di.Still.ed Lights

A lighting overhaul project with an alchemical approach that changes interior lighting with some simple ingredients and the help of MGEXE magic features. If the experiment will have success, a new dark harmony will come to light for my and maybe your pleasure.

Features:

Removes flicker effect from all light sources except fire flames

The result of getting rid of that, in my opinion, is a comfortable light emission that lights up the beautiful works of our most loved texture designers. Very immersive in dark interiors. Very funny for exploring in the dark holding a light source.

Rationalizes every light emittance in the game

In original MW light emittance of candles and alike was in relation with different layers of static lighting in base of locations. So a candle could have a radius of 64 or 256. Now all light sources, dependig by type/quality, have the same emittance; the small candles are the weaker, a travel lantern is the most powerful. Same work has been done with most fire flames.

Darkens interiors

There are three parameters in Interior Cells settings of CS:

Ambient: is the more relevant "false light" and my darkening work has been concentrated on this. It is usually just a grey tone that simply lessen contrast and compensate the lack of light sources. Ambient lighting will so be replaced by emitted, still lights. More the sources, lighter the interior.

Sunlight: acts most on objects, has often a proper tone setting, and an atmospheric effect that I have preserved in most cases.

Fog: I've left it unmodified.

Interior lighting recipe:

--| Apply di. Still.ed Lights

--| Add MGE Dynamic Lighting Coefficients:

--> 3 pinches of Quadratic

--> Linear is useless

--> a 0. 2 of Constant

--| Add Per-Pixel Light

--| Correct ingame gamma at pleasure (1/3 here)

Per-pixel magic wants the right settings...

After A LOT of experiments I've found a setting that really rocks my lights. If using per-pixel lighting, a bit of constant coefficient may change all thing. In the images that follow Quadratic coefficient has been set to 3 (more darken the environment, and less lights it up) Linear is totally useless with per-pixel so it is 0 (try and see: put mge light coefficient to the morrowind "default" of Q0 L3 C0 and make an ingame test by switching on and off per-pixel. They are simply antagonist.) Constant is 0. 2 and is more than enough to create the right atmosphere (lower than 0. 1 makes light sources too bright, higher lessen light brightness). Try to set Constant to 0 and you'll have dull lights with no shadows.

PER-PIXEL ON

PER-PIXEL OFF