The black smoke mystery

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The black smoke mystery

Postby JamesLit » Fri Sep 09, 2016 4:49 pm

Folks,

Any of you ever encountered a problem before where seemingly out of nowhere, smoke effects for a certain loco - almost always just the cylinder cocks, whistle, safety valves, but not the exhaust - go almost jet black? It happened to me with the S160 as I was puffing along, and no matter what I do, it won't go away. I couldn't fix it in the scenario, so I restarted the scenario a thousand times to try and sort it. That didn't work, so I restarted TS and tried it again. That didn't work, so I deleted the loco and tender from the scenario, put new ones in, and still had the problem. I restarted TS again, and still had the problem.

I've found others have had this on other "advanced" locos, including from the JT range as well as VW, but it has somehow magically gone away.

What on earth?
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Re: The black smoke mystery

Postby VictoryWorks » Fri Sep 09, 2016 9:01 pm

That's very odd!
I've not had it but I can confirm the only particles where we mess with the colour is the 3 for the chimney so it would never effect those others. Is it possibly caused by a shader problem with particle lighting?
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Re: The black smoke mystery

Postby JamesLit » Fri Sep 09, 2016 9:29 pm

VictoryWorks wrote:That's very odd!
I've not had it but I can confirm the only particles where we mess with the colour is the 3 for the chimney so it would never effect those others. Is it possibly caused by a shader problem with particle lighting?


I wish I knew, Pete, I really do.

It seems to affect anything advanced. Once it happens, it's happened. It can happen part way through any scenario, seemingly anywhere on any route, with any loco with any sort of "advanced" particles setup. I was trundling along nicely, and then, bang, S160 has black smoke from the safeties, cylinder cocks, whistle, etc. It didn't start out that way, but as I said, through all that changing and restarting and so on, it didn't change. Same thing seems to be the case when other people have it.

In the end I had to create a new scenario altogether as the existing one totally stopped working and started killing my TS completely. However, when I did, it did work fine.
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Re: The black smoke mystery

Postby VictoryWorks » Sat Sep 10, 2016 10:04 am

So when it happens in a specific scenario, does it carry on happening in other scenarios, or just that one?
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Re: The black smoke mystery

Postby JamesLit » Sat Sep 10, 2016 11:11 am

That one seems to be mixed results.

For most people it's just that scenario but it doesn't matter how many times you play it etc, if it fixes itself it'll fix itself on its own terms (seemingly), there doesn't seem to be something specific to make it go away in the same scenario.

I tried cloning the scenario for example and that still had the same issue, then started the TS crashes, which then carried over (immediately upon trying it again) to the original scenario. I created it fresh and it was fine. Others don't necessarily always have that much luck. Most people tend to find that a different scenario on a different route just about always works okay but usually only after an extensive palaver with restarts and things - whether it works straight off the bat I don't know because I've not seen anyone actually try that yet. A different scenario on the same route seems to have slightly more mixed results.
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Re: The black smoke mystery

Postby VictoryWorks » Mon Sep 19, 2016 9:20 am

To add to this, I had it happen to me on Friday.
I run a GTX 780ti and recently it's been having issues - switching off both monitors at random times. Of course this leaves you staring into the void and having to do a hard reboot of the PC, which of course Windows loves.

The last time this happened on Friday, after I restarted I had the black smoke issue. I'd had enough of the problem with the card anyway so I took it out and went back to my GTX 580 for the moment, the 780 heading back to Overclockers for replacement. When I put my old card back in the black smoke issue was gone.

Makes me wonder if the smoke issue is caused by some kind of artefacting in the graphics card :?
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Re: The black smoke mystery

Postby DominusEdwardius » Mon Sep 26, 2016 4:08 pm

It's a lighting engine glitch when the lighting engine doesn't load probably, it occasionally happens at random and nothing in particular seems to cause it (if you have 3D weather enabled the sky and clouds will be black and weird too). The solution is to close down the game entirely and try again. The reason we tend to see it on advanced engines is because Chris and Myself (and by extension Pete) use the "TrainParticleLit" shader which relies upon hte lighting engine, hence if that mucks up so does the particles appearing black.
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