My dungeons and nights are WAY too bright, please help

[riskybiz13]

I've been beating my head against the wall for days now. I have my game (during daytime) 100% where I want it-- I love it. I love the ENB I picked and the mods are wonderful-- but nighttime / inside dungeons is a different story.

My nights are too bright, I can see way off into the distance (uninstalling the "enhanced nights" mod makes no difference, just less stars). Here's an example: http://i.imgur.com/fjSRzg5.jpg

It gets even worse when it's cloudy and snowing, I can barely even tell it's night time: http://i.imgur.com/GK1hf1s.jpg

Some dungeons are really, really bright. Take, for example, Haeman's Cavern: http://i.imgur.com/wym5aNM.jpg

Even Embershard Mine is bright enough to navigate without a torch: http://i.imgur.com/ISl7Akc.jpg

The only time it's sufficiently dark outside is if I'm in the shadows: http://i.imgur.com/G8GHDln.jpg

Here are the mod details: I'm running SharpShooter's ENB with about 120 mods. The lighting mods I've been using include Climates of Tamriel (I put it on extreme dark settings and it made NO difference) and I've swapped between Realistic Lighting Overhaul and Enhanced Lights FX-- neither changed my lighting at all. I tried totally removing CoT and it did nothing. I installed Darker Dungeons for ENB-- nothing. I installed standalone mods that claim to darken dungeons-- nothing.

Here is my mod list with the load order: http://imgur.com/a/YGDnI

PLEASE HELP, this breaks the immersion so badly it's game breaking. Thanks for reading.

Also, I'm not seeing any variation in weather other than snowing in mountain passes. It never rains or storms. I don't know if this will help diagnose this or just confuse it even more.

[LargeStyle]

The reason why CoT differing night levels plus other light level mods don't work is that Sharpshooters ENB is setup to disable Skyrims own internal post processing. CoT uses internal brightness to darken the nights so the ENB stops this from changing, same for any other mod that adjust lighting through internal post processing.

 

RLO adjusts interior lighting templates so it should change the look of the game with or without ENB, and I couldn't say about ELFX as I've never looked into how that mod works, but I believe this too has been programmed "correctly" so you should also see change with this mod.

 

To disable the part of ENB that's effectively blocking the internal post processing you simply need to open the enbeffect.fx file (using any text editor such as notepad) and find the section:

//use original game processing first, then mine
//#define APPLYGAMECOLORCORRECTION

...then delete the // from the start of the second line so it looks like...

//use original game processing first, then mine
#define APPLYGAMECOLORCORRECTION

Only problem here is all of the internal post processing effects are re-enabled, including brightness, contrast, white balance, saturation, colour correction, and more. Ultimately adjusting this line may make the game look better, but I'd guess that it'll mess it up too much due to the image being processed both internally and externally.

 

So I'd recommend to edit the enbseries.ini file yourself so that everything looks like how you want it. As this ENB version in question supports an internal GUI you can make the changes in game while you're playing - just press Shift and Enter to bring up the display. Then it's a relatively simple process of navigating to the required section and adjust the values according to your tastes. Everything is broken down into sections so you'll want to find the environment section and you'll notice the values split between day / night (plus possibly sunrise and sunset) and interior settings. In basic terms, for interior lighting you'll probably need to adjust the interior direct and ambient levels, plus maybe tweak the fire lights (point lighting) and fogging. Nights will also need direct and ambient lighting changes, and if you want to balance things well then also adjust fog, particle, point lighting, sky, clouds. Also if you're new to ENBs then you're probably better off adjusting multipliers and not curves (the latter approach is a more complicated one).

 

As for your "sufficiently dark" image, other than seeing the sky quite clearly, everything else (mountain, tree, player, ground) looks pretty much pitch black on my (heavily calibrated) monitor - is this what you're after?

[shadowdef]

First try this and if it does not work then read on. This is a requirement for this mod.

 

Set in-game brightness to the lowest setting by pressing escape in-game and moving the brightness slider all the way to the left.

 

Your problem might be that ENB is overwriting your Climates Of Tamriel settings and using the default ENB settings for nights. ENB nights are normally not that dark but you can click Shift-Enter to open your enb option menu and change the nights so they are darker.

 

A few things you can do to fix this would be to reinstall all your lighting mods in the right order so that your darker nights do not get overwritten with brighter ones. I.e install ENB first then follow with Climates Of Tamriel. This may not help due to the ENB coming with its own .ini file.

 

Also check your load order make sure that you do not have any other mods that might be overwriting your darker night mods. I would not recommend using boss it might very well put the mods in the wrong load order and will not likely fix your problem.

 

Ps. Make sure that you have the Climates Of Tamriel compatible SharpShooter's ENB version installed. Please remember that this version of sharpshooter's requires that you make change's to your Skyrim.ini file.

You also want to make sure you have this version of ENB installed ENB v0.170.

[LargeStyle]

 

 

Set in-game brightness to the lowest setting by pressing escape in-game and moving the brightness slider all the way to the left.

 

That would also effect days, which the op stated no problems with, so I don't think this is a real option.

 

 

 

Your problem might be that ENB is overwriting your Climates Of Tamriel settings and using the default ENB settings for nights. ENB nights are normally not that dark but you can click Shift-Enter to open your enb option menu and change the nights so they are darker.

 

As I stated, ENB is overwriting CoT settings by bypassing internal post processing which CoT kind-of wrongly uses to darken the nights (should be darkened by reducing actual lighting settings instead). Also, ENB nights can be as dark or bright as the user who made the preset wants them to be. In this case, I'd guess that as the foreground is too dark for the op and the background is ok, then...

 

Increase the values for these commands:

DirectLightingIntensityNight=

AmbientLightingIntensityNight=

...and reduce this a little to compensate for increase lighting:

FogColorMultiplierNight=

Also...

 

 

 

A few things you can do to fix this would be to reinstall all your lighting mods in the right order so that your darker nights do not get overwritten with brighter ones. I.e install ENB first then follow with Climates Of Tamriel. This may not help due to the ENB coming with its own .ini file.

 

It will be extremely unlikely another mod (other than ENB) is effecting night brightness / darkness as CoT completely uses non-vanilla Imagespaces and Weather settings, for which I've never come across a night only adjusting mod. Load order shouldn't be an issue in this case, CoT is a master (.ESM) file, RLO or ELFX are regular plugins (.ESP) which overwrite ESM data, and ENB is totally independent.

Edited September 19, 2013 by LargeStyle

[Jacquar]

I'm suffering a different though comparable issue and think there might be some crossover, at least in those who might find this thread; My interiors are perfectly lit, using only RLO, no ENB or other mods - very dark, in a word, except in areas surrounding light sources.

My exteriors, however, glow with a universal grey illumination even at 2:00AM. I've disabled any of my mods which might effect this and found no change ingame, and tried FyTy's Darker Nights Brighter Days mod - which had absolutely no effect whatsoever.

I cannot figure out what it is that's overriding mod settings and creating these unbearably, unrealistically bright night scenes.