User guide

Use this guide to install neoOMSI, learn the controls, and find common gameplay options.

Requirement: neoOMSI needs an existing OMSI 2 installation. It does not include copyrighted game content. On first launch, select the folder containing maps and Vehicles.

Getting started

1. Download the build for your operating system from the Download page or GitHub Releases.
2. Extract the archive into a dedicated folder with write permissions (e.g. inside your user directory, not Program Files).
3. Launch neoomsi (neoomsi.exe on Windows).
4. On first start, select your OMSI 2 installation folder (the directory containing maps and Vehicles). neoOMSI reads these files without modifying them.
5. Select a map, vehicle, and timetable duty in the start menu, then start driving.

Keybindings

Driving controls

Action	Primary Key	Alternative
Throttle	W	Up Arrow
Brake	S	Down Arrow
Steer Left	A	Left Arrow
Steer Right	D	Right Arrow
Mouse Steering	O	Toggles mouse steering on/off

Configure wheels, pedals, and gamepads under Options → Controls → Game controllers. Linux also offers native axis modes; see the Linux controller axis guide.

Vehicle operations

Action	Key	Description
Battery / Ignition	E	Inserts key and powers electrical system
Engine Starter	M	Hold to crank engine until started
Drive Gear (D)	Shift + D	Engages forward drive
Neutral (N)	N	Neutral gear
Reverse (R)	R	Reverse gear
Parking Brake	.	Toggles handbrake
Quick Autostart	Shift + U	Automates the complete startup sequence

Camera & cockpit

• Cockpit switches: Left-click to toggle, click and drag to turn rotary dials.
• Look around: Hold Right-Mouse-Button and move mouse (or arrow keys / I/J/K/L).
• In-game menu: Press Esc to access settings, switch buses, or exit.
• Find a setting: Type in the search field of Options (or Ctrl+F). It matches names, descriptions, key bindings and related words ("lag", "mic", "fullscreen"), forgives typos, and shows where each result lives. Esc clears it.

Trip evaluation

At the final stop of a scheduled trip, stop the bus and open a passenger door to show the trip evaluation. Service trips and vehicles without a passenger cabin only require stopping. The screen pauses single-player simulation; LAN sessions continue running.

The table lists every planned stop with planned and actual arrival/departure times (HH:MM:SS), signed differences in seconds, and a status. Positive differences mean late; negative differences mean early. Day offsets identify trips crossing midnight. Missing observations appear as -; the final departure has no actual time when the report opens on arrival.

Use the in-game menu to view the current trip or the last completed trip. Scroll with the mouse wheel, arrow keys, or Page Up/Page Down. Select Save as text… (or press Ctrl+S) to export the table. Continue or Esc resumes driving.

Observations are recorded while a duty is active. Earlier observations are not reconstructed when loading a saved situation or joining a trip partway through. The last completed report remains available during the current session; save it to a text file to keep it after exiting.

Passenger seating

Under Settings → Gameplay → Passengers, enable Passengers prefer available seats to reserve free seats before using standing places when passengers board. Standing places are used once all seats are occupied or reserved. This neoOMSI option is off by default; with it off, passengers choose randomly among all free places, as in OMSI 2.

The option can also be changed through the in-game Options → Gameplay menu. Changes apply to subsequent place reservations in player and timetable buses. In settings.cfg, the option is stored as pax_prefer_seats=1 (enabled) or pax_prefer_seats=0 (disabled).

Boarding at the rear doors (on by default) lets passengers who buy no ticket from the driver get on at the exit doors too. Turned off, everybody boards at the bus's entries, as in OMSI 2. It is stored as pax_rear_entry.

Wet-road reflections

Wet-road puddles show reflections of buses, buildings and scenery. Enable reflections in the graphics settings, or set reflections=1 in settings.cfg. Puddle reflections chooses what they mirror (see Graphics and frame rate).

Puddle reflections remain visible from inside the bus through its windows and rain films. Glass tint and raindrops affect the view, including the reflections outside.

Graphics and frame rate

neoOMSI draws one picture: physically based lighting with a computed sky and automatic exposure. The former Vanilla, Vanilla+ and Enhanced modes are gone; a settings file that chose Vanilla, or still has the Low or Medium preset, starts with the matching cheap level of the options below.

Settings → Graphics → Quality preset sets most options at once. Low is meant for weak graphics cards. On the very first start the game picks a preset for the graphics chip it finds: Low or Medium on the processor's graphics and on cards with up to 4 GB of memory. To tune further, change these first, roughly by what they save:

Option	Saves
Render scale / Upscaling	Everything drawn per pixel
Anti-aliasing (MSAA)	A lot of memory and time; Post anti-aliasing is cheap
Sun shadows, Sun shadow quality, Lamp shadows	Drawing the scene again for each shadow map
Lighting quality	Lamp reach and lamp shadows per frame; most at night
Volumetric light	Light shafts and lamp haze in fog, rain and at night
Ambient occlusion	A depth-based pass over the whole picture
Cloud detail, Clouds	The clouds' ray march (Automatic lowers it by itself)
Puddle reflections	A second look at the scene in rain
Rain on the windows	Redrawing the street behind the drops in rain
Mirrors, Dynamic window reflections	Drawing the scene again for each mirror or pane
Bloom, Soft smoke, Road spray, Indirect light	Smaller costs, on the graphics card or the processor

Minimum frame rate is the frame rate the game tries to hold; it does not limit it, that is what Frame limit and V-Sync do. When the frame rate falls clearly below it, the game lowers the cloud detail and, with an automatic render scale, ambient occlusion, the mirrors and the picture size: at the default of 50, the picture shrinks below 40 fps. Set it to 30 fps if a steady 30 is enough and you prefer the sharper picture.

