Curiosity in Open Rails Lighting Parameters

[Whatever2006]

After looking through Open Rails' online manual and Coals To New Castle site's OR Physics pages, I thought of trying to tinker with the OR light definitions and see how they look in the game itself.

From ( https://open-rails.readthedocs.io/en...-engine-lights ) the manual says that OR supports a single light with multiple conditions, that feature interests me as it's possible to have a locomotive with a few light tables with many conditions or so I thought.
Screenshot 2024-08-04 184650.jpg

For Coals to New Castle ( https://www.coalstonewcastle.com.au/...ights/#control ), I head over to the Light Parameter Section under the Open Rails Physics Page and use it as a reference, I wanted to see how of the entries work in the game, mainly the Unit ( 4 ) and Unit ( 5 ) for MU and DPU light setting, I haven't used the MU table yet but I will figure that out later on.
Screenshot 2024-08-04 185712.jpg

Screenshot 2024-08-04 185739.jpg
The reverser interests me and I'm trying to figure on how I can get it to work to my liking when it involves the lighting, I will save that for another day or so.

In the meantime, I decide to test out the multiple conditions for the lighting on the Chicago and North Western GE C44-9Ws as a test to see if they work and they did.

The results speaks for themselves and I like it , although I'm not sure if the light cone (or light sphere) can work on both ends and I don't know if that's even possible for it to actually work.

[ossie]

....I'm not sure if the light cone (or light sphere) can work on both ends and I don't know if that's even possible for it to actually work.

Unfortunately there's only one light cone available (at present at least), so if you're asking about #8646 being able to cast a cone of light down the track behind it as the 2nd loco, it can't be done. The change cab/change direction function though will transfer the cone of light back to #8646 when it becomes the lead loco. If coding can ever get to a point where all lights are able to throw a cone, that would make night operations look unbelievably good.

[Whatever2006]

Unfortunately there's only one light cone available (at present at least), so if you're asking about #8646 being able to cast a cone of light down the track behind it as the 2nd loco, it can't be done. The change cab/change direction function though will transfer the cone of light back to #8646 when it becomes the lead loco. If coding can ever get to a point where all lights are able to throw a cone, that would make night operations look unbelievably good.

That does answer my question there Ossie, that's a limitation I've seen in Open Rails and Trainz. As for the last part of your sentence, that will be wonderful and a good addition.

As for the change cab or change direction function, it's a possibility for me to do it on a single locomotive when no other locomotives are present, if the set up is done correctly. That may involve a dual cab configuration? In the meantime I might tinker with the other light parameter tables to set up a DPU and MU lighting set up and see how it goes.

[CSRX]

Unfortunately there's only one light cone available (at present at least), so if you're asking about #8646 being able to cast a cone of light down the track behind it as the 2nd loco, it can't be done. The change cab/change direction function though will transfer the cone of light back to #8646 when it becomes the lead loco. If coding can ever get to a point where all lights are able to throw a cone, that would make night operations look unbelievably good.

I wish that could be a focus point. Having cones of light not only on the locomotives, but street lights and yard lights as well, would be awesome. Would make running at night much better.

[wwhall]

I wish that could be a focus point. Having cones of light not only on the locomotives, but street lights and yard lights as well, would be awesome. Would make running at night much better.

I've been begging the OR Development Team for this for years. I think that one of the issues is that will require pretty extensive coding and they may not have someone on the team with the exact skills to accomplish this. I do consider it one of the last remaining large deficiencies in OpenRails.

[R. Steele]

There have been numerous threads at Elvas about this, there are solid reasons why it has not happened....one is that there has been no volunteer willing to try to implement it ... as mentioned by wwhall. Another is a limitation of DirectX....James Ross has posted several explanations about the problem...I don't want to quote him without permission. Eric, being on the development team may have a more knowledgeable viewpoint than mine.

[Whatever2006]

There have been numerous threads at Elvas about this, there are solid reasons why it has not happened....one is that there has been no volunteer willing to try to implement it ... as mentioned by wwhall. Another is a limitation of DirectX....James Ross has posted several explanations about the problem...I don't want to quote him without permission. Eric, being on the development team may have a more knowledgeable viewpoint than mine.

I see and that's a bit of a bummer there... I might disregard on some stuff I said then?

[slipperman]

Hi,
At whichever end of a consist the loco is positioned, if it is driven forwards (ie pulling the train), then if the lights are correctly configured, they will be correctly displayed. Where a single, double cab loco is used, if the cabview and lights are correctly configured, then they will be correctly displayed whichever cab is used to drive it forwards (ie throttle in 'forward' position).

Although it doesn't cover the latest Open Rails parameters, it does still apply to OR as well as MSTS usage, have a look at file ID 85963 (lights-tutorial.zip).

