Yup, this is called anthropomorphism and humans are real good at doing it. Ever heard someone say how caring their cat is? That cat doesn't have a clue what caring is, they have all sorts of animal instincts and behaviors going on that just look like what we call caring. The same is what we think goes on for animal night vision etc. We don't know for sure what they are capable of, though as research progresses and we gain better understandings on the mechanics of their vision, making comparisons, we do get some insights . Still we don't know for sure.

I don't know... I like dungeons to be highly atmospheric and lighting conditions play a big role in that. Stumbling around in the dark clutching a almost-burnt-out torch, the shadows of nearby objects moving with the flame, echoes and noises from around the bend ahead... That's my idea of a good dungeon cave crawling experience. Bolting through brightly lit rooms going from treasure chest to treasure chest, however, is not, so while I'm sure there's a more popular middle ground here, the idea of a spell or alchemical effect that simply makes everything real easy to see does not appeal to me at all. By all means, make them effective -- using light to get around underground passages effectively does, after all, appeal to me -- but in non-atmosphere-ruining ways with their own quirks that make them interesting and balanced.

Whenever planning a character, deciding on how the character would choose to see in darker areas was always an early consideration.

Torchlight for beautiful natural lighting effects at the expense of being detected, Light with a slightly washed out green hued effect gaining an advantage in nixing the torch for a shield / weapon / 2 hand usage, or Nighteye with the washed out blue hue with the non-detection advantages.

I was disappointed that the degree of Nighteye had no effect on the color saturation or degree of ambient light visible. Aka 1% Nighteye being visually the same as 100%.

I hope to see this changed in Skyrim. I don't mind a slight blue hue for Nighteye, but would like to see the actual tint, saturation, and brightness vary with the degree of Nighteye effect you have.

that would be nice as a separate spell not Night Eye.

I have a phobia of scuba diving. It's one of my irrational fears. Unless it's nothing but sand underneath me (and even then) I just get really freaked out like some fish or invertebrate is gonna come kill me (of course I know it won't but I just get that nervous feeling)! It's like you never know just what's down there. My heart starts racing and my head spins. Silly I know, but I guess that's why it's a phobia.

My friend we all have fears, and you certainly are not alone in this one. I'll leave scuba diving to the Argonians.

yes OP indeed

night eye and underwater lighting was horrid

hop they make it better

Night eye has reasons to use over torches or light spells.Torches light a certain area,so you wouldn't be able to see everything.Light spells need to be thrown to a target,which alarms the target.If you were to cast on self,it still would light a certain area and you'd expose yourself to the enemy again.That being said,I'd also like some things to be simply "alternatives" and have no reasons to choose over something other than personal tastes.

About the Night Eye filter.Well,I liked Morrowind's.It did not have some special effect,it just worked as a personal light spell,but it'd let you enjoy the details of the area at the fullest,because there would be no color change.I actually hate color filters,and it frustrates me when they are applied to such essential things.That's the primary reason why I never liked Splinter Cell.

As for water,Half Life 2's water was pretty good I think.It was kinda dirty though...

night vision in OB made me want to puke I was sick of that blue light, its not the 20th century its magic, it does not need to be blue.

I know there is advantages to using night vision over light. The problem is that there aren't any advantages for using light instead. That's what I said.

I don't know whether cats can see their full spectrum in the dark or not, but this is not controlled by the brain. Yes, they may see green how we see red and blue how we see purple or something, there is no way to know that, but the actual spectrums of light that they can absorb are a part of the eye and can be studied. Cats can only see the colour range of green to blue. Look it up. There is no reason a brighter object would be "louder", hearing and sight are not related senses. Another thing about cats vision is that it cannot pick up much detail. It's brain can't increase the detail, it can only take in what is available to it through the eye. I have not been able to find a source on the quality of colour differentiation for cats at night, but I doubt it is more than a night vision camera, as both are reliant on an input device, and those can be limited (and understood through study). Just you can't read the writing on a photo on your computer if the camera didn't have a high enough resolution. The computer can't fix it for you so that it has infinite resolution.

i actually just used hunter sight. i was a stealth based class and i used it to get the drop on them before they got the drop on me... though i do agree with the op they need to make it easier to see under water with it. the inferred wouldn't help because undead don't or shouldn't have a body heat... the detect life thing is better because you can see a lot more and it doesn't wast your time if the target is already dead.

The point here is not to wich light frequencies a cats eyes are sensitive.
The point is that there is no way of knowing how the cats brain translates that input into an approximation of reality.

