Hey this is very nice ! And you say some are gonna be brighter and some darker depending on the inhabitans ... wow .

It would change from the typical Pitch black dungeons we get in Darker dungeons ... It was weird that some bandits wouldn't light up just a little their hideout. It doesn't make sense to me. As i see in the picture, this is the closest thing we can do to "uniquify" (lol wth?) dungeons, while keeping compatibility problems away !

Anyway, glad to see it's still under way. It will surely take over pitch black mods !

Thanks for the compliments.
I've been working on Vilverin's first floor last couple of days, and made some new objects to house/hold light sources. One of them, a tripod brazier is visible in a couple of these pictures.


http://www.imageno.com/56v6bp2rfkzapic.html
http://www.imageno.com/mu749vjqtbjjpic.html
http://www.imageno.com/uav6ldyd9nu5pic.html
http://www.imageno.com/wh96o8ukxz53pic.html
http://www.imageno.com/e0e2cn9o1sv5pic.html
http://www.imageno.com/v4iq9obb0ca8pic.html
http://www.imageno.com/5i5ogjlt6h2kpic.html
http://www.imageno.com/sro6ppe31mxhpic.html

Im trying to understand the scope of how massive this project is. Are you going through EVERY single interior/exterior and hand picking lights? Or are you going to find another method eventually? Nevertheless, the work is amazing.

Vilverin looks fantastic so far

Looks awesome, you have my download already..

The Vilverin stuff looks good, and I definitely like the idea of lighting based on who lives there. Bandits obviously would not be content with using whatever Ayleid crystals were lying about. They'd use their own torches and such.

As far as deleting, while you're working it's easier to delete the things you don't need. Then when you're ready to release, run it through http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Tes4Mod:Tes4View to remove any dirty edits and undelete the references. They'll be set disabled and moved clear of the area. Takes only a couple of minutes.

Just internally and yea, every level of every dungeon. I'm still experimenting with light setup and stuff in some areas. Sideways Cave was the first place I did that had Aylied ruins in it. So, I started looking at the architecture and looking for places that would make sense or would just look neat housing a light source. Like these http://www.imageno.com/pr0y78telrqipic.html or making this http://www.imageno.com/5i5ogjlt6h2kpic.html look like a mushroom. I play around with that sort of stuff until I feel I've got something and go from there. I added some extra things in Vilverin, since it has a bit of everything, so I'll wind up going back into Sideways and adding those things to it. It'll go by a bit faster as I get certain area layouts settled in my head. I'm thinking once I've finished all four levels of Vilverin, the rest of the Aylied ruins will go by a lot faster. Especially those with no human-like inhabitants!

I don't know of any other 'methods', but besides what I described a few posts above in response to wrinklyninja, I'm literally hand placing the light bulbs for things like the welkynd stones and some candles. Campfire logs, straw, barrels, braziers and other items are placed and scaled as well and then I add different flames or lanterns that alrdy have a light attached to it.

Hope that helps

I'm having a problem with a http://www.imageno.com/ulfixcjb6l42pic.html not 'lighting' ingame. It shows up just fine emitting light in the CS. Anyone know why?

Torches are set to default to off. The CS doesn't check those sorts of things. You'd probably have to alter the torch object to prevent that, assuming you want to raise the ire of torch mod users

Hell yeah, it does! That's some excellent lighting right there ...

Wonder if this will work with All Natural eventually? I know All Natural incorporates a new version of Real Lights already, but All Natural with ZILO would be hard to beat ...

Thanks again for the compliments.

Well that svcks. guess I'll just take that one out and add a different one in it's place. Kinda wanted to add a torch that the player could pick up and use, should they need it



I'm not sure if it'll be compatible out of the box or not. I don't really know exactly what the conflicts between AN and RL are. But indeed, that would be sweet.

Quick update...

Just finished Vilverin (she's a BEAST) as well as went back and touched up Sideways Cave to be more in line with the former. Took some more screens as well. Well post some later.

:And somewhat off topic: Anyone know of a free gallery type site, I can upload images too and maybe a .gif file to two?

Regarding All Natural compatibility, that relies on one thing: Will this mod be affecting interiors such as houses too, or is it just dungeons? Dungeons are fine, but interiors might be an issue, I'm not sure, but I'm 95% sure it will be fine, I'd have to check to be sure though.

Current plans for the Real Lights portion of AN include it being modularised into exterior, interior and dungeon portions. Obviously, if you want to use ZILO for dungeons/interiors, you just get rid of the appropriate plugins, and just use the exteriors plugin.

That should make everything play nice together.

Oh, and regarding the images, have you tried imageshack or photobucket? I've never used them, but they seem to be popular.

