What controls the amount of light from interior windows?

[TheMastersSon]

As per topic. Suddenly interior windows make it look like daytime, regardless of the hour. There's maybe a 10% difference between noon and midnight in the amount of light coming from them in interior cells, while they used to be completely dark or something close to it at night.

 

I have an idea where the change came from, as it started after I installed and then uninstalled a nighttime sky mod for Oblivion. But now the bright windows persist even though the mod is history and even with a new game, reverting to a known-good oblivion.ini etc.

 

I'm thinking it's a global variable setting or settings, if that's the case pointers to which one(s) would be appreciated. I'm 100% sure no changes occurred to the window meshes to cause this problem.

 

Thanks in advance for any help!

[TheMastersSon]

Well we stumbled on the solution, but still no idea why it happened in the first place. For others having the same issue, try going into Oblivion's video menu options and first disable window reflections, then re-enable them. The option is down toward the bottom of the list.

 

EDIT: Never mind the above. The next time we restarted Oblivion the problem was back, and toggling the window reflections option does nothing.

Edited December 17, 2016 by TheMastersSon

[Paranoid23]

It's probably caused by ambient lighting, i.e. artificial lighting in almost every room in Oblivion. However, since it's caused by an uninstalled mod it might be hard to remove.

[TheMastersSon]

Today the problem is gone entirely and, as with the rest of this issue, we have no clue why. Forcing Oblivion to redetect video quality settings (and then readjusting them manually) might have had something to do with it, if the function resets things other than what's in oblivion.ini. I have a feeling it does.

 

Anyone know why Bethesda opted for blinding cyan windows in Rosethorn Hall? It's my favorite vanilla house in the game except for these windows, so we swapped them with ones from Chorrol. The difference in atmosphere is amazing imo and I'm left scratching my head about the cyan.

Edited December 20, 2016 by TheMastersSon

[QuestSolver]

Today the problem is gone entirely and, as with the rest of this issue, we have no clue why. Forcing Oblivion to redetect video quality settings (and then readjusting them manually) might have had something to do with it, if the function resets things other than what's in oblivion.ini. I have a feeling it does.

 

Anyone know why Bethesda opted for blinding cyan windows in Rosethorn Hall? It's my favorite vanilla house in the game except for these windows, so we swapped them with ones from Chorrol. The difference in atmosphere is amazing imo and I'm left scratching my head about the cyan.

 

Have you tried All Natural with its Natural Interiors and Real Lights? Those mods in that package work well with AWLS (Advanced Windows Lightning System). Windows light up from outside when it is dark depending on weather or time and with individual settings for each city (take some time to use Wizard in WB instead of picking one setting for all of Tamriel) this make it feel more realistic. AWLS do also add smoke from chimney, which adds to the feeling of a more vivid world.

 

Real lights adds more realistic light sources like candle which actually look more alive, caves and outdoor have also another colour (depending on what one set up). Caves look much darker which make light sources like torches and candles stand out more, but it can also become a bit too dark to actually enjoy explore those dark places for several hours, so I "cheat" with Night-Eyes.

 

There is also street lights in different places in cities and with Immersive Interior you have a more realistic view from windows. Immersive Interiors is a series of mods where those mods make it possible to look out of windows from inside and look outside with some limitation described in mods documentation. In some buildings you can see that they had to "close" that windows as it wasn't possible to create a realistic view as there was another building right behind etc, so in some places it will not look the same as vanilla Oblivion, but they have put a lot of effort to make those windows that show outdoor as much as possible.

 

All Natural is also a weather mod which make it so you can see flashes when you are indoor during thunderstorm, hear rain while you are inside etc.

 

All Natural and all those mods I mention have pretty good instruction for how to use Wrye Bash to install. Especially Bashed Patch is needed for importing cells (tweak) and to merge some of those plug ins.

 

I use Oblivion Reloaded version 5 (no ENB) and have tweaked its colour setting among other, so it might be that you need to play around a bit with settings in OR or ENB if you use that to get the best mix from All Natural's colour and those two mods. There are some threshold where black look too dark (unnatural) and lights sources start too look odd. In OR you can enable/disable settings on screen, so it is possible to adjust settings on the fly. Don't forget to adjust settings on your monitor as you have both gamma there, in OR and in Oblivion as an example of at least three places where you can find the same setting.

Edited December 21, 2016 by QuestSolver

[TheMastersSon]

Thanks for the info. This install is very basic, we don't even use script extenders. Most major mods aren't an option. Also when it's working correctly, which it is now, what we see in the vanilla game (with the swapped windows) is exactly what we want to see. So there's no need for any additional mods.

Edited December 25, 2016 by TheMastersSon

[QuestSolver]

Thanks for the info. This install is very basic, we don't even use script extenders. Most major mods aren't an option. Also when it's working correctly, which it is now, what we see in the vanilla game (with the swapped windows) is exactly what we want to see. So there's no need for any additional mods.

 

Not sure I understand how you installed that mod for sky without making use of OBSE or any scripts at all? Did you only replace in game textures for sky and/or windows?

[TheMastersSon]

Here's the mod we installed/uninstalled:

 

http://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/16617

 

No idea why it should have affected interior lighting, as the mod is simply a 4k replacement of one texture, at textures\sky\skystars.dds. No script extenders necessary.