Being a "southerner" myself ( :hubbahubba: ) I would say go for the Northern Hemisphere concept.

Why?
The game map already has a certain similarity to an Earth Northern Hemisphere. with the Frozen North (Skyrim etc. Home of the Nord [a play of "Norse" or North-men]) and equatorial Elsweyr (decidedly desert-like.) As opposed to a full North-South expanse. Basically it just feels like a Northern to equatorial spread.

My two cents worth at any rate.

And when you get far enough north (past the polar or arctic circle) you'll never see the sun during daytime in the winter, and in the summer you'll get "midnight sun" or sun all day (unless obscured by clouds, of course).

OK, I'll set it so that the topal bay (leyawiin/blackwood area) gets the full day length as given by the seasonal day length settings, but the days get shorter as you go up to the top of the valus mountains (still sub-arctic circle though). How much variation should there be at maximum? Right now there's a 2 hour difference max. (IC to topal bay)

I'd say at most 3 hours or so. Maybe 4, never having lived outside of the 30 degree latitudes I'm not sure how wide the variance really is. Topal Bay looks like as good a place as any to consider the world's equator, with the northern border at Skyrim being before the arctic circle.

Definitely keep it sub-Arctic.

I wouldn't go any further than 4 hours beyond the "equatorial" 12 hours. Probably 3 as the maximum would be good (9-15 hour days.) Enough to be noticeable, but not too extreme.*

Note that the Earth's tilt means that at differing times of the year any non equatorial region can have days of over or under 12 hours. For example:

Daylight hour lengths (hours:mins):
June:

• England = 15:38
  
• Thailand = 12:44
  
• Australia = 10:24
  
  December:
  
• England = 07:51
  
• Thailand = 11:21
  
• Australia = 14:19

*This is kind of making me think of the comic book(s) 30 days of night. Where the vampires mythology takes note of this effect, and thus a tale is borne of nocturnal vampires infesting an Alaskan town experiencing a "night" that lasts 30 days!

OK, I've changed it so that the sunset/rise times listed in the ini are the maximum times that you get in Cyrodiil for that season: the equator is taken to be at Topal Bay, so the maximum would be witnessed in the Jerall mountains. If you go further north than that (ie. into Skyrim) then the days get even shorter/longer depending on the season. I chose a 12 hour day, with sunrise beginning and ending at 05:00 and 07:00 respectively, and sunset beginning and ending at 17:00 and 19:00 respectively, being the 'equator day', and deviations are taken from that.

If you go further south than Topal Bay, it behaves as the southern hemisphere of Earth does, with the opposite of your chosen day lengths happening (if the season has long days in Cyrodiil, it will have shorter days below Topal Bay).

How does that sound? It might be a bit confusing, but I'm basically saying it works as IRL. The latitude-based day lengths is no longer a separate feature from the seasonal day lengths, as they depend on each other.

Sounds great Wrinklyninja.
Tropical for Black Marsh and temperate for the I.C. and cold as a High Elf's behind in the north

Downloading.
I am thinking I might remove HLSLColorGrading from my shader list to really see the difference.

Thanks!

First - Congratulations.

Question - does this change timescale in game?

No, it doesn't touch timescale, or depend on it.

OBGEv2 that means no AA right?
This is a interesting concept.

You can have AA with OBGEv2 if you have an ATI card using ATI Tray Tools, but otherwise, yes. Although there is an AA shader that does add a bit of AA, and the CelShader does something similar.

@ Belanos mostly: Looks like I can't toggle canopy shadows on the fly, the game lets the setting change, but then doesn't actually do anything about it, unless it's a Tuesday and you just ate a haddock with half a pound of lard while turning in a circle anticlockwise singing Don't Stop Me Now on top of the Eiffel Tower. IE. It works very very occasionally, once, and then screws up. So I'm not going to implement it.

Other than that though, it looks like my other changes work well, so I'll probably release an update tomorrow.

Right. That's actually what I was referring to with this: I'm not sure Cyrodiil covers enough latitudes to get you to the arctic day/night cycle, which is truly disconcerting.

wrinklyninja:
Marvelous job. Thank you.

Enhanced Seasons updated to 1.1.

The changes are centred around the seasonal and latitude-based day lengths, combining the two features, and implementing a proper seasonal day length system, complete with a north-south divide.

