Space Engineers

Space Engineers

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Modified Ambient Luminance
   
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Type: Mod
Mod category: Other
Tags: NoScripts
File Size
Posted
Updated
59.967 KB
May 17 @ 12:23pm
May 17 @ 4:12pm
2 Change Notes ( view )

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Modified Ambient Luminance

Description
Experimental. Essentially an ambient lighting overhaul.

This mod's goals are:
1) to make piloting from a cockpit not have worse night visibility than third person
2) to hide stars during daytime when on a planet and looking at the sky
3) to make nighttime on planets dark but playable without needing lighting
4) to make enclosed spaces without line of sight to sky pitch black
5) to make metallic textures not turn black when viewed at steep angles or glow in the dark

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To be clear, the issues with this game's lighting are not its eye adaptation (despite the common complaints), but the way the game approximates ambient lighting. The eye adaptation actually works correctly and tries to compensate for the dreadful ambient lighting but falls short.

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Modifies ambient light and eye adaptation settings; many mods modify these settings either on purpose or on accident, so either those mods need to be disabled, or this mod must have load priority to work correctly.

Shadows need to be at least on low. Unknown if other settings adversely affect visual behavior of this mod. My settings are mostly high. Grass is recommended to be on for night time driving (and in general? this game is too ugly without grass).

Unfortunately, a side effect of the lighting changes in this mod causes what should be pitch black caves to be well lit when looked at from outside; this also affects vanilla.

Light levels are highly dependent on the skybox texture; anything besides vanilla will likely result in the wrong light level balance.

Reflections update every 0.1 seconds instead of every 0.3 seconds (this was necessary to have ambient light update almost every frame to avoid bad transitions, but not every frame which can cause flickering), so some degree of increased performance cost is likely.