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Showing results for tags 'nightlights'.
Found 8 results
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Hey All! New here 👋 Getting back into SC4 since it first came out, and discovering the wonderful world of modding along with it's challenges for Mac and nightlighting. So, I come with a request (which, is that ok to do here?). Could somebody enable nightlighting for these custom assets for Mac? I'm happy to donate some $ to a Patreon or Venmo for your time. Here are the files: TransAmerica Building: Salesforce Tower: Chinatown Road, Avenue, and Pedestrian Canopies: And here is a thread that has some instructions on how to mod them, which seem straightforward enough? Thank you for reading!
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Hi everyone, some of the buildings that i have downloaded don't show night lights but in the downloade pages the authors don't said anything about that and i have downloaded yet the ep1 and the nightlighting files and my version of sc4d is 1.1.640 so i don't understand why some buildings are without lights, anyone knows the problem or what i have to do? thanks
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Hello. I just want to ask why aren't the installed CAMelots getting nightlights? I want to know?
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Hi guys. I've got some questions about the nightlights. I was wondering what makes the game chose if a building will light up during the night or not. I think the occupancy is on of the factors, but I've also noticed that buildinsg (commercial ones) with just a few employees missing would not light up, while some with more people missing would. Is there an absolute limit of occupancy at which a building will stay dark ? Is it also related to land value ? Also... I wonder if there is a way to force lights to show up (to check some custom stuff). I have this one... ...that doesn't want to light up, no matter what. I have lots of cusomers, low crime, low pollution, etc etc... Only thing I've not managed to get is full occupancy.
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I've been working a lot on building lots using Google sketch up, then importing to gmax. But all the time I've put into building my projects, I feel applying night lights is a task I doubt I wanna try and tackle right now. I was wondering if there is anybody out there that is willing to apply them for me if I am able to send the correct files to be edited? I can post pics if interested.
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I bought SC4 Deluxe via download from Amazon. The executable file is version 1.1.164.0. Does this version require any of the patches? Only asking because the lights at night do not appear on many of the bridges. I tried some of the patches but received messages patches were not applied. Thanks ahead of time for any assistance.
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Tutorial - Common Nightlight mistakes you should avoid
Cool_Z posted a topic in Cities: Skylines Modding - Open Discussion
Hi builders and custom assets users that are curious enough to lurk here (and you're right to do so, because the way builders make things will affect you). We're now some time after AD. We take great pleasure looking at our cities at night, we see loads of amazing night screenshots... but sometimes we can't help wondering "What the hell is that thing?" when looking at certain buildings. I might not be the best modeler around, but like you I've got eyes... and I've seen some things that I wish would have been made better. First let me apologize if you're a CO builder and I use some screenshots of buildings you've made, maybe you were in a rush... sorry guys . This tutorial (or maybe anti-tutorial) is not here to blame someone, it's here to show people things that they should avoid making. Let's have a look at the bad things that can happen when you add nightlights to a building... and how to try to avoid them. 1 - The fully lit like a light brick "OMG my eyes" Yes.. it's bad... what kind of building has only one switch button for all the lights ?? Not only is this completely unrealistic but it's also completely bad looking. Some buildings are not 100% like that (they might go to the fully lit look only at some points during the night)... well they are not 100% bad looking at night then... but it's still bad. How to avoid it : Do not use a single value of grey for the whole windows ! Simple as that. If the problem is that it is ok at some times but goes full lit at other times, well first maybe it would be a good idea to leave some windows unlit, after all there's no obligation for each and every one of them to light up at some point. And try to make a good portion of your windows be close to the 192 value so they'll light up less often. 2 - The checkerboard and its variations. This is very low on the realistic scale. How to avoid it ? Just do not do that, please. Really. 3 - The patterns. (an evolved version of the checkerboard actually) *people in the building speaking* "hey guys, it would be very nice if we people from the 1-5 floors lit our flats/offices the exact same way people from the 6-10 did... and I think the people from the 11-15 and 16-20 floors could join" Ok this could actually happen... but will never. Never ever... ever ever ever. Why does it happen ? It happens when you use repetitive floors when building. It's 100% ok to do so, but if you make your nightlight textures and keep the repetition... it will look bad. Repetition of horizontal lines is acceptable. Whole floors can be lit at the same time (but less often for residential). Vertical patterns looks a bit weird. Diagonal patterns repeating are the worst, they're the most noticeable and the less realistic. Oh and symmetry is bad too. I know texture space is scarce, but it's much better looking if you lose some for the sake of good looking lights. How to avoid it ? The ideal would be to map the whole windows without any repetition, but for tall buildings it will be very texture inefficient. Even if you built using repetition, at least make several different light blocks that you'll switch and mirror around (you would be surprised at how few different blocks are enough to break almost every trace of visible repetition). 