Realistic nighttime lighting indoors

[Claeric]

I figure this is something people might like to know that isn't immediately obvious.

Yknow how a room is all...blueish at night? This is the game compensating, automatically, for a lack of light, to make a room visible enough to play in. But as long as ONE light is turned on, that effect goes away entirely. And lights that are "Turned On" instead of "Auto Light" will stay on all night, even when the rest of the room turns off, so it's an automatic effect, too.

So here's a room with the lights on:



And here it is with the lights off:



But if you turn on a single light (Here I've used low wall lights to make a sort of night light effect), that ugly blue goes away and the room looks a lot more natural:



So a home with a light in the kitchen, a fish tank, night lights in the kid's room, and wall trim lights for bathroom navigation will look like this:


Instead of this:





Just a little tip.

[J. M. Pescado]

They should have used greenish or reddish instead of blueish, for the Night Vision Goggles effect, then added a checkbox for it in options for "night vision goggles".

[Claeric]

That would be simple enough to mod, actually. Not as a toggle, though. Plus I am pretty sure the rooms use the same settings as the world itself, so it'd be green all over the map.

[JamesNine]

What if there was a small almost invisible light we could put in each outer room to offset the night blue? So the indoor lighting isn't so pronounced.

[Inge]

That should be easy enough to make...

[Claeric]

As long as a light is turned on, whether it produces light or not, it would work. So someone would just need to make a tiny light (preferably wall, so it could easily be deleted by deleting the wall) that doesn't produce any light, and blammo, instant dark indoors.

It'd make it a lot easier. My kid's room with the nightlights looked a bit stupid when she became a teen. I adore the kitchen light though.

[Inge]

Ok I have made an experimental version of this object but I am afraid it doesn't work as one might hope.  It does make the room a little less bright, but the actual black corners are only done it appears by calculating the contrast.

[Moryrie]

You could also use one of the really small, almost invisible lights on MTS, turn it on, then alter it so that it's at max dimness, and greyish, or black instead of the default white.

[Hejira]

Huh. Well, maybe my Sims 3 game is even more fucked up than most, but I was inspired to play around with the lighting and here's what I found.

I took a room, put one light in it, and set the custom colour to 0,0,0. Once I turned it on, the brightness exploded into the worst brightness to ever bright. It was uniform and looked shittier than Sims 1.

Then I made a green wall and a green floor and it's the best green screen ever. Like, ever. If I could figure out how to kick the reflective effect out of the windows to make them base-game-Sims-1-type holes, I'd probably do something with...oh, who am I kidding, I'd tell more proactive people about this glitch so they could machinimate stuff.

This effect is ruined if any other light in the same room is a different colour.

...oh, and another thing. After incrementally increasing the colour value, I found that something like 1,1,1 had no noticable effect on the Hollywood Night thing, but as the light got more colour, the rest of the room gradually got darker.