I really like the features of this mod, but the one problem I have is that areas in the shadow of the house - read, pretty much half the house - is insufferably dark. I love the complexities in shading and the ultra-realistic effect, BUT for the dark gloomy pall - it just kills the atmosphere.

So, any way to remedy just the darkness? B/c the rest of the effects I much prefer over v2.1.

First, be sure that you have the lighting to max, in the graphic option panel.
If you already have it to max, then you can just accept the darkness as is: there is not a setting to raise the overall light level; in order to make everithing brighter, someone should edit one by one *all* the lamps, windows, arches etc... included in this mod.

But it's not the doors and windows. It's the shadow of the house. The parts of the house in shadow is somehow much, much darker than before. Pretty much the backyard areas and such. That's outside light, so it shouldn't be b/c of the windows and doors.

B/c the outdoors is darker, the light filtering in through the windows is less as well, and it all pretty much adds up to a mood of doom and gloom. Is there any way I could just restore the original settings for the outside light?

I do have everything at max, though.

It seems that the lower outdoor light causes darker shadows in the house, because GunMod has masterfully tweaked every single light source in the game
But the windows, for the game, are not different than a lamp: if purposely (and improperly) set, they can cast a light by themselve, even if outside there is no light at all...

That's why I said that in order to raise the overall brightness, it would be required to rewrite the entire mod, re-tweaking the outside light and all the windows etc...

What? So to tweak the outdoor light source you have to tweak everything else? Damn! That really sucks. :P

Where do I extract it to???? The Sims 2 under program files???? Please help!!

If you want to automatically install (and uninstall) the Radiance, I suggest to use the Scriptorium.
The Radiance is composed by many files that go in different locations: that's why an automatic installer is easier to use (but if you prefer a manual installation, follow the instructions provided by GunMod in the first post).

This is a beautiful mod. I had many problems with 2.1, including all the ground texture in my neighbourhood view being a single shade of red. 2.2 doesn't have any of those problems.

Unfortunately, I don't think my Powerbook G4 is capable of supporting those durn pixel shaders for the pool effect, because nothing seems to be different about that. I haven't checked to see how the bump-mapping is working yet.

On my Powerbook I'm using an ATI Mobility Radeon 9700. I haven't tried this mod on the iMac yet, but since it has a high-end video card (and not a Mobility version either) I should have better news to report soon.

Edit: And I had no problems with seeing things on the Lost in Love Hedge Maze at 10pm-4am with my sims. It was dark, of course, but not so much I couldn't find a sim if they ran off into the shadows.

Though reluctantly, I've eventually got rid of the pool shaders, and now my games runs more smoothly, and still the Radiance effects are beautiful.

It seems to work great with the Pets EP, no issues to report. This may change as i play some more.



Verdict on compatibility:Great.


And note: Light has always traveled through arches and windows in 2.2 for me.
and typeing "boolprop useshaders false" in the cheat box will turn on, old fish,bumpmaps and pool caustics. at The cost of "realtime specular highlights "

I must say this mod is the greatest Sims 2 mod I've ever downloaded.. Thank you so much Gunmod and Chocolate Pi.

Although, I'm not sure if it appears this way with the original lighting files in the game (it's been awhile since I downloaded this), but I've noticed mosaic or pixelated looking shadows on the walls. It is especially noticable on walls with smoother or less texture, not so much on floors and other items.. Is anyone else getting this or is it just my video card, the original lighting, or this mod? Is there any way to fix this?

Virgil, thanks for the hint! Excuse my ignorance, but exactly what is different in your modification? The shader isn't forced to redraw every single frame, and so it eats less resources?

PS: now the auto-installer for the Radiance is included in the Scriptorium, that contains the very same version formerly contained in CEP4.2, with the only difference that no modification are made to the userconfig.cheats; and therefore, the Maxis shaders are used (I chose to do so in order to prevent automatic overwritings of the people's userconfig.cheats, and also because for many people the bump maps are more important than the pool waves).