Look up 'Quale'

So maybe they only pick up those frequencies, thats irrelevant.
How a cats brain then groups and tweaks that input is entirely unknowable. Colours, as a physical property, do not exist.
They are something the brain makes. If youre confused, bees can see ultraviolet. What colour do they see when looking at that? There is no human equivalent. Likewise, its folly to say a cat sees only red or green.
Colours are a lie the brain tells you. A handy way of categorising input.

Its quite easy to fool an eye into thinking something is blue or yellow, when in fact its grey.
There are blind spots, perception filters and all kinds of odd stuff going on there.

When a cats visible spectrum is grouped into those bandwiths, its entirely likely that in that bandwith the brain has made similar distinctions as we have done with our visible spectrum. ta da, colours.

Yes but for the purpose of improving game play, I think night eye, especially kajitts' inherent ability, should function more like night vision in cats in real life. I don't mean we should assume that cats can only see some hues, that would subtract from the overall gaming immersion. While it's true we have no idea how a cat's brain interprets messages from its eyes, we do know why their night vision is much greater than that of humans.

To begin, cats have far larger pupils relative to eye size than we do and because they have slit pupils, they are able to open to a much larger scale, therefore increasing the surface area of the eye which captures light. Second, the retina of a cat's eye is saturated with about three times as many rods (light sensitive cells) as our own. Third, behind the retina, cats have a reflective layer called the tapetum ludium which reflect light which passes through the eye back to be absorbed again. It's this which causes cats' eyes to glow in the headlights of a car. All this boils down to one thing, incresed detection of what light is available. It doesn't have anything to do with how a cat's brain interprets images or what range of the electromagnetic spectrum their eyes are sensitive to, but rather how sensitive their eyes are to the spectrum at all.

I liked Morrowind's nighteye better but it was also flawed. It should not light up areas as though they were all equally bright. I was just hoping for a slight increase in brightness of all areas relative to how much light their already was, not necessarily giving an insurmountable advantage to nighteye over torches or light spells which could have far greater effect. Maybe just a slight increase in brightness rather than illuminating everything completely in blue?

I don't understand why we need nighteye or the other illumination skill. Why can't Bethesda just combine the best aspects of both of these spells, and just make one illuminating magic spell?
The Light spell was nice because it illuminated everything very well and it didn't distort the game's color.
The Nighteye spell was nice because it gave you vision in the darkness without alerting enemies.

How about this idea:
Create an Alteration spell that simply alters your perceptions, so that you see everything as if it were day time.
They could make the spell work exactly like nighteye, but without the annoying blue.

Did anybody else think at least Argonian's should have had clearer vision in water in Oblivion?

I hope you can't see for miles underwater. there should be some "fog", at least in the ocean. it'd be scary to have a giant water-dragon appear 20 feet in front of you underwater.

Fine,
Take the cat part out of it and just use human night vision, which = monochromatic grays = monochromatic blue in TES. Still works for me :shrug:

Night eye should be in black and white......

I really liked the blue nighteye view, actually. And underwater. . . there usually is a blue view under the sea.

This is because your favorite color is blue, I bet...
haha.

Being extremely cold next to all those glaciers, I expect the Sea of Ghosts to reflect this with dark blue water, clear of murkiness. That way we can atleast see our deaths approaching before the http://www.photosfan.com/images/polar-bear-swimming-underwater22.jpg eats us.

The vision underwater didn't bother me much. The only thing that bothered me about the water was the blue coloration. It only looks like that in the ocean and on some shorelines. Otherwise the water is always some variation of green, clear, or brown.

However, I did find the look of night vision quite annoying, and the light spell as well for that matter. It makes sense to loose some coloration, but just putting a blue filter over everything is not the ideal way of implementing that. Cats vision, for example, is weighted towards a lot of blue and green tinges, but they still see other colors quite clearly. I also think that Kajits should always have some form of night vision always applied, rather than having to turn it on with a spell.

On the topic of lighting, I think it would be prudent to alter the coloration of the light spell to a more neutral hue. The greenish tinge to everything was quite annoying after awhile. I think a cool white color would be better.

That's a good point. It would make sense if they had superior vision underwater. They still wouldn't be able to see past the murkiness of some water, just as we can't see through fog; but you would think that Argonians would be better adapted to the refraction index of water.

That's fair enough ay, you feel pretty helpless when you're down pretty deep. But the thing I love about it is that the underwater world is the closest you'll get to going to a different planet it's all so different, like so many things shouldn't be there. I remember thinking of Morrowind the first time I scuba dived xD