Hey guys
I finish creating a track and it looks crisp, clean and with really nice looking graphics; then I time the track and go through the painful 'Shadow' creating process and my once crisp, clean looking track becomes a dull, lifeless dirty looking track with ridiculously dark sections no matter if the shadows were done very fast, fast, default or high...
I now find myself having to put Light systems in unnecessary places to compensate for the overly excessive Horrible shadows.
In TM1 at least I could disable the shadows. Is there any way to do this in TM2 and still validate the track ?

Trax

No, you can't disable shadows in TM2. Lighting becomes a serious equation as part of the track building process as you move into TM2. I find it adds another dimension to the track building process. As with any other part of the process, it can be exploited to increase the feeling of the driving experience.

Sadly the Stadium car has no headlights by default, so changing to Sunset or Night doesn't help much, although it will turn on many of the lights on the Stadium blocks.

Unlike TM1, I find that Sunrise and Sunset are the optimal moods in TM2, because it is in those two moods that the lighting is the softest and there's the least contrast between light and dark areas. Very rarely do I choose to use day mood anymore.

In Valley and Canyon you also have the benefit of headlights in Sunset and Night maps. And Nadeo has made it so that headlights work even on the lowest settings possible in the game. So this is a nice improvement over TM1.

Just a note about calculating shadows. The higher you go, the more light bounces the game will calculate. This sometimes can increase lighting in areas if you already have some good light sources available. However, usually it only means that the lighting and shadows across blocks will be smoother. The highest quality lightmap that is included inside the Gbx file is "Default". Anything higher will be compressed back down to "Default" quality. So I usually only do Default for most maps, unless there is some obvious lighting bugs or unsmooth shadows.

Thanks for the reply; I get what your saying.

The blocks do seem to cast faint shadows prior to going through the 'Compute Shadows' process.
As said, from a graphics (appearance) prospective on my pc the daylight maps look much crisper and cleaner before adding shadows, especially under fabric blocks.
Years and years ago, in TM1 I had a problem with bad shadows; half the stadium being pitch black for no reason, and TStarGermany showed me how to disable them ( to use his exact words; 'Turn that sht off, it's unstable'). I followed his advice and never had any more problems. The depth of 'shadow contrast' in TM2 seem very reminiscent of that problem(only not random or accidental).
The TM2 graphics obviously look nice without the forced shadows(well I think they do), it would have been nice of nadeo to provide the downloader with the same option of choosing their own shadow contrast levels, or just switch them off, as is the case in TM1.
But I personally think there are a lot of things in TM2 that have (for want of a better expression), been seriously 'overcooked'. But never mind, it's pointless complaining about them.

Thanks again for the reply

Trax

I had that same bug with pitch black shadows in Stadium in TM1. Like, it was totally black. I remember specifically on some dirt maps I had that bug. Because of that, and other maps with badly placed lighting in TM1... I also turned off lightmaps in the launcher settings very early in my TM playing. It also made RPGs easier to drive (when those eventually came along), cause you could see where you were going in those dark corridors.

I did miss the ability to do that when I moved to TM2. Thankfully Canyon has like a gazillion light blocks, so it actually opened up a lot of new possibilities. But you really do have to have a screaming fast machine to take full advantage of it, cause you need to compute shadows over and over as you build your map, to test how the lighting is looking. I often compute shadows at least 10 to 15 times during the building process. It usually only takes 20 to 40 secs per compute on fast quality, or a bit longer on default quality.

I can remember back with tm1 if you reduced the screen down to the Toolbar during the 'shadows computing' process it would cause the track to become very dark indeed. Sometimes almost too dark to even drive it! Personally i've not made this mistake yet with tm2 so i don't know if the same problem happens here