True Nights (for True Storms with ENB)
Please read this information FULLY before posting any questions or feedback.
This is a work in progress I currently consider a BETA. I aim to include feedback as I make improvements; so if you are running this mod as intended, please do leave a comment, both good and critical are equally helpful!
Don’t be mislead by the dark screenshots, which are being butchered by compression. Once setup correctly, this mod provides plenty of usable light in the near-ground, with deep shadow and beautiful vistas in the far ground. If all you see is black, read below.
I will not be making a variety of versions of this mod, I simply don’t have the time, and theres no need! As an ENB Preset is recommended, you hold the power to make quick and powerful adjustments, easily while in-game, to increase/decrease brightness of the ‘night’, that will only effect the night and not other times of the day. ENB makes it easier to significantly increase the brightness. My work here is in balancing the light levels across the whole image, setting hue’s/alphas and different lighting effect layers to provide a beautiful natural palette -I’m not determining the exact level of brightness you choose. See below for instructions how to increase the light levels, you may very well be amazed how powerful a few clicks can be!
DESCRIPTION:
The aim of this mod is to provide realistically dark nights but still light enough for high definition visuals with moody atmospherics, while enhancing fadingsignals amazing ‘True Storms’ mod. If you’ve been wanting a realistic nights mod with high quality visuals, this has painstakingly been crafted for exactly that. By high definition, I mean that I have removed most of the unnatural ‘fog’ FO4 is well known for, to give HD crisp images, and replaced it with True Storms awesome and life-like volumetric fog where appropriate for the weather.
The main focus for True Nights(and what sets it apart from Unforbidables ‘Darker Nights’ mod) is that it gets extremely dark into the distance, while closer to you, there remains some usable light. There is more light there than first appears in the screenshots, its an illusion, of sorts. The distant objects, horizon, etc, are hard to see, which creates a deeper ‘sense’ of darkness, but there is usable light in the near-ground. The sense of not being able to tell where the earth ends and the sky begins is of profound impact and I use it as much as possible! This creates cinematic visuals with deep shadows and dark alleyways, more akin to horror films and games like ‘Silent Hill’, darkness where enemies lurk waiting to jump out on you!
I have tried to carefully craft each weather pattern individually making them all unique and distinctive. For each weather pattern I have considered, moon light vs ambient light, temperature/hue of the light in the atmosphere, along with a variety of forms of occlusion correct for the weather and temperature: cool mist on a chilly cloudless night, rising mist on a warmer cloudy night, muggy/grey atmospheres with overcast cloud to light fog with clear skys and heavy fog occluding the stars. It often quite subtle, but I’ve maintained beautiful cloud layers and distinctive lighting, and I hope I’ve not overcooked anything.
The darkness at night varies greatly depending on the weather. I have emphasised a cinematic, often moody and at times claustrophobic atmosphere. While clear skys at night offer good visibility; in bad weather it gets very dark and inky atmospheres obscure your vision. You will need some form of light to aid you, or to be extremely cautious in your movement. Be prepared to use a torch, night vision, night vision perk or a flare gun mod.
People who understand what I mean when I say you will need to employ; shape, shine, shadow, silhouette and movement…should be right at home here.
To try and compare True Nights and Darker Nights is very hard, as they each offer something very different. True Nights baseline lays somewhere around Lv2 Darker Nights on my system. However, as I focussed on trying to create darkness that builds over the distance and vision greatly effected by the weather, much more so than Darker Nights, which allows you to adjust the immediate brightness via ENB. They are not really comparable. True Nights is lighter close to your character, similar to Darker Nights Lv2or3 in some cases and darker than even Lv0 of Darker Nights in the distance. On top of which, I’ve used True Storms volumetric a great deal to cloud out the horizon, providing for a close and claustrophobic atmosphere in the bleakest of weather. Be prepared.
Finally, fadingsignals ‘True Storms’ daytime experience and excellent sunrise and sunsets are respectfully untouched. So far, I’ve only altered the night and the patterns that lead into sunrise and after sunset as little as possible to ensure the blend is seamless and natural.
REQUIREMENTS:
True Storms by Fadingsignal
fadingsignals amazing weather mod is required by True Nights.
Why anyone would play Fallout without, by choice, I have no idea!
If you cannot run True Storms due to PC performance, True Nights is not for you.
ENB Preset
*True Nights was built using noidkid’s Subtle ENB preset -I highly recommend it as a minimal performance impact ENB!*
Your experience will vary greatly depending on which ENB preset you choose, and you should expect to make some adjustments to get the experience exactly as you wish(see below). If your favourite ENB preset does not work happily with True Nights, post and I’ll help as best I can, but it may be best to ask your ENB author. Ask the ENB preset author if they can help and they might be able to do a whole lot more than I can!