Cheers,
Ged

[Whatever2006]

Oh? I will take a look at it later on, thanks Ged!

[slipperman]

Hi Whatever2006,
You may not be aware that to use the cab switch facility in Open Rails (and MSTS with Bin Patch) to switch from one cab to the other of a dual cab loco, a reverse cabview has to created within whichever cabview folder is used. This may be accomplished by using the program in rvcvfmak.zip (file ID 68242), but please note the particular system requirements.

Cheers,
Ged

[CSRX]

I do get the limitations, I can't code for squat let alone barely get by with what I current do with ORTS.
I didn't think a program like Direct X would be a problem, then again, guess that would make sense, considering others use Unreal Engine 5 or others.

Unfortunately due to that situation, it's why I mostly run during the day light, and if I make activities to be released, I do my best to avoid night runs or running too deep into the night time.

[R. Steele]

I do get the limitations, I can't code for squat let alone barely get by with what I current do with ORTS.
I didn't think a program like Direct X would be a problem....

The issue is that DirectX feature level 9_1 (the minimum spec for Open Rails for ages) has a tight limit on the number of instructions in a shader. It is so tight we cannot even do all of the dynamic shadow effects (we are limited to a single shadow map, not the 4 we prefer to use).

The higher feature level that we support, 9_3, has more space, so it might be possible to expand this to multiple light cones but then you do start to get into performance issues, because immediate rendering is poorly suited to multiple lights.

So, as I understand it, we can have more light cones either by:

• Only supported in feature level 9_3 (or maybe it needs something higher), at a performance cost
• By switching to deferred rendering, which might mean a higher minimum spec

At the end of the day, it's mostly down to nobody trying to implement it, as with most other desired-but-missing features.

To partially quote one of the posts at Elvas about this issue....there are others than go into more detail...

[ossie]

I certainly didn't mean any criticism towards the developers. The little I know of coding suggests it would be a very complex issue to tackle. Even setting aside Shawn's point about buildings etc (which I fully agree with), just the variations in code I ASSUME you'd need for the train lights would be a challenge. While I'm no expert, I imagine the arc/distance you'd require for ditch and EoT lights would be much different to walkway lights, then step and truck lighting would also require something else again given they are directed more down than outwards. And I suppose even if that could be implemented into coding, would that automatically be picked up in the sim or would .s files and/or .eng files require manual alterations by users to pick up the coding benefits, ie sphere and/or angle entries for each instance of lighting in the .eng file? If that was a requirement, I can imagine a lot of people would drop that in the "too hard" basket regardless of how good the final results might be.

[Whatever2006]

After looking through Open Rails' online manual and Coals To New Castle site's OR Physics pages, I thought of trying to tinker with the OR light definitions and see how they look in the game itself.

From ( https://open-rails.readthedocs.io/en...-engine-lights ) the manual says that OR supports a single light with multiple conditions, that feature interests me as it's possible to have a locomotive with a few light tables with many conditions or so I thought.
Screenshot 2024-08-04 184650.jpg

For Coals to New Castle ( https://www.coalstonewcastle.com.au/...ights/#control ), I head over to the Light Parameter Section under the Open Rails Physics Page and use it as a reference, I wanted to see how of the entries work in the game, mainly the Unit ( 4 ) and Unit ( 5 ) for MU and DPU light setting, I haven't used the MU table yet but I will figure that out later on.
Screenshot 2024-08-04 185712.jpg

Screenshot 2024-08-04 185739.jpg
The reverser interests me and I'm trying to figure on how I can get it to work to my liking when it involves the lighting, I will save that for another day or so.

In the meantime, I decide to test out the multiple conditions for the lighting on the Chicago and North Western GE C44-9Ws as a test to see if they work and they did.

The results speaks for themselves and I like it , although I'm not sure if the light cone (or light sphere) can work on both ends and I don't know if that's even possible for it to actually work.

Bumping up the thread... ever since the ability to have custom light texture specified introduced on the unstable, testing and mono game versions of OR, although I'm not sure if the feature is on the testing version but it might be there (as I'm using Mono Game now), I pretty much tried it out on some locos I have with me with success and I'm happy how it turned out.

[Erick_Cantu]

There are absolutely no DirectX limitations on multiple light cones. MSFS has supported multiple lights casting light on surfaces since FS2002, which ran on DX8, and OR runs on DX9.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUxny8_lXUw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T03avYs8SOc

Consider this: FSX ran on 9.0c with shader 2.0. 9.0c with shader 2.0 is the baseline system requirement for OR.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLlv51tao7k

The primary problem, as I see it, is finding the right person to code it. Unfortunately, that's a hard problem to solve, especially considering this is a volunteer effort. I think we can all cut the devs some slack, all things considered.