ENB Glowing Objects Overhaul

ENB Glowing Objects Overhaul

If you use ENB, you may have encountered the phenomenon, from time to time, of objects glowing at night or in dark interiors.  Maybe it's even pervasive enough to be a genuine distraction.  Everyday objects shouldn't glow or have bright reflections when they're in a dark environment.

The cause

ENB's development for Fallout New Vegas was never completed.  That may be part of the problem, but in a discussion with Boris, I learned that his attempts to solve the issue tended to break other things, so he abandoned it.

In brief, certain components of 3D objects—namely environment maps and emissive qualities—pay no attention to the brightness of the local environment, something they should be doing.  So these qualities remain basically static across all brightness variations.  Although there is theoretically a way to control, via some of ENB's variables, where exactly this static level situates, unfortunately, putting a lock on those variables sacrifices control over things like light source brightness, which no ENB preset author is ever likely to want to give up since it's an important component of making ENB look good.

In the end, almost every ENB preset out there uses settings which do indeed engender the glowing phenomenon to one degree or another.  Whether this ends up being a distraction depends, in large part, on just how dark a given ENB allows the outdoors / dark interiors to get, as well as a given user's sensitivity to things looking wrong.  If environments never get darker than the vanilla game, then it's possible the user never notices an issue.  But the bottom line is that to fix the issue is to improve the visuals, regardless of whether one generally notices the improvement.

The goal

The shortcoming outlined above causes things to be too bright in dark environments, or to excessively express reflective qualities, or both.  The aim of every fix provided in this mod is to bring those aspects down to the level they should have been at, had ENB handled them correctly.  The vanilla game's visuals were used as a baseline.

This needs to be stated upfront: There is no magic bullet for this problem.  Every fix offered here is, to some extent, a bit of a compromise.  But if you're one who has noticed the glowing issue before, the results should speak for themselves.  With this mod, the glowing problem can be made a complete non-issue.*

What exactly this mod tackles[/s