PLC - Project Luminescence Commonwealth

Luminescence

Commonwealth

☢️☢️☢️☢️☢️

Overview

Project Luminescence Commonwealth is a mesh overhaul for Fallout 4 that addresses one of the most overlooked visual shortcomings of the base game: the complete absence of a luminescence effect on light sources that are supposed to be turned on.

Vanilla light bulbs, neon lights, and any other active light sources look more-less the same whether they are on or off. There is no clear glow or emissive effect on the mesh itself. The engine produces light around the object, but the object just sits there looking flat and dead.

This mod replaces those vanilla meshes with altered versions that try to simulate a luminescence effect, so active light sources actually look like they are producing light. Every vanilla asset that has both an on state and an off state has been identified (I hope) and given this treatment. When a light source is active, it now visually glows, whether it is an incandescent bulb, a neon tube, or any other light fixture in the Commonwealth.

Works with ENB Series (you may need to adjust your bloom settings) and on a completely vanilla setup alike. Light sources finally look like they are actually doing something, rather than sitting next to illumination that seems to come from nowhere. It's a nice effect that improves immersion.

Background

This project was inspired by ENB Lights Overhaul (Credit and kudos to its author for the original idea), a mod that tackled a similar idea and was well regarded by the community before being removed from Nexus Mods. The key difference is that ENB Lights Overhaul was designed exclusively for users running ENB Series. If you played on vanilla, it simply did not work well.

I always liked what that mod was going for, but the ENB-only limitation left a lot of players out. When it disappeared and nothing replaced it, after a long while I decided to build PLC from the ground up using the same core technique, while keeping things more optimized and limiting changes to the bare minimum needed to achieve the effect.

On top of that, PLC uses the ba2 archive format