4 - The "discofloor" windows (for the example pic just refer to the first screenshot of this post) Ok I know, the temptation is great to just use the specular as a pattern and just light up the whole size of the reflective parts. But the internal workings of a building are different. There are floors, and there is "technical space" between the ceiling of one floor and the ground on the next one, and walls between appartments/offices. Please think about it, and leave some space between the floors dark at night. It can be ok sometimes... but it will make the overall feel of a building much better. 5 - The glasshouse (I must really apologize for the example pic here, the guy who made it corrected it, so now it's a thing of the past... But others still can do this mistake and certainly have). A big glass roof or big glass facade is likely to be lit as one big surface, it's an empty structure, not a building. 6 - The lit balconies Guys... seriously... Everything that's glass is not a window. (bonus, note on the second pic... light emitting solar panels) 7 - The unrealistic windows Rooms are most of the time wider that one single window (at least for office and commercial buildings) (example pic also shows lit balconies on the small building to the left) 8 - The "When you zoom out the building's lights abruptly change" This is due to the lod not being mapped the same way as the main model. Here it goes from on to off but the pattern of light can also change. If you make a lod by baking the textures you should be able to avoid this easily. 9 - The "I've got no idea what I'm doing" ...hmmm...okay... 10 - The shiny window frames This mostly happens if you use variable windows but keep 0 as a neutral color. The mipmapping will average both and the pixels surrounding the windows will get values under the 120 range... and then they will get lit at all times. I might have not used the best screenshots of the worst buildings... I migth replace some of them if I come across better (worse) examples. At first I wanted to use pics from some workshop assets (and the CO devs might be reassured, there is much MUCH worse in the workshop)... But I thought that it wouldn't be very nice. (still i found no vanilla example for the glasshouse... yet. If you notice one, just let me know). And now some general tips : Think about your building about a collection of units. Not every window is a different unit. A flat or an office can be spread unto several windows. For big buildings it will almost always be the case (hey it's good news, less different windows). Try to lit your buildings in zones. Do not try to spread your light groups too much, make your different greyscales level spread, but spread in a zone of the building. Then you'll avoid the checkerboard look and have your building really change the way it look at different hours of the night). You don't have to make too many groups of different windows. 4 groups can be enough. 1 close to 128, one close to 255, and two more in the middle of the range. If I come across other oddities, or other things that I notice and that should be avoided (and other ways of explaining how to avoid them), I might expand this tutorial. Thanks for reading, have fun building -
Hello Skyliners! After releasing this building I was asked how I made the nightlights for it, so I thought that I could make a tutorial to share this technique with you. First let's recap how the nightlight system works in Csl: The Illumination map is a greyscale picture, a greyscale picture has pixels of values between 0 and 255. The devs have chosen to separate this range in two. From 0 to 120 the pixels will be lit everytime (yes, during the day too) and use the diffuse map color. There's a range from 121 to 127 that's left unused for now. From 128 to 255 the pixels will be lit "randomly" during the night... but only in one color independently from the diffuse map. 192 works as black, 128 and 255 are the values that are lit most of the time (but not always). The engine makes a gradient between 128 and 255, using 192 as the black point but making the gradient smoothly move during the night. Let's look at it ingame : the asset you see has an illumination map going from 0 at the bottom to 255 at the top, I plopped a few of them so you can see that the top part has a moving part. (if you want to see this asset in your own game and see the lights move during a night, download it and install it in your asset folder (it's using a clinic template) : https://1fichier.com/?93ej5aelv7 We could use the 0-120 range to have populated windows but as it will be lit during the day too it looks a bit weird. (I've seen some assets made like this... it's sweet looking at night... but I'm less convinced about the daytime look. Can be used for things that would "in reality" stay lit all day... but those are rare) and... we can't have the lights come on and off during the night. It's on... and that's it. Now the 128-255 range "forces" us to have full windows... and that's what you see on every building : flat windows. But there's a way... Let's start with preparing what we need I will be using a simple cube, mapped with a texture showing four different windows. I googled for some windows, here they are placed on the map. I made them greyscale already Now what we want is the white parts to be lit and the black ones to stay black; the "random" system works like a gradient so what we will do in photoshop is use a level correction layer on each of our windows. We have 4 windows, we have to spread them into the 128-255 range... Window 1 will be between 192 and 245 Window 2 between 192 and 230 3 between 148 and 192 4 between 133 and 192 Here is the correction layer for the first window : Wer're almost there but for the windows under 192 we have to invert the pictures (because 192 is black and 128 is "the most" white) So let's invert those two window images And voilà (I just made a full black diffuse map and a specular map to make the windows reflective) !! We have only used 4 windows here, but of course you can apply this to groups of windows (do not make too many groups, 4 is very ok, as we had to use pretty much all the range between 128 and 255 there isn't really more to be done) You can download the photoshop file for this tutorial here, I added the fbx file and the maps in the zip : https://1fichier.com/?q9jys7owp2 Have fun with your nightlights. If you have some questions or remarks, feel free to ask.
