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I don't know if there's anyone here familiar with the German heritage scene, but...

This luggage van is practically a carbon copy of a KPEV design. Does anyone know whether some survive into preservation, either the exact design or similar twin-axled vehicles, so that I have something to google and get clear reference pictures? The drawings I have aren't always clear.

Found some better reference... Can't say it's 100% correct but noone will notice .





I think I'll share this with whoever makes a nice set of abteilwagen.

I notice nothing accept that the game renders the lighting a bit exaggerated, may I say?
In the second picture, the coat looks surprisingly patchy, but it does not on the first.
To compensate, the front side, being in shade, is almost black. I guess all you could do here is reduce the contribution of the gloss map or whatever, i.e., reduce the influence that reflected light has. But it is more a matter of how it is rendered in the game, just to be clear.

Same for the monster casings at the axles, holding all the grease for the trip from Prussia to the Netherlands. I can't believe they shone like that but I was not there and I know of no one who took a good picture to really judge.

I can't wait to see this in UE3/TSW to compensate for all the modern time flashy stuff.

Really appreciate the feedback Andi!

The 'patchyness' of the coat is down to the speculars, as you say (technically, there's a difference between gloss and spec - but in TS we don't get gloss maps, sadly). Indeed the unlit sides of objects in TS tend to be rather dark, but I believe that's down to the route in question. AFAIK there's two sources of lighting in TS, both set in the TimeOfDay blueprints: Direct, and Ambient. Some routes tend to set the ambient rather dark. It's an artistic choice. It's always a question of balancing spec and diffuse, and given there's no gloss map to muck about with, it's still something I have great difficulty with.

The monster casings - axle boxes as they are known - have been made slightly more schmutzy and also darkened down, reducing their prominence. Still, the white socks are a hallmark of S.S. stock, so I can live with the fact they stand out. As one might have guessed, there's only two types of pictures: Factory new and lying in a ditch after a crash. None of which give an impression of regular use wear and tear.

UE4 does rendering in a far more sensible way, I just haven't gotten around to trying it out. We'll await news from Chatham on the SDK.

Specular, gloss, whatever. I read these things and forget them, read it again, forget again.
While we have no TSW SDK it file it under "forgotten stuff". And when we have that, the gloss may not be the first thing I dig into.

I love white socks, they are my own hallmark. I just did not remember axle boxes can be so big.

When I read about the weather blueprint in 2008 or so, I thought "this can be wrong". We should all examine our engines under neutral light, white balance set to flash. After the creator is satisfied, the route builder can come up with his or her artistic perception of the lighting at that specific location.

It would be fun to hunt down figures for the ratio of ambient light in the open field in the Netherlands, for various weather conditions. If we worry about so many things, we should worry about that, too.