Updating GunMod's Radiance Lighting System

[jrd]

Hell yeah. I wish I'd never been so stupid to calibrate: it is nearly impossible to get my old settings back!

I now have to use some weird gamma correction in my display drivers to actually see anything.

Re: Bloodlines — did you know they're now up to version 2.3 with the unofficial patch? The game is almost bug-free now…

[Eric the Platypus]

Just because your MONITOR may be set to display correctly doesn't mean any of your programs will care!

Yep. The issue of improved or more realistic lighting has also been played with in the Morrowind modding community.  To highlight the application-specific adjustments, there is a large array of lighting adjustments/settings within morrowind.ini.  Obviously, this means that the default lighting configuration is loaded each time the game is started.  You can then use the game's editor to adjust any light source within the game as you like.  I haven't bothered to check if Sims 2 even uses an ini file, not many apps these days do. 

The fact that what you end up seeing can be adjusted at your monitor, or video card, or the card's driver, or the application itself, is probably the reason Maxis went for the lowest common denominator approach.  There are way too many variables to ensure a consistent result.  The discussion here amongst a dozen or so posters all with varying results reinforces this.

If you're going to continue this project and I think it would be worthwhile, it may be an idea to consider doing it as a 'lighting tutorial' rather than a 'mod'.

it is nearly impossible to get my old settings back!

If you haven't already tried, monitors should have a 'factory default' or reset option hidden somewhere.

[jsalemi]

I haven't bothered to check if Sims 2 even uses an ini file, not many apps these days do. 

Yea, it uses quite a few, actually -- some are in the program directories, and there's two in the My Documents/EA Games/The Sims 2/Config directory.  But the user settings that you adjust in the game are stored in the UserProps.xml file that in the same directory.

[Standardliving]

Thank you. (However, does it matter that it was installed when I don't own OFB or FFS?)

And lastly, the native shaders do not support the realtime specular, such has the waves, right?

[jsalemi]

No, it doesn't matter, since the majority of the lighting changes are actually in the original Sims 2 base game directory.  The ones in the directories for the EPs and SP just affect new lights and windows added by those add-ons, if any.  So if you don't have a particular EP, the light files in this won't do anything but take up some disk space.

[Eric the Platypus]

Thanks, again I'm too lazy and on the wrong pc to check sims2, but here's the chunk from morrwind that deals with quadratic lighting (or not) and the settings.  The ini file then has a range of adjustments for each of the weather conditions in the exterior game cells.
don't know if it's relevant to you.
Improved lighting in MW comes by turning on quadratic and setting it to 1.7

[LightAttenuation]
UseConstant=0
ConstantValue=0.0
;
UseLinear=1
LinearMethod=1
LinearValue=3.0
LinearRadiusMult=1.0
;
UseQuadratic=0
QuadraticMethod=2
QuadraticValue=16.0
QuadraticRadiusMult=1.0
;
OutQuadInLin=0

[dewshine]

The issue that Gunmod had with Dizzy's Smartlights2 was that some people were reporting loading issues with corrupted pool lights when they used the mod.  I was one of those people that had the problem.  Dizzy stated that it was fixed, but I could never get it to work.  I'm going to try your files and see if they show any improvement over the 2.2 radiance lighting that someone else posted at MTS2.  Thanks for working on this.

[Standardliving]

I was wondering..  could Chocolate Pi's mod and your native shaders work together in the game? Is it possible? (to get the waves to appear ingame)

[Simsample]

I'm using Chesspieceface's native shaders version, along with the RLS shader file from Chocolate Pi's version. I get the nice pool waves as well as bumpmapping, and it looks pretty good!

[Standardliving]

But would  Chocolate Pi's mod mess up any codes for the native shaders?

[dewshine]

I believe that the code would be from this version and the shaders.package for the water would have little to do with the rest of the lighting.  I think I'll check this line of inqury out to see if it works.

[Chesspieceface]

The RLS-Shader.package never had any effect AFAICT on the overall light settings. It is all controlled by the various text files.  The 'native' shaders that are enabled are simply the ones built into the game.  I don't know enough to assess what exactly gunmods shader package DOES do, but what it doesn't do is control anything regarding indoor lighting.

FWIW this project was not abandoned per se, simply done.   I fixed the files, they work for me, and for everyone who used them and bothered to report back.  I didn't have anything to add at the time and got distracted by other gaming interests.  I never posted this on MTS2 because well... I didn't ultimately feel like it.  I decided that if I did I'd feel responsible to support it, and I knew I wasn't going to follow through on that.  I find it a little more than disheartening that in a post where I specifically asked that people who download the files post any kind of comment on its performance less than 10% of the downloaders did so.

