HLP Night Sky v2.0

http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=468

Changelog:
1.0 - Initial release
1.01 - Mipmapping shimmer test
1.02 - Size reduction shimmer test

2.0 - Fixed streaks caused by galaxy texture mapping
- Changed alpha channel management for starfield
- Changed alpha channel management for constellations
- Reduced constellation texture size to 1024x1024 for increased visibility
- Added optional texture to reduce shimmering for users not using FXAA

The purpose of this mod is to increase the visual quality of night sky starfields. Original resolution for the starfield and constellation textures is 512 x 512, and the original galaxy texture is only 512 x 256 texture.

Medium (recommended) includes a 2048 x 2048 sky, 2048 x 2048 constellation textures, and 4096 x 2048 galactic plane texture.
Low replaces the galactic plane with a 2048 x 1024 version.
High replaces the galactic plane with a 8192 x 4096 version.

We recommend the Medium version for most users.
Low version is recommended for people with low amount of graphics memory
High version is recommended for people who are running Skyrim at very high resolution, such as with an Eyefinity multi-monitor setup.

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Constellation starfields have been re-built at higher resolution based on the constellation maps from retail Skyrim.

Starfield texture is entirely new, procedurally built starfield calibrated to blend well with the constellation textures.

Galactic plane texture is based on Gigagalaxy Zoom / Astronomy Picture of the Day 2009 September 26th. Local stars as seen from Earth have been removed from it, along with certain other conspicuous bright objects, and the original texture was used as a mask and colour layer for an RGB noise layer, to construct a generic galactic plane texture that shares certain characteristics with Milky Way as seen from Earth, but then most spiral galaxies share those characteristics, and it seems Nirn is located in one such galaxy.

COMPARISON PIC:
http://img88.imageshack.us/img88/4829/nightmodcomparisonv20.png

SCREENSHOTS:
http://i44.tinypic.com/27zf4hk.jpg
http://i43.tinypic.com/20aq5ir.jpg
http://img28.imageshack.us/img28/4741/nightsky01.png
http://img683.imageshack.us/img683/174/nightsky02.png
http://img577.imageshack.us/img577/9666/nightsky03.png
http://img825.imageshack.us/img825/7942/nightsky04.png
http://img526.imageshack.us/img526/1619/nightsky05.png
http://img545.imageshack.us/img545/9547/nightsky06.png
http://img197.imageshack.us/img197/5719/nightsky07.png
http://img7.imageshack.us/img7/879/nightsky08.png
http://img703.imageshack.us/img703/6180/nightsky09.png
http://img163.imageshack.us/img163/8029/nightsky10.png
http://img716.imageshack.us/img716/5339/nightsky11.png
http://img707.imageshack.us/img707/2771/nightsky12.png
http://img191.imageshack.us/img191/1944/morningsky.png
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Greetings from Hard Light Productions
Bringing modders together http://www.hard-light.net

Looks pretty awesome

Is it lore friendly? Looks nice either way.

It's lore friendly in that no Earth constellations are present, and that the skill constellations are upgraded, but not changed

I was mainly wondering about dual moons? They aren't there I guess?

no, they are untouched and present in the game

That's a difficult question to answer.

The background consists of four textures:

- a starfield texture
- two constellation textures
- galaxy


Now, I reproduced the constellation textures as well as I could, so those parts should remain accurate (although I should note I tried to make the different starfield parts blend with each other as well as possible). That means the constellations should be there, but not quite as prominently visible compared to rest of the stars as they used to be.

If the basic background starfield also contains constellations, then no, that part is not retained. I can't be certain, but I have a feeling that the basic starfield is a repeating texture that is mapped cubically on a skysphere (projection from six different directions). If that is the case, then there can't be any specific constellations on the starfield, and the mod should be lore-friendly (as much as can be).


Also, like Turambar said, the moons are not affected. This is a simple texture replacement; the moons are entirely different textures.

Cool, I'll give it a try. I looks nice.

Those screenshots look great. I can't wait to check this out in-game.

The amount of thought, strategy and planning you put into it is just amazing! It really paid off and looks absolutely terrific.

Does it affect the auroras in any way?

Thank you! I have a fair bit of experience designing and building space background for another game, FreeSpace 2 Open, and I was able to utilize that experience (and even recycle a lot of existing material in the textures). So, in the case of this mod it wasn't so much thought and planning as it was utilization of previously done thinking, planning, and a large amount of experimenting.

For example, the galactic plane texture I used was originally designed for use in the aforementioned game. I simply adjusted its levels, changed the resolution, and put it in the game - worked like a charm. Similarly the base starfield was also originally created for FS2 Open, and required very little modifications throughout the dev cycle for this mod from concept to realization. The biggest work was reproducing the constellation starfields at high level (my WIP constellation textures were done at 4096^2) but now I have source textures for the location of them stars, and I can rather easily alter the appearance of those stars if - say - people turn up complaining that the brightest stars are too dim.