If you run True Nights without an ENB, it will be much lighter than intended and the tone and contrast will be way off. plus, you loose any ability to adjust the scene to your liking. Not recommended I’m afraid.
Finally, as you’ve probably guessed from the above, True Nights is not really setup for low end graphics. I’m not trying to be elitist here, its just the way it works. Low graphics settings will loose a degree of tone, contrast and other effects that help blend all this together. Low graphics will display a darker image than intended for this reason. You can always try, no harm in installing True Nights and later removing it.
If you have any trouble meeting the requirements to run True Nights, check out Unforbidables excellent ‘Darker Nights’ mod which should do what you want, in a variety of flavours.
TOO DARK / TOO LIGHT?:
As True Nights is intended for ENB users, if you find its too dark or even too light, its quick and easy to adjust live while in game. With so many different PC hardware setups and monitors having an effect, its rarely ‘perfect’ for ‘you’. Adjusting ENB is no more complicated than adjusting the brightness in a game menu, its just way more powerful. Here’s how to make it perfect for you:
Open the ENB Console with ‘shift+enter’
In the lower left box, expand the ‘Environment’ tab by clicking the ‘+’ symbol.
Locate the setting, 6th from the top ‘DirectLightingIntensityNight’
Increase to increase brightness, you can afford to increase this in single digits, eg from 1.00 to 2.00 to 3.00, etc.
Once your happy with it, you can fine tune using the + and – next to the number.
You can even do the same for ‘ DirectLightingIntensityInterior’ to effect the lighting on interior locations.
You’re unlikely to need to, but you might even wish to adjust the ‘AmbientLightingIntensityNight’. Have a tinker, no harm done!
Adjusting these values will only alter the lighting at ‘Night’, so its a great and easy way to make the overall light to suit your taste, exactly.
This is the power of ENB, so don’t be afraid to use it. You cannot break your game this way, so no worries there. You can always revert back to either your previous setting by clicking ‘Load’ at the top, or revert back to the downloaded settings.
Be sure to click ‘save configuration’ at the top of the ENB window, once your happy, and shift-enter to close the ENB window. You can always go back later to make adjustments.
THE MONITOR TEST!:
Yep, the thing you’re reading this on! Setting your monitor correctly can be the difference between night and day! Most notably any dynamic contrast or game mode settings, can turn a great image black. A good test is that you should be able to read clearly, the stylised text “For True storms with Subtle ENB” immediately below the bold capitol and much clearer text “True Nights v0.1” in the lower left corner of the screenshots. If you can’t, somethings not right! Ensure you’re facing your screen correctly, your eyeline should be 1/2 to 2/3 the height and looking flat at the screen. Try adjusting the screen angle if not and that you have your brightness and contrast settings balanced, and check for game mode or other dynamic image settings as they can make a huge difference. Thats worth doing before you set about adjusting your brightness in-game via ENBs window.
RECOMMENDED MODS:
‘Enhanced Interiors’ by fadingsignal.
-For the complete dark nights indoor experience. Makes a big difference, really great mod!
SIDE EFFECTS:
There are 3 minor side effects to True Nights, one of which is resolved, the other doesn’t affect gameplay at all, but the pause menu! The 3rd, rain ripples on water.
1. As the nights are dark, the image space adapter used during ‘Low Health’ -the visual distortion- didn’t play well with my mod at all. I have recreated the image space to work correctly, and you are unlikely to notice any difference.
2. I will hopefully clean up the pause menu asap just to keep things tidy looking.
3. Due to the lighting, the ripples you see on water with the vanilla texture appear very bright. To resolve this I have increased the alpha on the ripples texture. The result of this is the ripples appearing less ‘bright’ during the night. As a consequence they also appear less ‘bright’ during the day. If you don’t like this change, just delete the file Data > Textures > Water > ‘WaterRainRipples’
INSTALLATION:
Best to use NMM and keep track of updates!
Manual – Copy the Data folder to your games Data folder.
UN-ISTALLATION:
Simply disable and un-install in NMM.
Manual – Remove the True Nights.esp and Data > Textures > Water > ‘WaterRainRipples’
CREDITS:
fadingsignal for kindly allowing me to mod his mod!
Unforbidable for kindly helping me out to identify what some files and stuff do!
-I hope you both like what I’ve done here 🙂
MY OTHER MODs:
Better Beds – Comics & Posters
Better Beds – Vault-Tec
Lovers Luxury bed – The LADY KILLER
Lovers Luxury bed – The BLACK WIDOW
Bloody Realistic – HD Blood Textures
Bloody Mess – EBT ADD-ON
Bloody Comical – Enhanced Blood Textures ADD-ON
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