LOL! Thanks, but I was just curious to know the meaning of the "-modifiedEachFrameHint" that you added to the "pass" command...

I downloaded the (apparently antique) version from the Original post and followed the installation instructions. Then I remembered that I had CEP installed and that it had an option to install this, THEN I saw this post. I downloaded this "Scriptorium" and ran it, choosing to install Radiance 2.2 or whatever the newest version is.

Then I thought that could possibly cause an issue with having manually installed an older version and automatically installing a (supposed) newer version. So I ran the Script program twice more. Once choosing to use Maxis base lighting. And a second time to use the radiance mod (once again).

Would there be any problems with this? Should I just reinstall the entire game because I probably have some redundancy or other buggery going on? Or should everything be peachy-fine?

And I know I don't know how this works exactly, but seeing as it only had files for the Original game, University and Nightlife, if I placed a Pets lamp or OFB window, will the game combust or look like a digital abortion of some sort?

You did everything perfectly. You now have a clean Radiance installationthat can be uninstalled using the Scriptorium.

All the lamps and windows that came with EPs newer than Nightlife will cast the normal Maxis light, and therefore the final effect might be of a lower quality then using only the older lamps and windows.
But anyway the newer lamps work fine, with the Radiance installed.

I'm using version 2.2. It took awhile to get used to the darkness, but I like the way the light is more natural.

But I can no longer take useful photo booth photos. I think it affects the camera too, but I'm not 100% positive on that and don't want to reload the game in right now to check. All the photos are dark silhouettes. Sure it still fulfills their wants, but the photos themselves are now totally useless. I've read about this same problem in some other forums, but no one offers a solution. Will it be fixed in an update?

I'm using a RADEON 9550 with 256mb RAM on it and a Gig of RAM on the computer. I'm not actually sure how to compare a Radeon to a Geoforce. But the pool shaders work fine on my machine and I notice that most people with an inadequate graphics card have trouble with the shaders, so I think the photo problem is a problem with the mod rather than with my graphics card.

After installing this mod (version 2.2, again) using "Scriptorium" I was pleased to see that bumpmapping was once again enabled. However, I can only get the bumpmaps to show when using natural light (daylight/moonlight). Whenever my sims are inside and exposed to artificial light (lamps) and light through windows/doorways the bumpmaps disappear.

Attached is an image showing what it looks like:

A) This room has a wall removed--allowing natural light inside. The bumpmap shows perfectly.

B) This room has four walls and is lit by windows and lamps. The bumpmap is not visible.

Is this how the RADIANCE mod is supposed to work?

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Edit 1: Additionally, my sims often fail to reflect light from lamps--as if the light source is not there at all. This never happens to furniture and my sims can sit at a fully lit table and still be "in the dark". Is this a known issue with the RADIANCE mod?

Edit 2: I've tried a few things to fix these problems:

Firstly, I changed the "setf roomLightingType" value in the lighting.txt to 4. This made bumpmaps visible in artificial light. However, there would occasionally be "dark spots" where my sims would not display bumpmaps and would seemingly not reflect light from lamps or windows. This produces flashy transitions of light and shadow when the sims are walking indoors. Increasing the value further produced both more flashy transitions and less "dark spots".

Secondly, I tested the older RADIANCE mod included with Scriptorium. This gave an overall better bumpmap display when increasing the value of the "setf roomLightingType" parameter... but the furniture went dark!

I ran these tests on an NVIDIA GeForce 6600 graphics card.

The version included in the Scriptorium is exactly the one downloadable from this thread (including the "setf roomLightingType" value of 2).
the only difference is that the Scriptorium does NOT add the line "useMaxisShaders false" to the userStartup.cheat, and therefore the bumpmapping is not turned off.

I agree that different values of roomLightingType can give better results, and a value of 4 - though not perfect - is the best I could find.

