Railworks America

Experimenting with settings today, I found one that makes a pretty dramatic difference to my view... the Depth of Field. On my system it makes everything noticably fuzzier. Besides the overall slightly less-focused appearance, look particularly at the red clay bank on the left and the sharpness of the distant mountain crest where it meets the sky (screenshot processing for posting makes the difference less drastic than the real in-game view):

Depth of Field disabled:


Depth of Field enabled:

I have noticed the same thing, and turned it off.

lol, that is exactly what depth of field is. It's a recreation of the effect a lense of specific curvature gives when focusing on a certain point. Some people (myself included) prefer the effect because it helps give the illusion of 3 dimensions to a 2d screen, as well as giving a more cinematic/photographic look to the game. Thankfully RSC have given us the choice so that we can all use what we want.

If you're like me and you're always browsing the screen shots forums, you'll see many people have edited theirs with photoshop (etc) to give the DoF effect, where the background (and sometimes foreground) is blurred slightly. It's because it mimics the effect you'd see in an actually photograph. Now we can get the effect in realtime and without using any image editing magic :)

You're right. I haven't really noticed the beneficial side of it in RW though. Maybe I should look around in the cab with it on/off but in the great outdoors, I just don't see much difference (except the fuzziness).

Yes, but this affect is desirable in photography. My eyes cannot adjust their boken (I believe this affliction is called tunnel vision), so unless we are taking screen shots I don't see this as being very useful.

I turned it off too, made me feel short-sighted. IRL unless your eyes can't actually do it ( because of short-sightedness ), if you looked at the distant mountain you'd focus on it and it wouldn't be fuzzy. Useful for screenshots if you don't feel like waving the blur tool around.

I think it's more to hide the (not so) distant mountains. It's like using the blur tool in Photoshop to hide bad texturing. :)