some dungeons too dark

[wader2k]

It seems I am in the minority here, but I dislike dungeon areas that are too dark. I end up cranking the brightness on my monitor so I don't miss things like chests hidden over in some dark corner.

I know a lot of folks think it ruins the immersion, but i prefer to be able to see without straining my eyes. Flame away if you must, this is simply my opinion. I work on a computer and eye strain is a real problem.

 

What options are there to improve visibilty in these areas? Torches? Lanterns don't actually function (unless I'm doing it wrong!?) Constantly readjusting brightness sliders kind of ruins immersion for me<grin>.

[NoobusExtremus]

Are you running some sort of Lighting Mod? Reason I ask is because by default everything in a non-modded Skyrim is generally too bright for the majority of people.

 

I personally like it a bit darker, making the use of torches, candlelight spell or magelight spell, actually useful. But on the flipside, I don't want to stare at blackness all the time; you should still be able to see the ground and walls (but they should still be darker than the interiors of the houses).

 

There's a great link (I'm at work so don't have it handy) to a website that walks you through LCD monitor calibrations. I found the link in the doco for the Realistic Lighting Without PPI mod which I'm now using instead of the ENB post-process injector - my framerates were taking too big a hit from ENB.

[Rabbit1251]

No, I agree with you. You could try:

 

Ring of Light

Ring of Night-Eye

 

I hope that this helps.

 

 

Rabbit

[thesapien]

I'm not sure you're a minority. Often it's the minority that is outspoken and heard from most.

 

Immersion just depends. Most dungeons are occupied so less reason to be dark. Even Draugr need light, which is why some of their duties seem to be keeping things not too dark.

 

I like torches, but it's still hard to see beyond their scope. Mage lights desaturated the hell out of everything.

 

You could use ENB or a mod that uses ENB to adjust things to your liking. Most "outspoken" people use enbseries to darken things. But it can easily go the other way. Indeed, it has an "adaption" feature, when enabled, that adjust like eyes are supposed to. Changing its values for environmental lighting can do all sorts of stuff to help. Maybe just make torches more effective by upping point lighting intensity in ENB (but avoid upping values under [Fire] section because that also changes all transparent textures like water).

[wader2k]

I've calibrated my monitor using one of those calibration utilities for brightness and contrast, etc. Probably need to do it again since I've played with it some since, but this is not the problem.

I do use a lot of mods, but mostly textures. This happens Vanilla though so that isn't the problem.

 

I have used one of the FXAA injector things, but ended up getting rid of it early on. ENB I never messed with as I heard there was a performance penalty. Maybe I'll try it.

 

 

Rabbit: Ring of Light and Ring of Night Eye sound very promising!! I will be trying those tonite.

[SubjectProphet]

1.3 and 1.4 darkened dungeons and areas to make it more realistic. Bethesda released this info when the darkness became a glitch to the community, but they made sure everyone knew that it was supossed to be there.

 

Some mods can easily get brightness fixed and lighting better. Or you could use a torch everywhere you go.

[thesapien]

I've calibrated my monitor using one of those calibration utilities for brightness and contrast, etc. Probably need to do it again since I've played with it some since, but this is not the problem.

I do use a lot of mods, but mostly textures. This happens Vanilla though so that isn't the problem.

 

I have used one of the FXAA injector things, but ended up getting rid of it early on. ENB I never messed with as I heard there was a performance penalty. Maybe I'll try it.

 

 

Rabbit: Ring of Light and Ring of Night Eye sound very promising!! I will be trying those tonite.

 

ENB will only hurt performance if you enable ambient occlusion, or maybe depth of field too. If you disable AO and use ENB for adjusting things, you're not really introducing any new processes. It's still using the same directx shaders, just tweaked differently (/improved). The FXAA injectors are actually more costly for performance because they add pre and post processes. I don't like them either because they just manipulate the image with either sharpening or tonemapping or something else that decreases the original quality and just adds a cheap after effect. The only similar thing ENB might do is use a color palette if you include one, which I don't.