If the processor is the limit, lower View distance, Object distance and Small objects instead: fewer pixels do not help then.

Two options bring back the look of Vanilla+:

• Vehicle lights → Classic (OMSI): headlights light the road as short, soft cones, without the beam pattern and the long reach of real headlights.
• Sky → Classic (OMSI): the sky shows OMSI's sky textures with the Vanilla+ clouds. The scene is still lit by the computed sky, so clouds and shadows don't always match. This costs a little more: the computed clouds are still worked out for the light.

A settings file that chose Vanilla or Vanilla+ starts with both set to Classic.

The graphics profile Vanilla+ (Settings → Graphics → Load graphics profile) sets both and turns off what Vanilla+ did not have: bloom, volumetric light and indirect light, with road spray on Low. It leaves resolution, anti-aliasing and the quality levels alone. The game puts this profile back into settings.toml on every start, as it comes, so save your own variant under another name.

Upscaling (DLSS and FSR)

Settings → Graphics → Upscaling chooses how the picture is brought to the window size:

• Off (native resolution): full resolution, no upscaling.
• Render scale (previous): the previous behaviour, controlled by Render scale (default).
• AMD FSR 3.1: on DirectX 12 and Vulkan (Linux: Vulkan), on most graphics cards.
• NVIDIA DLSS: on DirectX 12 and Vulkan, on NVIDIA GeForce RTX cards.

For FSR and DLSS, Upscaling quality picks Native AA / DLAA (full resolution, best edges), Quality, Balanced or Performance. The change takes effect at once, no restart. While driving, the line Upscaling in use shows what actually runs; hovering it shows the render size, the graphics interface and why a choice is unavailable. The settings are stored as upscaler and upscale_quality under [graphics].

When a choice is unavailable the game keeps Render scale (previous) and says why, for example:

• its runtime files are not installed next to the game: the optional FSR or DLSS files are missing.
• needs an NVIDIA GeForce RTX graphics card: use FSR instead.
• it was prepared for … at start: DLSS was set up for the other graphics API. Choose the named one under Graphics API and restart.
• it could not start (…): the driver or runtime refused; update the graphics driver. After such an error the choice stays off until the next start.

Tips: Quality or Native AA give the cleanest picture; Performance helps most when the graphics card is the limit and does little when the processor is. Upscaling does not apply to triple-screen and VR views, which keep the spatial path. Windows smaller than 32 pixels (for example while being restored) draw without DLSS for those frames.

Command-line options

You can launch directly into a specific scenario using command-line arguments:

neoomsi --map maps/Grundorf/global.cfg --bus Vehicles/MAN_SD200/MAN_SD80.bus

Flag	Description
--root <path>	Path to the OMSI 2 base directory
--map <path>	Path to the map global configuration (maps/.../global.cfg)
--bus <path>	Vehicle file to load (Vehicles/.../*.bus)
--weather <path>	Weather profile to apply (Weather/*.owt)
--time <HH:MM>	Initial simulation time
--date <YYYY-MM-DD>	Initial simulation date

Modding

Place mods into the mods folder of neoOMSI's content folder (as a folder or a .zip archive), exactly as packed; neoOMSI automatically finds the OMSI content layout (Vehicles, maps, Sceneryobjects, etc.) within it. The content folder is the folder of the neoomsi executable (or its neoOMSI folder when placed directly in the OMSI 2 root), ~/.neoomsi/content when that folder cannot be written, or the path set via OMSI_CONTENT. A folder or .zip copied into mods by hand works the same way. The original OMSI 2 files are never changed.

Load order. Mods are loaded according to their priority: an entry higher in the load order overrides files it shares with lower entries and with the original OMSI 2 files. For example, place an add-on or repaint above the bus it modifies. The order is stored in mods/.load-order.json. When unconfigured, default ordering applies (archives from the old Archives folder first, followed by mods alphabetically).

A mod's plugins (code running alongside the game) can be configured per mod. Uninstalling moves a mod to mods/uninstalled; nothing is deleted. Changes take effect on the next game start.

OMSI 2 plugins (an .opl file and its DLL in a plugins folder) load as in OMSI. They are 32-bit Windows programs, so they run in legacy-plugin-host32.exe, which comes with neoOMSI; on Linux and macOS that needs Wine (wine on the path, or the program OMSI_WINE names). A plugin that talks to hardware over a serial port sees the ports Wine maps in ~/.wine/dosdevices (for example com1 -> /dev/ttyUSB0).

A plugin can be turned off or on in settings.toml, using the DLL name without .dll, for example [plugins.Example] with enabled = false. Some OMSI plugins need external services or Windows components; check the add-on's own instructions before enabling one.

When content required by a map or vehicle cannot be found, neoOMSI logs missing files and notifies you upon loading.

Set OMSI_NO_SURF=1 before starting neoOMSI to disable OMSI .surf height maps for an A/B comparison of wheel contact.

Passenger models and movement

Since 0.3.0-rc.1: the current 0.4.0 nightly makes passengers duck under a path link's [next_roomheight] with both movement systems. The release candidate did not include this behavior.

Settings → Gameplay → Passenger movement selects Natural or OMSI 2 movement. Procedural passenger animation independently selects the pose system; pax_ik and --pax-ik control it (ik remains a settings alias). Either pose system makes passengers duck under a path link's [next_roomheight], as on a double-decker's upper deck.

For realistic models, select Download the realistic passengers under Settings → Gameplay (or in the in-game options menu). neoOMSI installs them into the content folder's Packs/RealisticPax and selects Passenger models → Realistic; they take effect upon starting a new drive. Licensing details are in the RealisticPax package. Without the pack, installed OMSI passengers remain in use.