Thanks to those of you who have participated in the discussion it is appreciated, and I'll continue to contribute what I can.  I'm not a coder or modder of any kind really; Just a guy who started reading a bunch of text files and pasted them back in a revised order, and then tried changing a couple numbers in a logical fashion to restore a lost result.  Glad it worked, cause I was pretty much out of ideas at that point.

[dewshine]

The lighting with your changes looks really good.  Gunmod's shaders seem to set up a different texture for the water waves than the Maxis native shaders.  I think he was trying to match the texture of the pool sides.  It seems purely cosmetic as to which one is better, frankly.

I'm having a problem though.  I don't think it is this mod as it only happens with large, fully decorated lots.  My game is blue screening out when rendering and doing it so much that my screen actually shuts down while the game is on.  This means that I'm currently not able to test for very long periods of time.  I just installed new drivers for my video card so I'll see if that helps.

One thing I noticed after using Radiance Lighting is that it is nearly painful to go back to the maxis lighting.  It seems that this "update" is working fine otherwise. Thank you for updating it.

[Chesspieceface]

By 'bluescreening' do you mean reverting to the Maxian GreyBlue background or do you mean Windows BSOD?  Video drivers should help, but I would be very concerned about your case temperatures in that situation.

[dewshine]

I mean Maxis blue. It it was the blue-screen-of-death I would have known exactly how to fix it... haul my system into the computer shop for a full look-see.

It only does it in sims2.  None of my other games cause this. My CPU is running cool, but some of the meshes I must have in my game have to be high poly because when I use bunches of them my CPU clocks to 100%.  I'm taking those meshes out.  The house I was having problem with was huge.  I've gotten rid of it because it was just unplayable.

I think I'll make sure the vents and case on my computer are clean though.  I've got a long haired cat that sheds like a german shepard, Haha... 

[Chesspieceface]

TS2 is gonna slam your CPU no matter what you do, all that Simming is very calculation intensive. It's not the meshes in any case, those will affect framerates and texture swapping more than anything else, and thats largely videocard dependent.  The only time I've seen the Maxis Bluescreen for any extended period is immediatley after either a resolution/refreshrate change or immediatley after returning to the game from being alt-tabbed out of fullscreen mode.  Sounds like something is resetting your display somehow. Odd.

[Dami]

Thanks for updating the light-mod for OFB and FFS.

To be honest i like the pool effects from maxis better than gunmods, so i will stick with the native version of the mod. The censor blur is not removed by the RLS-Shaders.package you still need quaxi´s file.

I play the game with "boolProp bumpMapping false" in the userStartup.cheat file because with bumpmapping the performance is bad on comunity lots. my pc is amd 2800 barton, gf 6800 128mb, 1gb ram by the way. and i see no or no big difference in quality with bump mapping enabled or disabled. just much more performance like i said, especially on comunity lots.

so to get max performance i recommend putting
boolProp bumpMapping false
and
vsync off
in your userStartup.cheat file (My Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2\Config)

disabling the Morning and evening lights will give even more performance i noticed (especially on comunity lots). If you have much RAM it should be no problem (2gb or more).
to disable it again goto (\Program Files\EA GAMES\The Sims 2\TSData\Res\Lights\Lighting.txt)
look there for:
setb morningEvening true/false

I also recommend deleting the file Groups.cache (My Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2)
and all files in the folder (My Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2\Thumbnails) if you have problems with dark objects and thumbnail pictures.
Sims 2 will create new files on the next restart of the game.
All thumbnail pictures in game will be generated with the new lights again, so expect higher loading times when you load the game and start playing. But after a while all the thumbnails will be cached again in the thumbnails folder and you should see no loading anymore when browsing through the build or clothes catalogue.

PS: You not need to re-install the CEP if you do so you overwrite the lightning.txt in the folder (Program Files\EA GAMES\The Sims 2\TSData\Res\Lights) the line that you need for the CEP to work is already in the lighting.txt you downloaded with this mod. If you one day install a never version of CEP > than 4.1 be sure to save a copy of your lightnig.txt because CEP-install overwrites it with the original settings.

thats the line that is added by the CEP installation but you not have to worrie when downloading the mod its already included.
####################################################
# Support for Custom Lights added by the CEP3
#
wildInclude "CEP3_CustomLights/*.nlo"

EDIT: I noticed something is wrong for me with 2nd floor lights. when i go down to 1st floor, then after a while 2nd floor again, the lights seem not to shine on objects anymore. picking up the light and placing it fixes it until i go 1st floor again. anyone else have problems with lights on second floor or higher floors ?

