Proper Illumination inside The Strip. (Especially needed for darker nights users)

[Jupezus]

The Strip, the beacon of light you can see almost from everywhere in Mojave. Even at night you can see the glow, reaching many far away places.
But when you get there at dark, when it's the proper time to do some sweet sweet gambling, it's so dark! Especially when using weather/lighting mods which makes the nights darker. How is this acceptable!?

There are only these pathetic piss yellow street lamps, providing almost zero illumination! And some of the led/neon strips on the casinos provide none. This is not The Strip is was advertised about! This is just sad.

Photos below show what I mean.

 

 

Now, here's image from New Vegas intro video, for reference, giving the idea what I'm looking for. Now this is what I'm talking about! It's almost like nukes never dropped! It's glorious!


The Strip should be very well lit during night time. The street parts and paths/entrances to the casinos especially.
I've tried some of the Strip overhauls mods and none really touches the illumination aspect of The Strip.

So yeah, this is my request. Thank you for reading this far :smile:

[Radioactivelad]

There's a reason the NV intro cutscene was CG: That scene is more or less impossible to do with the in-game lighting engine. Statics and the ground can not receive light from more than a couple sources., directional lights don't exist*, you only have orb lights, and the plain fact performance will buckle on an engine level if you have too many light sources.

 

That scene you're getting with your weather mod is indeed very ugly; something lighting modders I feel don't think about is *why* the lighting is a certain way in the vanilla game, and they try to do "realistic" lighting (with tools that are ill-suited for replicating realistic light) instead of something that looks good.

In this case the vanilla Strip Night lighting has that purple look because it *feels* like the whole area is lit by all the surrounding neon. The non-distinct color comes off as an amalgamation of all the surrounding lights.

 

It would definitely be possible to greatly improve the strip lighting if someone looked at it with a more artistic eye, but it's a tricky beast. (Which is why I haven't yet released an attempt at it in my own Blue Moon Lighting mod)

 

*Weather and Cell lighting have a global directional light, but that's all you get for directional lights. You can't have a proper streetlamp that has a beam of light that goes straight downward.)

Edited May 19, 2021 by Radioactivelad

[Jupezus]

Thanks for the reply! Yea, the engine is pretty limited when it comes down to the lighting (and many other things).

Darker nights is great everywhere else in The Mojave, but it really makes me wanna avoid The Strip at dark.

 

Now I'm interested about the Blue Moon Lighting mod you mentioned. I love the sound of more artistic night time lighting with bit of blue tint.

If you are ever gonna try and continue to make it work, I wish you best of luck! :)

[JimboUK]

To light the Strip well would require multiple light sources and multiple lights drag the frame rate down, thus the game relies heavily on ambient lighting. I found this out the hard way, me and another guy built an island home, when I did the lighting I set the ambient light to near black and put in multiple proper lights, torches around the pool, spotlights and that sort of thing. Being a exterior cell I had to have to lights off during the day or the lights would have blinded the player so I put them on a timer and this is when I saw the problem, during the day the frame rate is good but as soon at those lights kick in the frame rate tanks.

[GamerRick]

Why not just find the weather and its ImageSpaceModifier that are used for the strip, and change them back to vanilla?

 

EDIT: I assumed you thought it was too dark because of the weather mod. Sorry if wrong.