Another topic hopefully addressed in Skryim.

Who remembers playing Oblivion for the first time? Now, who remembers the mad dash to make mods that improve the lighting in the game shortly after it was released? I'm hoping Bethesda saw the extreme immersion breaking impact of the hokey no-light-source-lighting in the game. Namely how one could see the edges of the map from anywhere in the game at 2 a.m. and how every cave/ruins were lit up with inexplicably present light sources.

I remember the multitudes of mods to correct this making starless nights and torch-less caves pitch black. At the same time, making night-eye, torches, and light spells useful in the game and fueling the imagination for what is lying in wait down that deep dark cave.

Did this kind of "hold your hand" lighting make the game less enjoyable for you and would you like to see realistic lighting effects in Skyrim as created by many Oblivion mods?

It didn′t make it less enjoyable for me, not at all, but I′ll be pleased if they add a darker tone this time around, to make the player really need those light sources

REALISTIC LIGHTING ALL THE WAY!!
It makes the game x99999999999+ better.
Hopefully this time the vanilla game will have night and dungeons pitch black dark and realistic.

All of the screenshots so far (save maybe one in the tavern/shop) show the same kind of ambient light as Oblivion.

Hopefully we will get more screenshots to counter that. But at the moment, I'll just post some from Oblivion that show off good cave lighting if no one uses darker mods.

http://img716.imageshack.us/img716/8753/screenshot0b.jpg
http://img26.imageshack.us/img26/5653/screenshot5vd.jpg

I demand http://www.wallpaperez.info/wallpaper/games/Crysis-2-2048.jpg lighting! No seriously, that's perfectly possible and is much faster than their bizarre insistence on forward rendering. Where's my Crysis 2 lighting?

I will have to take a look at more Crysis 2 lighting. While I think the engine is too far in development to alter that much, they could easily make it to where there aren't fake lights everywhere and illuminated fog everywhere.

Though, now that I think about it, what is the allure of having no darkness in the game? I don't quite understand the point of character light sources if they aren't necessary.

I found the ambient lighting in Oblivion sort of immersion-making, as it tried to simulate a feature every videogame lighting system fails to implement: Basic reflection and radiosity(The reason games are so brown)

The reflection and radiosity are just fine in Oblivion. I'm not questioning what happens to the light when it comes off of a light source, but rather why the entire game is lit up whether or not there are actual light sources present.

Like this image: http://img20.imageshack.us/img20/3610/oblivion20060324234841011ai.jpg

No sky lights, torches, or any other real light sources are in this image, yet everything in the cave is perfectly visible.

Unfortunately, deferred shading isn't an all-powerful godsend. It doesn't support transparency at all. Means that you have to still do a forward render for all the transparency on screen. Imagine this in Oblivion, in the forests! Didn't matter much outside anyway, because there was almost always only 1 light (the sun or moon).

"Bizarre insistence" is a... bizarre... way to put it. :tongue: The vast majority of games still use forward rendering. It's only the few AAA games with AAA engines that support otherwise. With that said, if I made an engine myself (I'm already learning how), I would probably just jump straight to deferred shading because I share the same ideology. I like the idea of the G-Buffer, and the ability to have thousands of lights. I think the max lights in Oblivion is 12. Intel has this really great implementation of deferred shading that uses "tile-based" shading using a compute shader. It's like 4x faster than other deferred shading. It's sort of like "light binning" which was sort of one of the first deferred techniques, but it wasn't anything like deferred shading today. It's fun though to get only 0.2 FPS with forward rendering, and 80FPS with deferred shading (the Intel implementation) with 1000 lights in the scene.

Please make it realistic Beth. It always seems like the first mod i DL is a lighting readjustment mod. Darker nights and Darker caves FTW

Yeah. It wouldn't be game breaking, but it's certainly annoying to be stuck with mysteriously lit caves for dozens of hours.

I don't know about Oblivion, but I would imagine it would be the same as Morrowind. You can set the ambient light level of each interior cell, and even determine the color of the ambient light. If you want a room to have a slightly pink cast, you just set the ambient color, and raise the light level.

The problem with Morrowind is that the engine only supported a handful of lights illuminating any given mesh. I've just about pulled my hair out over this, because I prefer caves that are pitch black unless light with something, only to have the bleeding engine crap itself, and generate seams everywhere. I've actually had to resort to carving up cavern meshes into tiny pieces, and arrange it so that the junctions are in naturally dark places anyway - along with a whole host of statics to hide the seams for players who carry torches. I suspect the same limit on light sources is why Oblivion artificially raised the ambient light level in interiors.

That said, this is something that REALLY needs to be fixed. It is practically impossible to setup a proper cavern or tunnel when you have to make it midday bright to see anything.

They have an entirely new dynamic realtime lighting system in Skyrim, so I think the entire game will look FANTASTIC lighting wise. Be it ambient color, or shadows.