Imageshack doesn't appear to offer albums, but I know photobucket does, as I've seen many of them. Though I can't say if they're free or not since I have my own image gallery

Like wrinklyninja said, AN compatibility will depend on the scope of what you're doing vs the scope of what we're doing. The work you've done so far looks awesome, and I don't know, it may simply be that you end up doing a better job than either of us could and so it wouldn't make a lot of sense to duplicate efforts for dungeon lighting. We may well be better off concentrating on building interiors, cities, and open areas.

i like photobucket. always seems faster than imageshack for me.
http://photobucket.com/

resize and convert bitmap files to jpeg with this very nice free utility:
http://irfanview.com/


http://i295.photobucket.com/albums/mm125/whirlin/dd6.jpg
good luck on the mod.

edit: never uploaded vids so not sure how they work.

Thanks for the tips. Turns out I had a Photobucket account from a few years ago. Uploading some images to that as I type. Just looking for something temporary till I find a website of my own. Like what Alienslof has.

I made some animated .gifs yesterday of the ambient dawn-night lighting screens I put up in the first post. I noticed some of them aren't even available for viewing anymore. And since I figure it might be time to update the original post i might as well make it easier on everyone to see the difference in the lighting conditions when they're coming from outside.

Sounds like AN and ZILO should be compatible then. As of now, I have no plans to do anything outside of dungeons.

Ello again,

Been working the last few days, but I've got the next few days off to do some more damage Minus my anniversary on St. Patty's day!

Uploaded all the screens to photobucket and put them in a ZILO gallery subdivided into each dungeon for now. I'll update the OP soon to reflect this.
There's quite a few new screens in the Vilverin gallery. These are all taken in 1440x900. not sure if there's a whole lot of degradation with photobucket dropping the resolution, didn't compare.

Here's the .gifs I said I made. Starting at dawn, they move into morning, day, late day, dusk, evening and then night.
http://s216.photobucket.com/albums/cc105/zinnikeys/ZILO/?action=view¤t=Sinkhole.gif
http://s216.photobucket.com/albums/cc105/zinnikeys/ZILO/?action=view¤t=FirstChamber.gif

http://s216.photobucket.com/albums/cc105/zinnikeys/ZILO/Sideways%20Cave/
http://s216.photobucket.com/albums/cc105/zinnikeys/ZILO/Vilverin/
http://s216.photobucket.com/albums/cc105/zinnikeys/ZILO/Tutorial%20Dungeon/

Something that has been bugging my for a long time is whether or not to keep the rays of light as seen in the .gifs above during the 'day' hours. Coming from a window is one thing but coming all the way down through a long vertical shaft is another. While it can look nice, it doesn't seem very realistic to me. Anyone else think I should get rid of them?

I don't. I'm using a modified version of Real Lights that comes with All Natural and I think they look pretty good. Much, much better than vanilla. If you remove them there will be no light source at all, unless you add torches to the walls or something, but there is no reason for their to be torches mounted to the walls since no humans live there.

There's still a light source without a ray of light. And the tutorial dungeon is the Blade's secret escape route for the king. So, they would have light fixtures in place.

I'm wondering if this will be compatible with Darker Dungeons or better Let there be darkness: http://tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=22819

So looking forward to this. any eta

Sorry, No clue on when I'll be done.
And while I'm pretty sure ZILO, DD and LtbD would just simply overwrite each other, you won't need the other two, should you like ZILO better. Because unless there's a light source, it's as black as it's gonna get in these dungeons.

If you're planning to drop cell ambient light settings to 0,0,0 I'd suggest rethinking that. I've found in the dungeon cells in my mods that things look better if you drop them to 10,5,2 instead. It's just enough ambient to take the harsh edge off of the light source fading without making it possible to see in the darkness and looks a lot better that way.

For interiors I usually go with 20,10,5 for the same reasons, mainly because it's nearly impossible to sensibly light an interior with only true light emitters. You end up having to give way to the game engine's hatred of overlapping lights.

Whether or not you follow up on Arthmoor's suggestion, ZILO and DD/LtbD will be compatible.

If you zero the values, then DD won't be needed, as it won't be making any other changes, and LtbD will just add to ZILO with the fog changes too, as well as more dungeons from SI, etc.

If you use the 'Arthmoor' values, then people can pick to use your mod as you release it, or they can use DD/LtbD to zero the values, and all is well.

So that's another thing you don't need to worry about. I just want to say good luck again, those screenies and gifs looked really awesome. Don't rush it either, I think RL was a couple of years in the making, so you just take your time getting everything good too.

Well, I'm back again. Somewhat absent, but still on it.

Work has been busy as hell and kicking my butt over the last month. So, I haven't had much off time to work on this over the last 4 weeks. And even if I had time, it was a question of do I have the energy? Things should be slowing down now. That will enable me to pick up the pace.

Anyway, as with an absence I bring more pictures. This time from http://s216.photobucket.com/albums/cc105/zinnikeys/ZILO/Vahtacen/?albumview=grid. I'm currently in the middle of Veyond at the moment. Nothing really new or exciting to report.

Zinni


Yea, I'm not dropping it to 0,0,0. Something in my head told me not to, since fog near set to 0 caused problems. I started off using 1,1,1. I popped in 10,5,2 while working on Vahtacen to check it out. That gave it a red ambiance to the darkness.

That looks beautiful, I really hope this mod gets finished someday