It might be that they need to do some performance tuning to get so many lights running well with recommended system specs. In that shot there is 14 headlights and running 8 head lights is quite a challenge to CPU at ECA at the moment with i7-6700's single core performance, it might be bigger task to improve performance of lights, so that might be also one of the reasons why they are not yet there.
Sure, but JRI is bit special case, it does not kill CPU like ECA does, it is hard on GPU though. This is with 12 headlights: JRI has more polygons and more fps. ECA more drawcalls, but nowhere near DX11 limits, anyway at JRI turning lights on has less impact on CPU, but my GPU is not enough to keep 60fps with it, anything seriously above 7000 draw calls seems to give increase in CPU load so maybe there is some limit in engine as how much stuff it can handle. sadly list of sounds hides shadow data. Partial shadows seems to do wonders for this in new versions though, but I think they have to work either on engine or on ECA map to have performance level where they want with more headlights. Although, Sunburst with rally lights has 8 headlights. Maybe they could set full shadows so that anything beyond 100m radius is not getting full, but partial shadows. Anyway, that is perhaps why off road lights are not there yet and probably area that will get some attention. For map makers though, it might be interesting to know tricks used in JRI that makes it perform so much better than ECA or if it is just that JRI manages to stay bit below certain number of stuff engine needs to do and maps themselves would perform same if engine would be able, we will probably never know that though.
Has anyone seen this before? I think that this might mean that the Tow Truck-D-Series is going to come very soon.
Yup, It has been there since few updates ago (I've mentioned it some discussion pages ago) P.S. There is also a push bumper for a tow truck
If you press L to activate hooking to trailers, you'll notice that on each car there is a hookpoint in the front and back of the underside. Just noticed this on the legran as I hitched it to a camper. --- Post updated --- Definitely gonna be a tow truck next update
We can't really say that about the tow truck. I don't think anything was added in 9.0, the parts and front tow option and controls were all in the 8.0 updates IIRC. Gabe said that the coding to allow vehicles to link up still needs to be added in an update before the tow truck can be added. Unless something is added in a smaller patch, I don't think the tow truck will make the next major update.