Interiors are too dark

[nomaddc]

Is this the intended level of darkness? STEP modlist + Heavy STEP ENB preset, with some gameplay/ui-only personal mods that do not affect lighting/shadows/etc.

Edited November 14 by nomaddc

[nomaddc]

I suppose a follow up question - is it possible to eliminate ELFX and other lighting related mods from STEP list and replace them with something like LUX? I recall we're not using ELFX esp files, so I'm not exactly sure if it's just baked into one of the step patches instead.

[z929669]

This is fairly subjective and also depends on your graphics hardware/software.

You can adjust the ENVIRONMENT AmbientLightingIntensityInteriorDay/Night in the ENB to something a bit higher to suit your tastes. Also be aware of using Windows HDR, which creates black crush for me in this game. I disable it. It's also a good idea to avoid image scaling/sharpening in your graphics software for this game, which can affect the post-processing result.

[Kattmandu]

On 11/14/2024 at 3:39 AM, nomaddc said:

Is this the intended level of darkness? STEP modlist + Heavy STEP ENB preset, with some gameplay/ui-only personal mods that do not affect lighting/shadows/etc.

That looks like the intended level of darkness.  I personally don't like playing Skyrim that dark.  It's a game, not a simulation.  I use a different ENB preset, Silent Horizons ENB for Cathedral Weathers (option D).  It's an older ENB preset that hasn't been updated since 2020.  It's not perfect but I haven't found another one I like better.

Edited November 16 by Kattmandu

[nomaddc]

2 hours ago, Kattmandu said:

That looks like the intended level of darkness.  I personally don't like playing Skyrim that dark.  It's a game, not a simulation.  I use a different ENB preset, Silent Horizons ENB for Cathedral Weathers (option D).  It's an older ENB preset that hasn't been updated since 2020.  It's not perfect but I haven't found another one I like better.

Yeah, I'm not a fan of playing this dark either. I had my fun with it when ELFX just came out, and it was cool and atmospheric, and you had to use torches/magic to light yourself a way. That said I find it only fits for "high immersion/survival" type of play where the point really is shifted from the questing/combat to managing adverse factors like cold/hunger/darkness. Which I don't really play much anymore. I found myself almost always using stuff like wearable lantern soon after I started using mods that darken this much, and night eye, and at that point it's getting redundant and you can just remove both mods that effectively cancel each other out I was using Silent Horizons 2 myself, although I switched back to STEP defaults for these screenshots. SH2 seems to be about same in terms of darkness, but it does add this "cinematic" feel to the game which I'm not a big fan of. I am still searching for an ENB preset that would be closer to RealVision from LE, which was a realistic enb preset with clear and crisp visuals.

3 hours ago, z929669 said:

This is fairly subjective and also depends on your graphics hardware/software.

You can adjust the ENVIRONMENT AmbientLightingIntensityInteriorDay/Night in the ENB to something a bit higher to suit your tastes. Also be aware of using Windows HDR, which creates black crush for me in this game. I disable it. It's also a good idea to avoid image scaling/sharpening in your graphics software for this game, which can affect the post-processing result.

Got it. What about switching out ELFX and weather mods? How high-wake would that be? I've seen that STEP has us disable esps for the ELFX, so I'm assuming it's baked into one of the step patches? How big of a headache would ripping it out be?

[Kattmandu]

4 hours ago, nomaddc said:

I was using Silent Horizons 2 myself, although I switched back to STEP defaults for these screenshots. SH2 seems to be about same in terms of darkness, but it does add this "cinematic" feel to the game which I'm not a big fan of.

I was excited to see SH2 and tried it but found that I still like the original better.

[z929669]

10 hours ago, nomaddc said:

Yeah, I'm not a fan of playing this dark either. I had my fun with it when ELFX just came out, and it was cool and atmospheric, and you had to use torches/magic to light yourself a way. That said I find it only fits for "high immersion/survival" type of play where the point really is shifted from the questing/combat to managing adverse factors like cold/hunger/darkness. Which I don't really play much anymore. I found myself almost always using stuff like wearable lantern soon after I started using mods that darken this much, and night eye, and at that point it's getting redundant and you can just remove both mods that effectively cancel each other out I was using Silent Horizons 2 myself, although I switched back to STEP defaults for these screenshots. SH2 seems to be about same in terms of darkness, but it does add this "cinematic" feel to the game which I'm not a big fan of. I am still searching for an ENB preset that would be closer to RealVision from LE, which was a realistic enb preset with clear and crisp visuals.

Got it. What about switching out ELFX and weather mods? How high-wake would that be? I've seen that STEP has us disable esps for the ELFX, so I'm assuming it's baked into one of the step patches? How big of a headache would ripping it out be?

We only use ELFX meshes, so nothing about Step is related to ELFX lighting. We use RS for lighting, and Ambient for color temps and aesthetics, which is very vanilla friendly. Your problem is most likely entirely related to the Step ENB. Try the Light and Milk Drinker Step ENB presets. those disable certain effects that likely exacerbate the darkness issue.

Did you look into Windows HDR as I mentioned? Disable that to test if it's contributing.

 

[nomaddc]

1 hour ago, z929669 said:

We only use ELFX meshes, so nothing about Step is related to ELFX lighting. We use RS for lighting, and Ambient for color temps and aesthetics, which is very vanilla friendly. Your problem is most likely entirely related to the Step ENB. Try the Light and Milk Drinker Step ENB presets. those disable certain effects that likely exacerbate the darkness issue.

Did you look into Windows HDR as I mentioned? Disable that to test if it's contributing.

 

1. I've looked at the lighting with UseEffect set to false in enb, it's still too damn dark in the problematic areas. Some places are even darker than when enb is on. In particular - interiors, night time. Interiors just get considerably darker (at this point, due to the loss of cranked up ambient intensity in the enb), nights - sky gets much darker, overall brightness loss across the board.

2. I did see the HDR mentioned, I don't have it on my system. Never got an HDR display, so never enabled that.

[nomaddc]

After some dirty testing (disabling suspect mods, step patches, and booting a now dirty save):

- RS doesn't seem to be the cause of darkness. It changes lighting some, but not really an overall light level.

- Ambiance seems to be the culprit.

- Cathedral weathers - no impact indoors.

- EVLaS - no impact.

That's all I've tested so far. It seems that Ambiance is the real culprit here. Will do some more testing with ambiance on/off.

It may be also worth mentioning that I play in borderless fullscreen mode. That shouldn't be a problem though, because generally games have good brightness with the default gamma settings on my setup.

Edit: yeah, looked up some skyrim lighting mod comparison videos and everything checks out - ambiance is like ELFX on steroids - makes already darker areas significantly darker, sometimes pitch black.

I am considering picking up LUX and seeing how that goes, but that would require to rip out RS from step patches, or giving 2 of them up alltogether - lighting and weather one, and post-processing one.

Edited November 17 by nomaddc

[nomaddc]

Update: did some limited testing with Lux, minus RS and Ambiance. Cleaned step patch file, it turned out there's only one reference that had RS as a master. A bit too early for conclusions, but it does seem like Lux alone looks better than RS+Ambiance combo and without excessively dark interiors. Will sleep on it and do more testing tomorrow.

[nomaddc]

Did a lot more testing, Lux works just fine with STEP and I think it does provide better lighting overall, so for me it does replace both RS and Ambiance. I did also test Lux Orbis and it's working great as well.

[TechAngel85]

4 hours ago, nomaddc said:

Did a lot more testing, Lux works just fine with STEP and I think it does provide better lighting overall, so for me it does replace both RS and Ambiance. I did also test Lux Orbis and it's working great as well.

Just to let you know, I've been playing a bit and have noticed how dark the ENB is making the game too. One of the main issues is the current ENB nearly nullifies the ambient lighting. However it got to be like that, we've done some editing that will restore some of the intended visuals from Ambiance; which isn't normally too dark without ENB. The goal of the Step ENB is to "enhance" what the Guide is already providing. So when something like this happens as a result of the ENB, we have to readjust settings to bring it back into balance. The next update of the ENB files will improve upon some of these issues.

Also keep in mind that the outcome of the ENB can be setup-dependent due to graphics cards and monitor quality. We've discovered from taking screenshots from our own, individual, systems that it's not always the same visual outcome from system to system. Therefore, we're attempting to achieve more of an average with the settings, so they will look right on the most systems possible. It could take some tweaking on an individual basis to fine tune the ENB to the individual system. We may put together a quick reference, linked from the Guide; since it's an easy process to adjust a few settings up or down.

[nomaddc]

1 hour ago, TechAngel85 said:

Just to let you know, I've been playing a bit and have noticed how dark the ENB is making the game too. One of the main issues is the current ENB nearly nullifies the ambient lighting. However it got to be like that, we've done some editing that will restore some of the intended visuals from Ambiance; which isn't normally too dark without ENB. The goal of the Step ENB is to "enhance" what the Guide is already providing. So when something like this happens as a result of the ENB, we have to readjust settings to bring it back into balance. The next update of the ENB files will improve upon some of these issues.

Also keep in mind that the outcome of the ENB can be setup-dependent due to graphics cards and monitor quality. We've discovered from taking screenshots from our own, individual, systems that it's not always the same visual outcome from system to system. Therefore, we're attempting to achieve more of an average with the settings, so they will look right on the most systems possible. It could take some tweaking on an individual basis to fine tune the ENB to the individual system. We may put together a quick reference, linked from the Guide; since it's an easy process to adjust a few settings up or down.

Thanks for getting back to me! That sounds entirely reasonable. Hardware can indeed make a big difference. I myself run a custom icc profile for my monitor and a calibrated profile from tftcentral (back before they started paywalling the profiles), so I have somewhat different color reproduction/brightness even from just stock settings of my own hardware. I did also notice that the game *appears* to be a lot darker when it's daytime/sunny and the room has a generous amount of sunlight flooding in, compared to night time when the game appears quite a bit brighter. The whole lightroom/darkroom thing I suppose.

Personally, I liked the old STEP approach where there were just some recommendations for enb mods, for weather, and for lighting mods, and the choice was mostly left to user discretion. I understand that probably there were good reasons to move away from that, it is what it is. Part the reason I do prefer this approach is that it leaves room to do fine tuning to make it look good to your eye and on your hardware.

So with that I just ended up using STEP as a base with my initial setup, and by now deviating in some key points to fine tune the appearance and features. Personally, I've been liking Silent Horizons 2 ENB a lot, and as I've mentioned Lux does look better to my eye at least. I did also prune out a lot of the AE CC additions simply because I don't believe them to be either on the same level of quality, or to be extraneous to the experience (looking at you, pets), or just personal preference let's say (anything from the Blades mobile game was purged).

I would consider using a different grass mod for the guide, since when running SH2 I've noticed that the grass used in STEP really does not play well with ComplexGrass enb feature. Replaced that with a more recent grass mod, and it looks a lot better. (it was not an aesthetic issue, the grass lighting was just messed up)

But also kind of the reason I've not been posting more often here - I understand that it's not the place to troubleshoot mod issues that are not on the guide, and I've pretty much replaced lighting, enb, and now grass, not to mention some personal mods (that are not super high wake, just better vampires and different body mesh/texture replacer with some bells and whistles to distribute different skin textures to npcs based on race/weight).

Edited November 30 by nomaddc

[TechAngel85]

9 hours ago, nomaddc said:

Thanks for getting back to me! That sounds entirely reasonable. Hardware can indeed make a big difference. I myself run a custom icc profile for my monitor and a calibrated profile from tftcentral (back before they started paywalling the profiles), so I have somewhat different color reproduction/brightness even from just stock settings of my own hardware. I did also notice that the game *appears* to be a lot darker when it's daytime/sunny and the room has a generous amount of sunlight fl

I too have a custom ICC profile on my monitor from RTings. I was fortunate enough to have a monitor they've reviewed and provided a calibrated profile for.

9 hours ago, nomaddc said:

Personally, I liked the old STEP approach where there were just some recommendations for enb mods, for weather, and for lighting mods, and the choice was mostly left to user discretion. I understand that probably there were good reasons to move away from that, it is what it is. Part the reason I do prefer this approach is that it leaves room to do fine tuning to make it look good to your eye and on your hardware.

I would consider using a different grass mod for the guide, since when running SH2 I've noticed that the grass used in STEP really does not play well with ComplexGrass enb feature. Replaced that with a more recent grass mod, and it looks a lot better. (it was not an aesthetic issue, the grass lighting was just messed up)

But also kind of the reason I've not been posting more often here - I understand that it's not the place to troubleshoot mod issues that are not on the guide, and I've pretty much replaced lighting, enb, and now grass, not to mention some personal mods (that are not super high wake, just better vampires and different body mesh/texture replacer with some bells and whistles to distribute different skin textures to npcs based on race/weight).

The lighting and weather sections were decided to be all or nothing for the Guide a few releases again to reduce overhead. We're already making CACO, CCOR, TCIY, and WCCAF optional, which creates multiple patches to maintain. Lighting, weather, and Post-processing are all optional for the Guide. Their sections are simply all or nothing vs providing more than a single patch for each picking and choosing the mods to install within their sections. Granted the Lighting & Weather section is vanilla-friendly so any ENB that works for vanilla lighting and Cathedral Weathers should look okay with the Lighting & Weather mods. We do use Ambiance, but it's not than far off from vanilla; which is why I keep saying 'vanilla lighting'. As for the Post-processing section, it's just a generic setup to incorporate ENB-compatible mods into the Guide. So you are feel to try other ENBs than the Step ENB. The Step ENB is simply made, specifically, for Ambiance/Cathedral Weathers combo.

9 hours ago, nomaddc said:

I would consider using a different grass mod for the guide, since when running SH2 I've noticed that the grass used in STEP really does not play well with ComplexGrass enb feature. Replaced that with a more recent grass mod, and it looks a lot better. (it was not an aesthetic issue, the grass lighting was just messed up)

The grass is one of the few made to work well with Cathedral Landscapes and we've made it work with ENB ComplexGrass on our own. If there is something off with it, please do provide feedback so that we can improve it.

[nomaddc]

9 hours ago, TechAngel85 said:

The lighting and weather sections were decided to be all or nothing for the Guide a few releases again to reduce overhead.

Yeah, I figured as much. Entirely reasonable, juggling multiple combinations of those is likely a sizeable headache. I hope I didn't come across as complaining or anything, you guys are doing a great job and I understand how hard it would be to have broader support/higher tolerance for deviations from the list. I hope anything I post comes in useful, but that's not my call to make.

As for the grass: full disclosure, the issue came to my attention only after I started using Silent Horizons 2 ENB, so I can't really verify if it happens with STEP ENB. I was using exact STEP setup for grass/landscape/weather mod combo (but not the lighting as I've outlined above, which shouldn't affect outdoors skylight and complex grass to which this is isolated), other deviations in my list are isolated to character/equipment meshes and textures, and vampire rework - in other words I don't believe they would be significant for this specific area. First time I've seen it was in the Dawnguard vale area - the landscape there is rather dark, and the grass was sticking out quite a lot, looking unnaturally bright/lit. I did go on to check other areas like Whiterun and Rift, and it looked alright there, so it's probably specific to the DG Vale area. I have narrowed that down to complex grass option in the enb and got to investigating. I was suggested to try out a newer grass mod, Freak's Floral Fields which is actually using cathedral 3d landscape and grass library. It also does have some options that can be used to stay close to vanilla visuals. That switch solved the issue entirely and I think it actually did make the grass look even better across the board. I will try to attach some comparison screenshots, but again I apologize if it's spurious due to me using a modified modlist, and feel free to discard this feedback if that's the case.

A detail worth mentioning is I ran into some dyndolod issues after rebuilding grass chache, lodgen, texgen, and dyndolod and that mod does produce some warnings (the mod author did say some are to be expected), so I'm currently in the process of troubleshooting it, will update when it's resolved (but basically I just have some lod grass sticking around and not unloading, so it may be even unrelated to this. Either way, I'm in the process of sorting that out).

Screenshots before:

After:

Edited December 1 by nomaddc