SimFox's day/night mod issue?

[Magneto 316]

Hi!

I recently grabbed SimFox's day/nite mod to give it a go, but I'm having issues with the famous truenite (or is it darknite?) feature it boasts. To put it simply, buildings that support this feature doesn't have lights...at all. The other "classic" lighting is fine, though.

Sent a PM to the author a few days ago and still waiting for an answer, but I might as well ask here. Is there any known conflict with this mod? I have quite a lot of mods in my plugins folder, but I'm not using any other day/night mod.

Thanks

[skylerracer23 71]

this answer is based on the posts you made-----

well it looks like certin mods you have dont support the darknite mod. they're usually buildings. my best suggestion would be to go find that mod again and download the darknite version and get rid of the maxis version.(of course you need to delete the lot first or else your in big trouble)

[Jasoncw 11,840]

There are 3 possible situations relating to your BATs:

1. Maxis buildings and almost all buildings made from gmax/BAT will work just fine.

2. BATs listed as being "MaxisNite", or slightly older BATs listed as being TruNite (before there was a distinction to make between MaxisNite and DarkNite)* will light up at night, but because of the way they were rendered, and because they were made to blend into the brighter default nitelites, they'll stick out from the rest of the buildings, sort of like they're glowing. But the night lights will still turn on.

3. BATs listed as being DarkNite will have their night lights show up and will blend in really well with the darkened night environment.

Nitelites work in all of these cases. The nitelites won't blend in very well in situation #2, but they'll still turn on.

So I don't think your problem has anything to do with this modd. And actually, even if you remove the modd from your plugins folders and keep the DarkNite BATs, their nitelites will work just fine too, except that those BATs will look darker at night.

If nitelites aren't showing up for any BATs at all it could be that you don't have the update to the game that enables nitelites on BATs. I think the updates are available at SC4Devotion.com though (I don't remember the specifics, it's been a while since I've had to do this myself). The other thing might be that the buildings are abandoned or don't have electricity or something, so the nitelites aren't turning on for that reason. The other thing might be that they just haven't turned on yet. Sometimes some BATs just don't turn on at first.

* TruNite is a way of rendering the nitelites that's different from the original default way, and really improves the image quality. Because of the way the process works, you need to do separate renders for different night modes. At first they were made to blend into the standard bright blue night environment, because night modds weren't really as common at the time. And so these BATs were just listed as being TruNite. Sometimes that they were TruNite was left out of the description because at the time it didn't really have any consequences except that the image quality would be higher. Then night modds became more common. And then SimFox made his own night modd and then provided the tools for rendering BATs to match that night mode. "MaxisNite" and "DarkNite" were coined to differentiate between the default bright blue Maxis night environment and SimFox's darker night environment.

[Magneto 316]

Well that's strange. I have the update for nightlights and I tested with 3 different BATs with the darknite feature, none of them had lights... Definitely not a problem with electricity. It could be abandonment, but one of the 3 bats was just some kind of air filter for roundabouts

Kyleracer, I couldn't understand what you were referring to, could you be more specific?

Anyway thanks for your help, appreciated!

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

To check if you really have the nightlights patch installed properly use windows explorer to navigate to Program Files ... SimCity 4.exe and hover your mouse over it. If it tells you 1,1,640 or 1,1,641 you do, indeed have the patch installed.

[Magneto 316]

Just checked, it reads 1.1.640. Oh well.

Thanks Moose

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Cool. Now you need to understand the competing versions for night lights. I believe there are 3, simfox's, Maxis' and one other I don't recall.