Update
 

OK the mod is starting to take shape. After messing around with just about everything to see what can be improved and what can't, I reverted right back to stock settings and started over with a clear direction. That direction is as follows.

There are effectively 6 times of day in SH3. They are:

High Noon
Morning/Afternoon
After Sunrise/Before Sunset
Before Sunrise/After Sunset
Early Evening/Early Morning
Night

The Night time is being completely reworked from scratch with the aforementioned fixes (which are also being applied to the Early Evening/Early Morning time where appropriate). Since we don't have light-sourced moonlight in SH3, and since even bodged moonlight would only look nearly-correct once in a blue moon (haha) I've decided to set the colours appropriate for a moonless or partial-moon night (note: a half moon is only 10% of the brightness of a full moon, meaning that the average brightness of the moon over a full month is negligible even if you assume that every night is a clear night - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon#Observation).

The other five times of day will get the following enhancements:
- Fixed horizon haze colours for the 'Partialy Cloudy' weather type (this is the only weather type where they need fixing IMO).
- Fixed sun size.
- Reworked sky/sun reflections using alpha channel.
- Better cloud textures and reflections.

Screenies to follow.

*Screenies to follow*
:o :roll: :huh: :o :roll:

:ping:

"The Screenies!".....at a cinema near you..now!

Sorry that there aren't any screenies yet - as soon as I have something to show that actually looks the way its meant to, I'll show it (off). :cool:

They do this to make us work just that little bit harder :doh:

:lol:

Ven, you've modded crew uniforms... any idea where this setting might be? I thought maybe it was the ambient colour of the bump map which was causing the problem but its not. Now I'm trying to find the ambient light settings for the base (normal) textures of the uniforms - do you know where it is?

Sorry matey this is a new mod threat too me, I'll start looking my end, we will meet in the middle :arrgh!:

:up: :up:

Here we go...
 

Done so far:

• Changed the size of the sun and moon to RL values. *1
• Made the reflectivity of the water as realistic as possible and fixed the ugly square-shaped reflections which sometimes occur. *2
• Made new cloud textures with both cumulus and stratus clouds by simply combining the stock and GWX textures.
• Used stock sky textures for the daytime and early evening, and GWX sky texture for the new night environment (all oceans).
• Used stock sky/sun reflection textures for the daytime and made new textures for the night time (all oceans).
• Used OLC Improved Wave Textures for the wave textures.
• Made new environment colours using stock colours as a starting point. About 150 of the 800+ environment colours have been changed from the stock settings but most of the changes are very subtle. The most noticable changes are at night.
• Fixed the bug causing a flickering sky when water washes over the scope.
• Removed sunshine/fake moonlight at night time (ships are now visible only as silhouttes). *3

*Footnotes:

1. The sun and moon in SH3 are huge! The SH3 moon is 8 times bigger than it should be! The SH3 sun actually changes size (artistic license I suppose) so that its 8 times bigger than it should be at sunrise/sunset, and only 4 times bigger than it should be at high noon. In OLC Environment I've set the sun and moon to be their proper size (which is just half a degree wide - that's one sixth of the width of Orion's belt) at all times. At first the sun and moon (especially the moon as it has no halo) will look very tiny indeed compared to what you're used to, but this isn't just realism for realisms sake. You now get an accurate sense of perspective - the horizon really feels like its 8km away, and the clouds feel like they're high and big, not close and tiny. The sun halo (glow) now looks much better in comparison to the sun itself, especially when partial clouds come along because the sun size affects the behaviour of its halo when it is shining through clouds, and the new, realistic ratio of sun-to-cloud size now allows the sun shine at varying brightness levels when it is partially visible, instead of the stock behaviour which is to spend much of its time being a strangely flat, not particularly bright disc whenever it is behind a wisp of cloud - an example of this comparison can be seen in the screenshots below.
2. "As realistic as possible" is definitely subjective in this case because SH3's quirky light modelling, combined with its very low polygon count on the ocean surface, means that truly realistic reflections are probably not possible. I've therefore worked with specific camera views - the on-deck camera and periscope/binocular/UZO views - and tried to get those as good as possible. It's all about angles, you see. From those cameras you'll never have a particularly high viewpoint and things will look great. However if you switch to external view and put the camera up high then the reflections in OLC Environment won't be ideal (though still not terrible).
3. There is still an issue with the "base ambience" of the crew uniforms. I'll keep trying to fix it.

Still to do:

• Environment colours for overcast/stormy weather conditions.

Screenshots:
[out of date - removed]


Remember it's still WIP.
OLC

:o !! Wow !

(kinda make me speechless)

Thanks :ping:

Good stuff!

This won't be compatible with Reece's atlantic water though, will it?

Sadly not. :(

You'll be able to use the OLC Environment colours with Reece's SH4 Scene for SH3 and you'll get my bug fixes (and my colours of course) combined with all the cool looking effects from Reece's scene mod (though I don't recommend this to GWX players because his scene file seems to have adverse effects on GWX sensors, which is a real shame because it looks stunning).

You'll also be able to do the reverse i.e. combine my scene file (which does the reflections, but not the night colours and fixes) with Reece's green colours.

What you can't do is combine all his colours and effects with all my fixes and effects. Sorry.

Very nice, thanks a lot :sunny:

well olc, your water really looks like water. Thanks a lot for the effort, Im sure this mod will be a must have, and no other scene mod will be necessary. Looks fanta stic. :D

So can u tell us when this baby will be under our grasp?