I had another go at the "lighting" files--both the original and the modded ones. To this, I may have found a solution to the issues I experienced.

I think the "flashy transitions" are caused when too many sources of light are projected onto the sim (this could be referred to as "popping"?). In the lighting.txt file there is a parameter to prevent "popping". This value is 0.0 in the RADIANCE mod. Hence, I set:

set lightRangeCutoff 0.275

The result is smooth shading, perfect bumpmaps (using "setf roomLightingType 4") and no flashy transitions during the brief test I did.

Thanks Cinder! So far, I didn't want to publish into the Scriptorium a modified version of the Radiance, but the modifications you suggest are safe enough to be included in a future release.

I use an Nvidia 5700LE, and I have no problems in taking pictures in the photo booth.
The light inside the booth is the same as the room it is placed into; but when the photo is take, the game creates "internally" the picture, it doesn't seem to be affected by the room light.

I've placed a booth in a completely dark room, then in a room with windows, then in th open air; and the light inside the booth was different, in the three case; but the three pictures are identical (see snapshot).

After some extensive testing, I can conclude that the changes I made, unfortunately, are not enough to get proper smooth light and shadow. Rather, they only fix the most severe flashings and enables indoor bumpmaps.

I've experimented with a few additional parameters and values--without any significant luck.

Here are the changes I made to the lighting.txt file (in the base game folder):

setf roomLightingType 4
Comment: Without this I simply cannot get bumpmaps to show indoors. I am currently testing a value of 3 and it seems to reduce flashing at the expense of bumpmap shade direction (bumpmap shades may "flicker" when sims walk).

set lightRangeCutoff 0.275
Comment: This seemingly has two benefits to the game lighting: 1) Greatly reduces sim flashing and 2) Reduces surface whitening when exposed to very bright light. The value may be increased to 0.350 but I found that anything higher than this produces very dark sims and objects.

These changes are merely reverting to the Maxis default values. I still randomly get darkened objects, walls and sims ("flashing")--as if the light sources are not correctly calculated. Either there is something wrong in the mod code causing this or my setup simply refuses to display lighting correctly.

Finally, I removed the "RLS-Shaders.package" from my downloads folder in order to restore the original pool effects, because the pool water looked like glossy plastic. Fancy, but ugly!

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Edit: For some reason the morning light settings have little to no effect on my setup; everything outside is pitch black and only a slight change can be noticed on windows. This is not the case for version 2.1 of the mod (also included with Scriptorium). Hence, I made these changes (taken from version 2.1):

Small (hopefully) query, I apologize in advance if a fix for this is obvious and I just completely missed it, but I did look to no avail.

I installed the lighting mod and came across an issue; random objects and sims wouldn't receive any light indoors. They'd "act" as though no light was touching them, no matter how many lights I placed or what position I placed them in. In one case, a sim was only receiving light on the hair mesh.

This appears to only have affected indoor lights, as the outdoors and CAS are perfectly fine. This has happened with both the 2.1 and 2.2, by the way.

My belief is that it has something to do with my video card (NVidia GEForce 7600 GS) because 1) I didn't have this problem with my previous card (a Radeon X300) and 2) a friend of mine experienced the same problems with two different NVidia cards.

Has anyone else had a similar problem/know how to fix it? I really like this mod and would like to continue using it, so if anyone has any suggestions, I'd be happy to hear them.

Personally, I never had such a problem, and I have an Nvidia 5700LE.

It's renowned that the latest Nvidia drivers are *not* better than some older drivers. I use v. 77.77 and whenever I tried to upgrade them I had to revert to the older driver.

If you can't fix your problem, please give us some more details: what EPs you have, what windows and lamps are in the room and what object(s) suffer for this problem.
About this last point, you say "random objects": does it mean that the same object sometimes is dark and sometimes is ok?

If I want to edit the color of the dawn, day and sunset light, what do I need to edit with SimPE?