TrueLight Shadows - Dynamic Weapon and FX Lighting

TrueLight Shadows Overview

TrueLight Shadows transforms Halo: Campaign Evolved into the first game to deploy MegaLights at scale throughout an entire campaign. Hundreds of environmental and combat lights can operate simultaneously with dynamic shadows—not merely inside a controlled demonstration scene, but across complete levels filled with weapons, vehicles, characters, projectiles, and explosions.

What’s New in Version 6

VERSION 6 — CAMPAIGN RE-LIT

• []Complete grenade lifecycle lighting, including human grenade trails, plasma charge lights, and new explosion flashes.[/]

  []Richer rocket projectiles with two complementary lights and a spatially accurate explosion flash.[/]

  []Completely rebuilt Energy Sword lighting for more reliable first-person and third-person behavior.[/]

  []Expanded Sentinel Beam lighting and new illumination for Sentinel explosions and destruction effects.[/]

  []Extensively refined weapon impacts with more natural colors, brightness, radius, duration, and fading.[/]

  []Smooth mathematical fades for Covenant impacts, shields, explosions, and other temporary lights.[/]

  []Native environmental lights can now use ray-traced MegaLights, extending dynamic shadows beyond weapons and combat effects.[/]

  []Safer Simple Light replacement that preserves the game’s original particles, decals, sounds, and effect behavior.[/]

  []Further performance and stability improvements through event-driven activation, native retirement, stronger level-transition protection, and reduced unnecessary processing.[/]

Version 6 represents the biggest evolution of TrueLight Shadows so far. What began as a relatively simple timer-based lighting mod has become a fully event-driven lighting subsystem that follows the game’s actual weapon states, effects, projectiles, impacts, explosions, and equipment changes.

The result is more responsive lighting, smoother transitions, broader coverage, and far fewer lights that appear late, end abruptly, or remain behind after their source disappears.

Description

Many weapon, energy, and explosion effects in Halo: Campaign Evolved use Unreal Engine “Simple Lights.” These lights are inexpensive, but they cannot cast proper dynamic shadows. Plasma can shine through characters and walls, explosions may fail to illuminate nearby geometry correctly, and bright effects can appear disconnected from the environment.

TrueLightShadows detects supported Niagara effects and replaces their illumination with synchronized, movable Point Lights that cast dynamic shadows.

The original Simple Light renderers are preserved, but their lighting radius is reduced to zero. This keeps the game’s native particles, decals, sounds, animations, and effect lifecycles intact while the replacement Point Lights provide physically grounded illumination.

Whenever possible, the replacement lights inherit their color, intensity, radius, and other optical properties directly from the running Niagara effect. TrueLightShadows also upgrades compatible native environmental lights to use ray-traced MegaLights.

Main Features

[]Shadow-casting muzzle flashes for player, NPC, and vehicle weapons[/]

[]Dynamically illuminated human, Covenant, energy, and heavy-weapon projectiles[/]

[]Shadow-casting impact and explosion lights[/]

[]Complete human and plasma grenade lifecycle lighting[/]

[]Dual-light rocket projectiles and spatially matched explosion flashes[/]

[]Reliable first-person and third-person Energy Sword lighting[/]

[]Plasma Pistol charging and overcharge illumination[/]

[]Covenant, portable, and character shield lighting[/]

[]Sentinel Beam, Sentinel explosion, and Sentinel destruction lighting[/]

[]Warthog, Shade, and other supported vehicle effects[/]

[]Ray-traced MegaLights support for compatible native environmental lights[/]

[]Smooth, mathematically calculated fades[/]

[]Dynamic color, intensity, radius, exponent, and scattering capture through Niagara simulation data[/]

[]Editable per-effect optics through the included TSV cache[/]

[]Separate profiles for effect variants, preventing colors from crossing between weapons[/]

[]Full asset-path identification for precise effect handling[/]

[]Event-driven activation and cleanup based on the game’s real effect lifecycle[/]

[]Safe radius-zero suppression of replaced Simple Lights[/]

[]Native Unreal retirement for completed replacement lights[/]

[]No permanent EngineTick watcher or continuous global UObject scan during gameplay[/]

[*]Persistent decals, scorch marks, a