Night Darkness MOD?

[subedei 3]

I was wondering if it is possible to make a mod to make the night effect darker so you could really see the lights better. I dont really do any city planning at night but only use it for the effect and I thought this would look better IMHO.

 

 

Subedei

[6459978. 106]

Sorry to drag this one out from the archives, but I think this is a great idea. I posted the idea independently in the mod request thread a while back, but it didn't get much attention. Does anyone know how to do this? I think some part of Gizmo's rain/cloud thingy involved darkening the land below it.... is there any relationship to this problem?

[torkieri 0]

I'm also sorry for dragging this back out of the archives.... just wondering if anyone had had any thoughts on this. I think it would be nice to see all the nightlights on even darker nights...

[qurlix 20]

Yeah.  Perfectly possible.  And rather easy, too.  I'm working on it...

-qurlix

[GMT 389]

cool thing.

cant wait to see it working

[kassarc16 4]

And maybe we can tweak it so it's dark around 9 pm and notmlight until 8 am?

[6459978. 106]

Sweet! I was just thinking about this again today and I'm glad someone dragged up the post again to remind me.

[MayorTim 16]

Cool! This will definately be an awesome mod!

[Daeley 46]

actually... if i remember correctly, isn't there some sort of alpha property in the config files of simcity? I believe i changed my darkness there once, without the need of a mod.

 

edit: nope... must've been something else...

[6459978. 106]

I was perusing the SimCity dat files with the Reader but I can't find anything that would seem to be related to this. I would think that some sort of colour gradient (either as an image or as raw RGB data) would be needed to define the transition through dusk and dawn, etc. Anyone know where I could find this?

[qurlix 20]

Well, there is an exemplar called Lighting that has all these properties.  And they all sound like the right properties, like Night Global Modifier and Use Environment Maps and all sorts of stuff...but all of them that have to do with night don't seem to change the brightness level.  I tried lots of stuff so far, like dropping the texture floor to zero.  (I don't know the range on anything, maybe it can be negative?)  I don't think the night lighting properties are understood correctly, because their definitions don't really match up with what they seem to do.

 

I'll keep working on it, but my internet at home is overloaded until February.  (I thought I had the Unlimited Plan, but I actually have a connection limit of 40 hours)

-qurlix

 

[6459978. 106]

Where is this examplar? I can't seem to find it...

[edit]

 

I love irony... The minute after I posted this I opened up SimCity_1 in the Reader and randomly clicked on an examplar. Lo and behold, it was the lighting examplar ... lemme have a go at this and see what I can do.

[ardecila 124]

The lighting exemplar is, I believe, the first exemplar, if the files are sorted by position.

[torkieri 0]

I have been fiddling around with the exemplar values for quite some time now...nothing seems to work, only thing I managed was to get the shadow colors white... not exactly what I was aiming for...

It seems that the value in Nighttime global color is a value to be multiplied by a RGB value, so that in theory setting all three values to 0 would mean a black color, and setting them to 1 should be a white color (presuming that the base is 255 , 255, 255). Other than that I am out of ideas...

[6459978. 106]

Yeah, I tried fiddling with it too but I couldn't affect any useful changes. The property Nighttime global color does seem to be what it claims (a multiplier for all nighttime colours) judging by the default values; RGB(0.4,0.4,0.55) [this makes the nighttime a little bluer than day]. However, changing it does nothing. Another theory I had was that perhaps Use environment map overrides those values and uses a colour gradient (art supplied) to fill in the colours for night and day. So I tried setting that false; the only change I got was a very strange dark band over the north-west edge of my map . Any guesses what or where the environment map is?

[torkieri 0]

OK, it is getting darker...but still something's not right. I've attached a screenshot of the Lighting values from iLive reader. If you set these and try it in SC4, hopefully you'll notice that it is darker, but you will also see that the terrain texture is very blueish. I would presume that the blue color is coming from a FSH file in Simcity_2.dat, but I'm not sure if my trials at replacing the most blue one there was successful, at least no success in game.. Hope this is useful...?

[6459978. 106]

Date: 1/29/2006 5:12:46 AM Author: torkieri OK, it is getting darker...but still something's not right.

quote>

 

Well that's a start... I changed the values similarly to that and didn't notice any change -- could we see an in game screenshot?

[torkieri 0]

Here's the shots... you'll notice that everything gets a blueish color, but it is slightly darker...not much, I know...
notice the color change in the lower right corner of the shots

Original:

Applied values from previous post:

[Andreas Roth 605]

Wow, it surely makes a difference! I like the darker night; it looks like the first shot was taken at full moon and the second one without moonlight.

[6459978. 106]

Well that surely is a difference... I'd still like to take it further though, almost to pitch black if we could. From the looks of your examplar, though, you changed most of those values. Have you tried changing them systematically one at a time to see what effect they have? I would expect that the blue terrain is a side effect of something you've done there.

[torkieri 0]

Woohoo...!!! It is dark... but there is however a slight problem getting daylight back... it gets brighter in the mornings, but it's still pretty dark. I'll try some more tweaking...

[6459978. 106]

That's commendable work! This could change the way the game is played (and certainly the way BATs are designed for night!) Could I see what your examplar values are for this setting?

[torkieri 0]

Certainly... here they are, hope these values work for you too...

[Duke87 1,070]

Problem to point out- the street lights look dim now. Can that be helped?

[6459978. 106]

I've done some testing of my own and the results are slightly disappointing (and... well... weird -- read on.) torkieri's values work very well for night time (very well considering what some other random values do...), but they leave the buildings dark during the day. So I tried to determine if it is possible to make the buildings light in the day and dark at night as desired.

After playing around with the various properties, I ended up with some pretty psychodelic terrains:

 

The yellow (and red) brick road.....

https://www.simtropolis.com/idealbb/files//weird7.JPG align=baseline>

Kinda feels like snow... (in the Black Forest)

https://www.simtropolis.com/idealbb/files//weird93.JPG width=851 align=baseline>

Looks like a flag to me....

 

So when all's said and done... I got nothin'. torkieri's settings still look good for night, but I think there is a fundamental problem blocking us from a solid day/night contrast. As far as I can tell, the global colour fields do nothing to affect the day and night colours, or at least nothing drastic. The terrain shadow fields do have drastic effects, but they seem to apply to both day and night. I'm still of the belief that there is an overriding global colour map hidden away somewhere that completely defines the night-to-day-to-night transition, with all its subtleties. Or perhaps that's just hardcoded.

 

[DuskTrooper 314]

Now, hold on a sec..
If you can acheive those psychadelic effects with some numbers, perhaps we can tweak the game to have some awesome effects, such as sun rays, simulated cloud cover (when light peeks through the clouds in patters on the ground) different colored light according to weather conditions (such as like during a rainstorm), etc.

But, anyway, interesting stuff!

[Micah 16]

This is a very interesting project. Can't wait for more developement. The ideas of dusktrooper are good too.

Personally to me, the darker the color the better. (Not pitch black of course).

[tragicomicus1 99]

Cool ideas all around. Way over my head but cool. This game is so amazingly customizable it is no wonder some of us are so addicted to it. This would be in my top  5 mods if you can get it to work. Can't wait to see the end result of this one.