these addons were released in Europe by the German company Simaviator. Information on them (in Japanese) can be found here: _addon.htm
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