[Winklesim]

just downloaded this and thought I would add my two cents to the conversation,

1: evening - this is the time of day I have the biggest issues with. Perhaps it would be easier to play if the light was less 'fluro orange' and more 'gentle pink' or something. I would prefer if this evening colour wash was not quite so strong so you could still see the original colours of walls/floors/furniture/lights coming through. Perhaps another idea would be to change the time of the 'evening' to begin at 7 o'clock, so it coincides with the auto turn on of the house lights. No idea if this is possible, but I thouht i'd mention it anyway.

2: window light - how about making light from windows diffuse further into the room so their aren't so many really dark spots, especially in large or oddly shaped rooms?

Anyway, just a few ideas, but all up it looks great!   

[Simsample]

Dewshine, do you have an NVidia card? In all of the cases I've seen where the Maxis bluescreen has been an issue, the graphics chipset has been NVidia. If it's any help, increasing my RAM and using the newer NVidia graphics drivers (84.21) has solved this for me, and many on the Help forum at MTS2 have reported this, too. I had the bluescreen issue before using this or GunMod's lighting scripts and in fact I've noticed better performance since using them.

[dewshine]

Yes I do have Nvida chipset.  I have the newest drivers, Beta ones infact.  I am trying everything at this point to solve this problem.  Currently I've managed to get the bluescreen issue down to once in 3 hours play.  This is much better than it was, but it is still happening.    I even went so far as to crack my case open and clean out the insides of my computer.  The cat hair was pretty bad. I've updated every driver I can think of.  I was using the 84.21 when this started.  The 7x.xx series that served me so well for so long started crashing during Fable so I updated.  I am trying 91.31 beta drivers currently, having installed them last night.  I've not played the game yet though.  Well... I might have to spring for another gig of RAM then. 

My moniter is shutting off while the game is playing.  It seems unrelated to the bluescreening issue, as my moniter shut off while I was ordering my sims around last night - mid comand.  I updated the drivers for it as well.  I really have no clue as to why it is suddenly acting up when playing Sims2 but not having problems with my other games.

Yes, I've had wonderful luck with Gunmod's lighting.  The performance does seem improved.  This is why I'm mystified as to what the problem is.  I don't have many hacks in the game aside from those offered here at MATY (The radiance lighting and Gunmod's camera hack are all). Heck I just wiped out my downloads folder and started a new neighborhood with a total of 9 playable sims and a handful of maxis default townies.  *Sigh*

[Giggy]

I have the same problem as you but its only windows bluescreen.
try upgrading ram, power supply, graphics driver (If you can't then try downgrading), Graphics card (maybe switch to ATI for better luck)
and if possible,sound card.
if these dont work then I can't help you.

[dewshine]

Blah....  Well. One thing at a time, okay. I got my computer specifically to play sims2, and at the time it was a $3000 machine.  I would hate to think that my 2.2 gig CPU and 1 gig ram machine cannot handle a game that has minium specs of 1 gig CPU and 256 mb ram.  I really would.  I mean, it's not a new machine or anything but I shouldn't need to outspec the game that much should I?

I'm just glad it's not the Windows "bluescreen of death".  I took out Gunmod's shader package and am now using the maxis native shaders version.  Guess what?  No bluescreen unless I alt-tab out of the game. So, for me at least the problem might have been a conflict in commands, perhaps?  Or not.  I've upgraded drivers and all, so it might not even be related.

Giggy, do clean out your vents and fan openings.  It's possible that windows is bluescreening on you because the CPU is getting too hot. 

 

[Giggy]

  I hate to think. a guy vaccumed my motherboard, round my graphics card, my soundcard and the cpu as well. the fan was pretty dirty. I found out later on that it was the anti-analaising (Smooth edges) is causing the problems. I don't get why it decided to not get right with the smooth edges option.
(Stupid card)
Oh, what version should I get so that I have the waves in the pool?

[neriana]

Dewshine, your computer's specs are similar to mine, and I have no issues with running the game, so I don't think that's the problem. Is your monitor's refresh rate set to the same as your driver's? Also, is your in-game resolution the same as your desktop resolution?

[dewshine]

neriana,
Oh, my... no they are not.  I'll have to double check the refresh rate because I'm sure those are different.  The resolution is different  too.  So I need to make sure that my desktop and the game have the same then, huh? 

I would have never guessed.

giggy,
either version will give you the waves in the pool, but if you want to see them you need to have your sim outside at sunset or sunrise and place the camera at a shallow slope to get the reflection.  I think Gunmod's version has waves that are eaiser to see, but I just switched to the native shaders and I see waves with those too.

The anti-anlaising was causing your computer to give the "blue screen of death"?  That's scary.  Have you got it fixed?  (there's another thing for me to check, I think.)