I'll note here that while if you keep going north of Cyrodiil's northern border, the days will continue to get shorter/longer past the times you've put in the ini, the maximum day length is 22 hours and the minimum day length is ~10 minutes (don't ask how that would work), so you never get true arctic winters/summers. This isn't due to any limit I set (though I would have set a limit if needed), but the game's limits for the acceptable times for sunset and sunrise to begin and end.

So how long would the day be if using Tamriel Heightmaps and at the northernmost and southernmost shores?

That would depend on the time of year of course. But I take it that Psymon here is asking what the longest and shortest days possible would be.
Perhaps adding the "latitude" cells, top and bottom, would help Psymon. How far north and south do those heightmaps extend?

It depends, as Vargr said, on the season, the latitude and your settings. I don't know what the latitudes of those shores are, so I can't say.

I am considering adding this to my current game. I take it this is compatible with All Natural and/or your own Enhanced Weather mod?

Yes.

Not attacking Thorbin here, but someone on Nexus asked the same question (I did bite his head off). Do I really need to specifically state the compatibility status between certain mods, much less mods that I have a hand in? The readme states:



I think that is pretty clear cut, especially when asking about mods that I've worked on - I should darn well know of them. I think I've laid out the compatibility status quite clearly, ie. compatible unless the mod fulfils quite exact conditions, or mentioned by name. I don't mention any mods, which common sense (I thought) dictates that I would do, if I knew of any.

Furthermore, I would think that it's not too much of a stretch to believe that I would bring a lot of attention to any incompatibility with AN/EW, and would seek to avoid incompatibilities in the first place (which I did: that's why this requires OBSE v19).

Maybe I'm just having a bad day...

Wow, this mod is amazing! Thank-you!

A bit off topic here, but it's my thread, and I'll cry go off topic if I want to.

Note that this post is a work in progress, because my brain needs de-fragmenting.

I'm trying to draft up a decent 'legal' section for my mods, in light of the recent changes made (or not made) at Nexus related to this subject. My goals are:

1. Protect the author's investment of time and effort (and whatever else). This involves prohibiting rebranding, re-authoring (ie. someone else saying they made it) and unchecked re-distribution. It also includes protecting any original resources the mod contains.
2. Offering and recognising the ability of the author to waive any prohibitions.
3. Providing an 'escape clause' in the event of catastrophe (author death/disappearance, loss of data on upload sites, etc.) to prevent loss of unique data (ie. the mod).

The last, because enough incredible, amazing, unique work is lost forever every single day, and in most cases very few people know - this is a tragedy in my opinion, and one I seek to prevent. I think it would be a worthy enough goal to spend a lifetime pursuing. (But then who would take over the world? )

The author and name of the mod are two things that should never change, no matter what happens. Under certain circumstances though, I think it's OK for the mod to be modified and re-distributed. Such circumstances would only be valid if the author is either no longer present or no longer interested in the mod, as otherwise responsibility falls to them to modify and/or re-distribute the work. If the author is simply not interested, then they can give express permission themselves, and the escape clause is not required. Therefore, the escape clause should be activity-dependent.

So, after enough meandering, here's the WIP license:



What do people think?

As you can see, much of it centres around the issue of re-distribution, as people can do whatever they want with stuff if they don't share it. (I can set fire to my bookshelf if I want, but nobody would be happy if I went around throwing burning bookshelves through windows or burning their bookshelves - what an odd anology)

Seems very clear and reasonable to me.

Slight typo: "If the ALL of the following applies:" should read "If ALL of the following applies:"

I have been checking my OBSE log file and noticed this...

Loading strings
WARNING: substantial numbers of string variables exist for the following files (may indicate savegame bloat):
Enhanced Seasons.esp (280 strings)

I did a clean save and reinstalled ES and it seemed to have gone away, however after playing for a while, the above message has returned. Should this be happening?

Many thanks

No. I thought I was deleting the strings. I'll fix that.

EDIT: Ah, I forgot to destroy strings in functions, and I suppose they kept getting created each time the function was called, hence the 280. I'll need to test to see if it works now, but that'll have to wait till tommorrow. The good news is that a clean save will remove the strings from your OBSE save file.

Cool. I'll upload screen shots to the NEXUS entry asap. Thanks, wrinklyninja. :thumbsup:

No worries, sir. My question wasn't exactly well thought. Serves me right for ignoring the user comments on TES Nexus.