[WIP] Damo's Lighting and Ambience Mod.

[Damo]

Hi all,

After posting in the New Interiors thread about my efforts to create a more realistic lighting environment in my game I've been hard at work tweaking and finalizing my lighting setup with the aim to release it to the community. I found the stock lighting and ambient levels too high with overpowering glare levels and thought I'd adjust it. What I aimed to emulate was the quality and technology of electric lighting in the WWII era, as well as making the interior of the boat a lot more gloomy, oppressive and claustrophobic. I think I may have cracked it.

I went through and tweaked every bulb in the sub, making them differ in color, brightness and intensity. Most of the differences are very subtle, but there are now no two bulbs that are the same. I've tried to adjust the lights so they correspond with their surroundings and the lightmaps that are cast by them. One example of this is the engine room, where the bulbs are browner to emulate the collected residue of diesel and oil.

The ambient lighting has been changed to make it darker and tinted to the hue of the old style lights, and I've removed the fog. No longer is the sub lit up like a ferris wheel and the corners of the interior now have better shadow effects where anything could be lurking.....

Anyway, pictures speak a thousand words so here's some screens from my latest version:























This version is made to be compatible with the following mods enabled in the order they are listed:

FM New Interiors v1.0
Open The Conning Tower Hatch TestFMFood

Cameras.dat and Commands_xx.cfg are not altered in any way so all funcionality and features of the above mods is left untouched. The only files altered are:

NSS_Uboat7_CR.dat
NSS_Uboat7_RR.dat
NSS_Uboat7_CT.dat

I'm ready to upload a beta version and the link to that will be sent via PM to the authors of the mods that use these files, as well as a couple of people I've decided to share with for testing and feedback. Please do not request the link as the only people who should have it are those I decide to PM, I will not be persuaded otherwise.

Flakmonkey, Diving Duck and lucagaeta should expect a PM within the next 48 hours, mainly for your testing and approval. I understand that if approval is not granted I will withdraw the mod and further development will cease. I also realise that updates are in the pipeline and a public release may not be possible until they are made public, but at least you can get an idea of what is possible.

If all goes well I'll aim to release versions for the Interiors mod on it's own, OH 3.09, and the standard Open Hatch mod (as provided with GWX), as well as moving on to the other uboats in the game.

I'd like to thank everybody here at Subsim that answer people's questions and also those that ask them in the first place, without this excellent community I'd still be floating around in a cramped uboat wondering what all these dials do, let alone twiddling about in S3D...

Thankyou.

Updates will be posted here as and when they happen.