Darky - Shader Mod - Make darkness great again

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Tired of all the bright spots in your world? Want some more darkness to spice it up and look more realistic?
Lets try a little different then and go dark!



current features
- increased overall darkness
- increased window transparency and thus reduced their glow in the dark
- emissives (status lights on blocks etc) scale with brightness and thus are toned down in dark regions

things i would like to add
- tone the yellow boxes around interactable objects (text panel, respawn, cargo hatches) down
- increase voxel brightness a bit not to "punish" these regions so much (ideally only in regions next to other lit voxel or under lit atmosphere)
- remove the stepping effect for darkness
- soften up some of the shadow borders



Installation:
- Always backup the modified shader files beforehand (verifying on steam should help otherwise)
- Open the files below and replace their content in "<STEAM>\common\SpaceEngineers\Content\Shaders"
- Take your windows explorer and enter "%appdata%\SpaceEngineers" to get into your SE appdata folder where you have to delete the folder "ShaderCache" so the shaders get recompiled
- NOTE: If you installed the first version that modified the EnvAmbient.h shader, please restore that file (backup).

Uninstall:
- Restore the shader backup
- Alternatively: Verify integrity on steam

Files (release 2 - old stable branch renderer)
- billboard.hlsl
- light_dir.hlsl
Files (adapted release 2 by @RandomBlue - new dev branch renderer)
- https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/841512/SpaceEngineers - Darkness - Dev.zip

Please leave some feedback and especially galleries of your new and darker worlds.


enjoy


Credits:
MrMcGowan (reddit) for pointing me to a different and better shader file to modify the values

 

Amazing work! Though I hope that name won't bite your ass...

 

Great! Hopefully with enough interest, the devs will give us some tweakable settings to enable workshop modding these values.

As for the yellow box, I don't know why they just don't remove it and stick with the yellow triangle highlights only, they work just as well.

 

FANTASTIC! I was getting tired of the bright diffuse light inside my ships. Thanks for making lights a necessity again

 

It's a bit of a racial slur. I would compare and contrast it to others but posting slurs in the forums is a big no-no.

 

Then just let it go. Is there just no escaping political correctness so much that we have to actively go looking to take offense where I highly doubt any was intended?

 

Awesome. Finally lightwork on the ship will look great once again=)
P.S. Made a quick picture for the OP heading, I think it would fit nice)

 

Please don't turn this board into your conservative outlet to troll. The name is offensive, intended or not.

 

Wow, great mod, Player2k!

Finally, we can create horror scenarios!

 

Like everything else you do, this is amazing.

Edit: what the hell is going on in this thread?

 

ikr? it's like some people are thinking like a machine(raw text matching)- and clearly,the title isn't used in reference to a person,which is situational anyway...

 

Then don't turn this board into your leftist totalitarian outlet to troll. You're offensive, intended or not.

 

Thank you for the mod player2k, this along with deleting the window texture has created some very beautiful scenery. The shadows are a bit dark right next to lights, but that may be an issue that keen has to fix. As for the "other" part of this conversation, cut it or I'll use a Rick an Morty quote to end the conversation.

 

I'm going to drop this here. Not because you're correct, because this isn't the place for political debate. It's still offensive. That hasn't changed. I'm done. Get your final word in if you must.

 

Well thanks for some replies so far. Sadly i am in norway right now and only online occasionally through a phone to read and rarely reply so dont expect a long reply til like in a week.

Yes i am aware of the really dark shadows next to light sources. That partially is realistic even though we may not be aware of it aswell as unrealistic if plenty of reflective surfases are around.

I hope to increase overall brightness for voxels but i didnt find it in the spare time i had before.


As for the name and the potential offensive chatter i can only say that there likely exist only a very few word that aint offensive or generally got a negative conotation in any other region in the world. That is a general problem we got in any intercultural communications. Someone says something normal and neutral while another person takes it very offensive even though never intended by the senser of that message.

That pretty much sums it up here. I never intended to be offensive and thus i hope nobody seriously took offense.

However as i also am of the opinion that there are these two parts of a communication where both sender and receiver take their shares, i wont bother much past the point of saying that i did not intend to offend anyone even if any person so desperately insists on taking an offense.

So it sadly goes both ways like it almost always is the case in life.
To some people a "polak" (polish person) or a mexican is an insult even though in many other regions that is perfectly neutral and valid. Same goes for many other mostly neutral words that got banned in some places due to political correctness.

I am quite confident that people in this community like in many others are aware of the fact that the peoples ethnics, cultures or simply nationalities dont have too much to do with the individuals themself on the most atomic level. So whoever is active here sure noticed that there are nice people all around the world, no matter how they look like.

I hope i could ease the fuzz a biz.
I'll enjoy the next few sunny days in southern norway and check in later. Enjoy.

Edit: fixes some typos
Also please lets focus on the actual topic a bit more.
I however would not reject an offtopic thread about this topic if anyone wants to talk about it seriously.

 

Nice mod and sorry about the derail. Sometimes Americans forget that there are other places that aren't American. That is a slur in America, but it means jack in most other places.

 

and what is with the: ...\SpaceEngineers\Content\Shaders\EnvAmbient.h ... file?

witch you described to edit here: https://www.reddit.com/r/spaceengineers/comments/4to17a/making_space_dark_again_shader_mod/

has that now to be restored to keen defaults?

 

@druppi
Yes. It has be to be restored to default.
If you didnt back it up, this should be the default file.

 

Aussie here - I agree with you partially, as many words have double meanings around the world, and you certainly didn't mean it as a slur in this context, so there is nothing to be offended by here. However, while the word "Darky" isn't used in an offensive context here in Aus, AFAIK, the actual meaning of "Darky" is only that of a racial slur, as the word has no other meaning in the English language and isn't used in any other context. Dark, Darker, Darkly, Darkness, all mean devoid of light, but "Darky" only has one meaning, and that is as an ethnic slur.

 

YOU! made my day!
great work thx

 

now with the new patch you can mod light settings in-game

 

So now is my question: Is it still compatible with the new updatte? (Changed light-system)

 

I didnt try it yet but i doubt it.

 

Thank you so much for this! You have no idea how many mods I've tried trying to get the ambient lighting back to realistic levels, including opening the developer menu and manually adjusting the game brightness! You even got rid of the weird trees being lit up at night bug.

11/10, day made.

 

I've updated this to work with the new engine changes in the dev branch.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/841512/SpaceEngineers - Darkness - Dev.zip

Install is basically the same as the OP but you unzip to your <SpaceEngineers>\Content\Shaders folder and overwrite existing files. You'll need to delete %APPDATA%\SpaceEngineers\ShaderCache\* as well.

Seems to be working well but I didn't do tons of testing, basically just inside a ship with and without lights/power, in an enclosed room with no windows/lights/openings and around an asteroid and the outside of ships. Everything looks good to me, but this is the first time I've ever messed with shaders, so something I tweaked may have unforseen consequences.

The mod also lowers bloom from 23 billion, or whatever they have it set to, to 20% of its current value so it's just very slightly noticeable and LCD screens are actually legible.

 

So far i couldnt test it as i am still on an old stable build but the files look fine. Thanks for the transition

 

Hmm, the dev version looks OK apart from... invisible windows!

 

The original non-dev version drastically reduced the visibility of window textures, did you use that previously and are they different? The calculations and modifier values used in Billboards are the same in the dev version as the stable version. Might be some other change in the lighting engine or one of the files I tweaked that's impacting it indirectly.