Which reminds me to say that if anyone has any negative criticism, please don't hesitate to say it! If it's something fixable I'll try to do so.

For example, there is a little problem with some of the textures when they're applied on the background mesh; I don't know if anyone has noticed it yet - if you wish to see if you can find it yourself don't highlight the spoiler!




No. Aurorae are, I think, part of the atmospheric effects. These texture changes only affect the starfield background textures, and the galaxy on the background. Here's an image from High Hrothgar:

[img]http://img94.imageshack.us/img94/4970/galacticplaneaurorae.png[/img]

Nice to see good ol' folk from Hard Light in here.

Great job with the night sky, I installed the medium version immediately.

I have excessive twinkling with any version, the vanilla night sky doesn't twinkle at all.
Specs:
Nvidia Geforce GTX 560 Ti
Resolution: 1280x1024
Ultra settings.

http://youtu.be/zMrKm0HbA30

The first texture change I like! Will put it on tonight. Great job.

Could you do a real Earth moon and sky?

Looks really good, nice work

Thanks for reporting. The retail sky probably does not twinkly because it uses a tiny 512x512 texture for the starfields, whereas this one uses a 2048x2048 texture.

It looks actually very good at 1920x1080 resolution - very natural twinkle effect (even if it's achieved solely by accident due to the texture shimmering anomaly), so it might actually be worth keeping.

Nevertheless, here is a twinkle test version of the mod, with MIP mapped textures. That should technically address the shimmering issue, but I am unsure how well it will retain the texture quality. Please test it out and report any differences to the v.1.0 release. Everyone who's willing is welcome to test, regardless of resolution.

Main thing I am interested in is this:

-will excessive twinkling be dampened on low resolution such as 1024x768 or 1280x1024
-will it completely stop any twinkling on high resolution such as 1920x1080



http://www.mediafire.com/?sky8m8gwpfuu9xn




Possibly, within certain restrictions.

The starfield system as such will not work to that end. What I could do is use a completely transparent starfield and constellation textures, and replace the galaxy texture with a spherical texture of the sky as seen from Earth. If the galaxy map is a full sphere and the texture is fully projected on it, then it would work. However, achieving correct star colours would probably be impossible since it appears the game does some post processing to the galaxy, and as a result the colours are not reproduced accurately. It's worth a try, however, and reasonably simple to achieve since I have good high resolution material on the subject.

Getting Earth's Moon to work would be a more complicated endeavour but probably possible nevertheless. However, it would be very unimpressive I'm afraid, as Earth's Moon orbits much much further than Nirn's two moons, which means it is very small on the screen. Mathematically speaking, the Moon is half a degree wide in angular diameter. That means, if field of view is 60 degrees, the Moon covers exactly 1/120th of it. If the horizontal resolution is 1920 pixels, then the Moon will be 1920 / 120 = 16 pixels wide. Don't know exactly what field of view Skyrim uses but you can probably see the Moon wouldn't be very big at all.

Basically, what that means is I would have to put a really small Moon in the middle of otherwise transparent texture, to get approximately correctly sized Moon. And make the other Moon completely transparent.


Then there's the matter of orbital orientation and other things like that - for example, if the galaxy is replaced with a spherical starfield there is no guarantee whatsoever that its axis is aligned with the rotational axis of the planet.


On other words - there's no way to ensure that Polaris actually is over the North Pole. If the developers have been sane and wise, then it probably might work that way, but it would require experimentation. That said, only those familiar with astronomy and using constellations for orienteering would ever even notice such a thing...


This would be probably easier to achieve with a complete starfield background mesh replacement, but I don't know if that is possible at this time.

I tried the mip-mapped version but it didn't change anything, the amount of twinkling is the same.

Curious.

What are your GPU driver 3D settings? Try what happens if you set "Texture filtering - Negative LOD Bias" to "Clamp" instead of "Allow".

http://www.abload.de/img/settingsak3yh.jpg
Changing to clamp does nothing. I noticed the twinkling is only at the border of the sky sphere and not in the center, only where it moves.

Hmh, don't know what to do about that. What about triple buffering?

I guess I could put together a lower resolution test with 1024^2 starfields. Though, I would like to have some information from other players using small resolutions to figure out if this is indeed symptomatic for using the mod on small displays.

so, I'm not entirely sure how to install this, since the texture folder is packed...(not the download, I mean the vanilla folder) any help?

If you make a new texture folder in your data directory, it should work fine.

do I just need to check "load loose files" then?