white overlays are painful

[gwgardner]

I'm just getting started, have played some of the mission tutorials, but don't know if I can continue until the devs do something about the complete map white overlays, for instance with contours. It's glaring, is hurtful to my eyes, and obscures the info that it is supposed to be aiding.

Please devs, give us an option to alter or remove the white overlays.

[Katana1959]

I agree fully, i have problem wiht my eyes, and the white is painfull

[larry_roberts]

Completely agree, they couldn't have made a worse choice of colour (or non colour) if they tried!.

[Parkera]

Yah its a right pain in the arse, and seems to be the way a few of these games are going. City Skylines and recently Planet Zoo to name a couple.

[ikorotkin]

Totally agree. When I choose a cargo overlay that shows demands, and then click on a station, the white overlay just blocks everything. So I have to switch between the overlays to see if the station catchment area covers all city demands. So annoying.

[webbie33]

Very much agree! I'm sure the developers thought the white overlay would help, but I find it to be the complete opposite. Please, give us a way to disable white overlays.

[canophone]

Originally posted by dwebster73:

Very much agree! I'm sure the developers thought the white overlay would help, but I find it to be the complete opposite. Please, give us a way to disable white overlays.

On a paper design it might be effective, but not a computer!

[luftfisch]

Yes, white is a pain in the eye and I hate to spend half of my game time in edit mode (almost like Mashinky).

But at least there are mods for better contours and colors.

[Edge]

It seemed like a bug to me.
I don't like adding stations, the screen goes white and you can't see things like city names any more.

[Cop Unit 12]

Originally posted by Edge:

snip
snip can't see things like city names any more.

Most transport tycoon games do this when adding stations. It can get in the way. Just deselect "add station" to bring back town names.
As for the white overlay it's person by person. Some like it others don't. The point of the white overlay is to remove all backround colors so you can see what is what. It's quite helpful when looking for bad roads with the traffic density overlay. You can always make a mod to remove it or make it a black overlay with white lines.

[TheLostPenguin]

Originally posted by Edge:

It seemed like a bug to me.
I don't like adding stations, the screen goes white and you can't see things like city names any more.

Hiding names whilst in line editing mode has unfortunately been a longstanding bizarre 'feature' of the series so far, so I doubt that's going anywhere, although that being fixed along with getting rid of white on white sillyness would of course be ideal.

[luftfisch]

Originally posted by Cop Unit 12:

... You can always make a mod to remove it or make it a black overlay with white lines.

I don't think that modifying the undocumented code of a game is the way every player can solve problems.

IMO the best overlay colour depends on the screen size. Played on a small screen at daylight, white is most pleasant for my eyes. But when I play in a dark room at night in front of a huge 4k cinema setup (which is great for immersive gaming), the white overlay drives me crazy.

So if anyone knows where to find and how to mod this color, I would love to use that mod.

[Gorby]

I always assumed they did that because their game couldn't handle the activities performed when using the line/vehicle mgmt, cargo overlay, etc, unless they also wiped all the textures and made everything white.

Don't know if that's a legit reason to do something like that but I was just guessing. I hate it too, except for the terrain height and emissions overlays.

If the white overlays are by design then they should make it something you can toggle on and off in real time while playing.

[Leigh]

Yeah they are wretched.

i mean, the various overlays in TPF1 were easy to see and understand, easy on the eye, and were handy to have active while you were going about your business in game.

This "whitewash" in TPF2 is not only ugly, it doesn't really allow much building/editing while it is active, so you have to keep turning it on and off.

A step backward, for sure.

[TheLostPenguin]

Originally posted by Gorby:

I always assumed they did that because their game couldn't handle the activities performed when using the line/vehicle mgmt, cargo overlay, etc, unless they also wiped all the textures and made everything white.

Don't know if that's a legit reason to do something like that but I was just guessing. I hate it too, except for the terrain height and emissions overlays.

If the white overlays are by design then they should make it something you can toggle on and off in real time while playing.

It is 100% by design, as Lei mentioned below your comment in TpF1 the overlays showed whatever was selected without changing anything else, ie land use just coloured each plot of land as to what was built on it, contours just drew contour lines on the map etc etc. It's a vastly superior system that is overall far more readable/useful, AND supports having multiple overlays active at once.

My default setup in TpF1 is to have land use and contour overlays on 100% of the time, it's perfectly readable and the only thing that needs 'fixing' is that the game doesn't save which overlays should be active either when loading a save game, or returning from first person vehicle cam mode. You'll note that neither of those issues was fixed in TpF2, despite the overall UI downgrade in the name of change.

[Cat]

TF1 contours were much better. The white overlay makes it much harder to see what is going on while trying to get a line to follow a contour.