What is track's scenery ID?

[Wuzzy]

In the editor, in the vegetation tab, there is one text field labelled “landscape ID” or “track ID” or something like that (something with “ID” for sure).
I didn’t really understand the tooltip and I did not find anything in the wiki about it.
So: What purpose does this text field serve?

[CryHam]

Long story. Generally, tracks that have similar light params (ambient, sun diffuse, specular) have the same ID.
ID is the track name that first had this scheme.

Eg. 0W1-cross, 0W2-Wet, 0W4-ice-blur and other, have same light so they both have W1 in scenery ID.
But since some tracks are very specific (dark, sunset, dawn etc.) 0W7-LJs-Mntn has W7, and 0W6-88 has W6, they have their own scenery ID.

This ID is used for generating vegetation (tree,rocks) impostors. And you usually want those to be lit just like the rest of track. Would look bad if sunset track had daylight impostors.

So, if you did make a new track (by duplicate) and didn't change sun params (or just slightly) don't worry about it. But if you made a specific light, you probably want to put there your own track ID.
Or just leave this to me, since I add track to releases, I also look at it.

[Wuzzy]

Thanks. This clears things up a bit. New questions follow:

• 1. What is considered “best practice” if a track uses no vegetation models at all, like 0W13-Peaks?
• 2. What can I do against the problem that my track had by chance the same lighting as another track (or is very close to it) but I did not know it?
• 3. To what exact track settings does “lighting” here refer? (My guess is “specular, diffuse and ambient” but I may have missed something.)
• 4. How do I find all used track IDs automatically?

[CryHam]

Ok, so
1. Well, I don't recommend making tracks without vegetation. Even tracks supposed to be without vegetation (like e.g. probably whole desert scenery) have some vegetation on it. They would look quite bad without it. Terrain textures repeating would be too visible etc.
But, if there is no (or very little) vegetation, this usually means that terrain has to be more detailed (and appealing). Use various noise brushes and decorate terrain especially near road. You could try some rocks (if they fit the scenery). And use more terrain layers, also with noise to differentiate look.

[CryHam]

2. If you realize before the release (with your track) it's still fixable. If after, well won't be a big issue, just some different colored impostors (but assuming you didn't use W1 for V1 (some bright ID for really dark track etc.)).
Mostly you make a track by copying from another so you know if you changed lighting (or copied it from yet another track).
Ah and, scenery ID isn't shared across different sceneries. Eg. winter IDs are only for winter etc.

[CryHam]

3. All sun params: ambient, diffuse, specular, yaw, pitch. But ofc with some tolerance. Fog is not here.
4. You would have to make this (not easy) search for all scene.xml in data/tracks/ and take the line that has 'sceneryID' in it.
Can somebody write a grep command for that ? But after some formatting is needed. So I just wrote some code to list this in ogre.log.
Here is the output for all tracks now: