Illumination Within
From Oblivion Mod Wiki
| Author: | Slap-Happy |
| Thread(s): | Official Forums |
| Version: | 1.0 |
| Last Updated: | April 29, 2006 |
| Download(s): | Elder Scrolls Source, ElderScrolls-Oblivion.com,
Direct Download, Filecloud (direct & filecloud broken link) |
[edit] Description
This mod lights up in the evening, the external windows of most buildings throughout the world of Cyrodil based on various scripts that control time and duration of the "Light on" period. Houses, Inns and Taverns are timed differently from Guilds and shops, to give a staggered feel to the illuminating windows. Cathedrals also have their own time schedule, but offset against the others and a shorter period for them quick confessions. The "glow" of the windows are new meshes overlaid on top of the original window pane, which are also accompanied by numerous extra shutters and hand placed lights to complement the immediate area around the new window. This creates a truly beautiful view for most evenings in the cities and smaller settlements, when the lights come on. Many new textures and 3d windows components had to be created for the mod to function the way we wanted it, and to give that true feeling of a building being lit from the inside. The end result is over two thousand hand placed window/shutter meshes and lights, covering all buildings that had a window and potential evening light. Oblivion nightime with this mod running, makes for a totally different gameplay experience. With hardly any performance hit when the scripts run, most people with a half decent computer will be able to run "Illumination Within" without the concern of a major performance loss. Two versions of the mod are available, one with shutters present around window frames in some cities, and another "Lite" version with just window glows and extra lights. The shutter version impacts framerates an extra 2/6 fps.
[edit] Known Bugs
The only issue you may experience when running this mod is major slowdowns of fps in cities directly related to water reflections and what you have set to reflect in your ini. If statics or misc objects are set to 1, this will kill your framerate with the new glow mapped windows, so I recommend you set both to 0. This way when the window and lights script kicks in and the windows spawn and lights turn on, your computer wont blow up, but instead hardly notice any change in framerate. The impact might be 1-4 fps give or take. It will depend on where you are standing at the time, and of course your rig. But generaly making sure these are set to 0 will ensure almost no performance hit with the new windows. Only the new Omni lights will cause any slowdown you experience. Tested on a Vanilla Geforce 6800 128mb standing facing the Guild in Leyawiin (a heavy polygon area) before and after window spawn, and noticed a "tiny" framerate loss, which was barely perceivable on that card.
No conflicts reported using ModManager
Note: Some people are experiencing "missing" or purple textures in game. This is because the model files for the mod were saved to the "absolute" default Oblivion install directory which is: C:\Program Files\Bethesda Softworks\Oblivion\Data. If you are having this problem, download the directory fix which includes new models that will function correctly no matter where you have installed Oblivion. So simply overwrite the old models with the new ones, and the missing textures will show up ingame as intended.
There are also reports of corruption in the Imperial City Temple district, although this seems to only affect players who have completed the main quest-line. At time of writing, there are no known fixes or work-arounds to this issue, although disabling the mod has been reported to reverse the corruption.
NOTE BY CO-CREATOR: The town of Skingrad was not affected by the mod, as there were plans to have more advanced features in the next release. This update was never released, however, and plans for future updates by the original authors (Slap-Happy and ModMan) have been cancelled.
[edit] Reviews
[edit] Reviews by MikeTaba
This mod rocks. I love it. If you have 19 little mods that change details like this, it makes the game so much more immersive, so much more realistic. These little mods make the game much more real, and therefore much better. I did not encounter the corruption in the Temple district, but I don't ever do the main questline, so obviously it didn't apply to me. Anyway, all in all, this mod gets 8/10 for me.
[edit] Reviews by Senkin
This mod should be on the list of mods that should have been apart of the game in the first place. Way to go Slap-Happy.
[edit] Reviews by kr1sse
This must be the mod I have wanted most of them all. When I traveled along a bridge in the real world late in the evening, I looked at the lit light inside the houses close to the seashore, and dreamed of that view in Oblivion. Now it is just not a dream, but reality. =)
