The newest available version of Train Simulator NEXT from March 31 of 2024 (Version 1.0.2024.331) does have these new features and improvements:
Overall
- The graphics quality and rendering performance have been improved.
- Many improvements to the Object Editor, the Tools, and the Exporters.
- Environment Sounds are now supported in the Object Editor.
Graphical improvements
- The rendering performance has been improved by about 15-20 percent in practice.
- The sky textures are now processed with the correct gamma values for colors. The colorization of the scene is now as expected and not grayish anymore.
- The environment lighting and atmosphere computation have been improved.
- Improved rendering for the 3D ballast of tracks.
Object Editor Base
- New presentation mode for objects with and without vertical movement.
- If you disable the sky, a white background will be rendered instead of a black background.
- Render presets do work now as expected and apply the season, weather, and daytime.
Object Editor Lights
- The light pollution in the environment has an impact on the brightness of lights.
- The computation for the cone of spot, line, and area lights has been fixed.
- Lights will be rotated into the correct direction now if you rotate the object.
- The brightness of light sources has been updated to match more common light sources.
- Removal of projected lights, as they are not needed anymore with a ray-traced renderer.
Object Editor Materials
- The layout of the Materials Panel has been improved.
- The order of geometry rendering can be sorted by materials.
Object Editor Nodes
- The action to change the order of geometry rendering is also now applied to the object data.
Object Editor Sounds
- New sound framework to control sounds in dependency of the surrounding environment.
Importers and Exporters
- Issues related to the stability of the plug-in for Autodesk 3ds Max have been resolved.
- Various special resource image formats supported by FreeImage have been removed.
- Issues related to makeMap with some types of input textures have been resolved.
- Issues related to makeMap with various texture sizes have been resolved.
- Textures with a data size of more than 90 MB will no longer use DirectStorage.
- Textures need to have a width and height with a multiple of 256 pixels.
Content Developer Kit
- A project file for environment sounds is now available in the Sound directory.
- An example of environment sounds is now available in the Sound/Samples directory.
Various in-game improvements
- Issues related to the positioning of lists for combo boxes have been resolved.
- Improvements related to the processing of mouse wheel interactions.
- Many minor or internal improvements in the application, user interface, and data.
- Dependencies like FMOD, DirectX Shader Compiler, DirectX Agility, DirectStorage and more have been updated to the newest publicly available versions.
- Added newer graphics cards alike NVIDIA RTX 4070 Super, 4070 Ti Super, 4080 Super, AMD RX 7600 XT, Intel A530M and A570M. Also added a default path if the graphics card has not been found in the list.
The newest version of the application is available to all members of the Preview-Access Tier on Patreon. The download link is shared in a post with the tag download.
Greetings
Patrick