Well, first of all, hello there! I'm aware I've been absent for a while. My PC broke and therefore I had no way of modding, and I've been busy with my degree and such so I've not had much time at all. But it's summer, and I've got a new PC. Exciting stuff.

If you don't actually know what Immersive Interiors is, have a search for it on the Oblivion Nexus. It's quite popular and allows you to see out of interiors to the cities outside. I've always wanted to do this for Skyrim as I found the default "musty" windows really unrealistic and annoying. However for Oblivion I based my mod upon All Natural, which is a brilliant weather mod that adds transparent windows and weather effects to inside. While there was a lot of work to do to add the cities inside, I had a great platform to work on. In Skyrim, I don't have this. I also tried a few lighting mods for the game and really wasn't totally happy with any of them. So, Immersive Interiors for Skyrim has become a pretty ambitious total lighting overhaul for every interior.

The original issues I had were that Skyrim's lighting is hugely complex compared to Oblivion's quite primitive lighting. Allowing external weather to show inside is easy enough, but then you lose all of the lovely interior ambiance and shadow lights. Everything gets washed out with omni-sunlight and looks really ugly. While I got a simple version of the mod going last year, this was the major hurdle I had. Sure, you could see outside, but everything looked...well..pretty rubbish. While on the other hand, just setting the sky to reflect the time looked great inside, but you had ambient fog that destroyed any view of outside. Pretty annoying.

After a LOT of tweaking, swearing and experimenting with a mixture of regions, weather, lighting and imagespace magic, I've got to a point where I'm happy that the interiors look better than vanilla. You can see outside of the windows, yet lighting changes are subtle. There's still an obvious difference between night and day inside, but without getting everything washed out.

So essentially, what does Immersive Interiors for Skyrim do?

• Overhauls the interior lighting system to allow exterior light to show. There are now obvious changes in overall lighting between night and day, rainy days will cause darker interiors etc.
• Windows are transparent, allowing you to see the weather changes outside. As work goes on, you will be able to see the buildings and landscape of the city outside too (like the Oblivion version).
• All invisible lights are removed. Shadow lights are used whenever possible instead of omnilights, but balanced to not cause flickering, performance issues or shadow striping. Every light source is tweaked to emit light.
• Overall, interiors will be slightly lighter in the day and darker in the night. You'll see light shafts through the windows that reflect the current lighting outside, and rain will drip down the windows when it's raining.

My aim is to achieve this without any post processing.

So, screenshots. Dragonsreach has served as my starting point. You can't see the city out of the windows yet, but you can see the sky and the weather (i.e. they're transparent). The interior lighting reflects the weather and time of day.

http://i.imgur.com/0vXdd3L.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/cE6BQyl.jpg

....http://i.imgur.com/xHHT9zo.jpg

All feedback, positive and negative will be appreciated. An early alpha will be released for anyone who'd like to test it out.

Excellent. I was wondering if this would ever be worked on again.

Will there be any effects such as water running down the windows when it is raining?