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Blind-, Lowlight- & Darkvision adjustments
This is a very simple light emitter adjustment/model fix to tweak how "normal" vision, lowlight vision and darkvision looks like on clients. It adjusts normal vision to be darker, lowlight vision to be redder, and darkvision to be MUCH brighter and with a blue-ish hue that hints at it being greyscale in reality (wait what). This is a pure-model fix that can be dropped in override or a hak, no scripting or breakage neccessary.
If you want your players to use torches (or change things yourself, details inside), this is the way.
This file also edits the ultravision vfx to be exactly the same as darkvision so you can use the visual effect interchangeably instead of faffing with creature skin itemproperties.
The presets given in this model file are designed to be bloody dark indeed. They are meant to be used with areas that have at their darkest point zero ambient lighting, and some kind of system tweaks those values with regard to moon/phase lighting and so on! (Still, the darkvision fix might be a bit too bright - this is not the final version by itself, but I wanted to share)
If that isn't your style but you want to edit anyways because the default darkvision settings are useless, the values itself are easily found. Any vision modes are actually just client-only dynamic lights that are spawned on the player object, so editing the file that defines the light emitters will work.
In the attached model file ("fx_light_clr"), find the animation that corresponds to your desired change (for example, Blind_Vision = normal human vision), and edit the colorkey and radiuskey values to match your desired result. I have little documentation on what they do exactly, but experimentation gets you far enough. Please set your fog to 0 while editing/testing .. ;)
From what I saw in testing, colorkey defines the RGBA colour components (so 1.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 is pure red); radiuskey is some kind of falloff curve (in meters).
The default file can be found in the original NWN data files, and is best extracted with NWNExplorer. I've added it to the zip as well for your convenience.
You can edit the default light effects in the same file, but I have not tried that.
Let me know if you have any questions.
Tweaks made for silm.pw.
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
 fx_light_clr.zip (360) | 2.2 KB |
"Before" and "after" pics would do wonders for this.
Native NWN darkvision does next to nothing, with ultravision doing a little bit more (still not much) and giving you an ugly, violet hue.
Nivs darkvision for silm.pw does this:
Normal vision
Darkvision
I was working on something like this as well, alas it has languished the last few years. Yours is complete and much better, I hadn't really settled on what I wanted. This is really cool and I'll be using it!
Thanks!
I've replaced the old screenshot with those provided by Darkheyr. Much better.
This wasn't really supposed to be a drop-in replacement but I suppose you could use it as such. I wanted to post it mostly because I figured very few people knew you could tweak those effects by editing the light model.
What I'm doing on my PW is replace the darkvision effect with normal vision, replace Ultravision with what darkvision would be, and then add a feat that allows toggling the effect on and off. Rulewise creatures can't toggle DVis, but it's preferrable to players to have the option anyways, just to enjoy the lighting/mood more. Also stops it from flapping each time one enters/leaves torch range, which in my book is a plus.
Cheers
this is awesome. thanks for digging this up! i had no idea it existed.
I lost this when I reformatted, and am so glad to have found again. A must have, and really makes players think about bringing a light in dark places...or invest in Darkvision.
I just had to comment, tried it out and WOWZA, very cool effects for darkvision.
For normal vision, thh player can still hit the Tab key and all interactive objects will highlight, but otherwise everything is DARK. I liked using a torch, really immersive. This will help my underdark areas as well, darkvision+ will let PCs see around them, but humans will get the benefit of the darkness punctiuated by glowing objects.
I found the right values I'd like to use in my dwarf-centric module. I'll give full credit, is it ok if I submit my version in a hak/override file?
Normal vision has a tiny illuminated area, to simulate feeling around in the dark. Still needs some playtesting.
Low Light Vision give a fairly large area of violet visibility, it's untouched from yours.
Dark vision goes out a bit more than 60 feet, per PHB, but I'll probably tweak it a bit. I need it for PCs that should be playing Dwarves, so tweaks were needed.
It is my understanding that the reason normal vision works so well in the dark is that it was frustrating for players to deal with vision issues in the game. PWs and some creators (me) want to be able to design for the various vision flavors...
Thanks so much for discovering this! I should've commented two years ago, but it's never too late I suppose. I tried this out, didn't agree with the choices made, so I created one which I think better fits the PnP rules. And I combined that changed light model with dim yellow light spell and continual light spell, as well as a dim yellow torch — all of which better fit the PnP rules than the standard NWN ones.
Thanks again for this discovery and my contribution is called PnP Vision, Light spells, and Torches.
This is a great fix that does pretty much exactly what I want Darkvision to do. The vanilla darkvision is utterly useless in truly dark areas.