Hey all this is just a thread to help me figure some stuff out with regard to evaluating lighting and stealth mods and how they interact.

In Oblivion it seems that stealth and lighting were far less confusing. Mods were available to remove fake lighting, make lights behave like real lights, and then further mods that worked in synergy to make the new information about light and light levels effect stealth mechanics.

I had high hopes for the http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1357526-roll-call-real-lights-thread-2/ project, but that thread has sat dead for months and Plutoman seems to be less active ... and his project real lights seems to have been passed off with its next major update in November at best. Further the RL project seems to have a lot of leanings toward what I consider the bugaboo in understanding the interaction between lights and stealth: Image space modifying.

An initial question is does image space modifying affect light or the stealth formulas at all?

Further compounding this is the ENB craze. As an injector there is no way that it effects game play.

What I lament is that with Image space modifying and ENB folks have torn off on correcting what they see as the lighting problems and not paid attention to game mechanics. So while we are being treated to darker dungeons that are times pitch black - these darkened features are not really effecting stealth mechanics and as such are really just gimping the player (as opposed to the character). That said I'm not a die hard RPG player where I expect the character to have skills and abilities that I the player only could dream of. I like the synergy of FPS and RPG with this series of games and how what the player does and what skills the character have accentuate each other.

So onto the problem ... lighting mods and stealth mechanics seem to not be on the same page. When I install Realistic Lighting or another mod that alters a lot of image space to make things darker I end up playing with a near completely dark screen and yet my character has limited ability to actually use the darkness. In other words I the player and gimped and cannot see the enemies that have no problem seeing my character. This being the near opposite of vanilla with its bright dungeons.

I wish there were a Realistic Lighting thread over here as well. It doesn't seem that the devs there either answer or check in that often and because Nexus is so territorial often other modders don't comment in the comment/thread sections of mods not their own. I prefer this site for that kind of thing.

As I just commented in the RL comments section - I found the formula for detection http://www.creationkit.com/Category:Detection#Visual:

So light level does matter. What I'm not clear about is this factor called light. I can look it up in edit and I see that a there is a Light category and it has records for all forms of light sources. Looking at those, however, I'm not seeing what determines light level as described in the above formula. Can anyone clue me on this?

I see two game settings that are in play here:

fSneakLightMult [GMST:0001A205] data value Float 1.330000 ... though the CK reports 1.4000

fDetectionSneakLightMod [GMST:0004D363] data value Float 15.000000 ... in CK value of 0.0000

And now I'm up against a wall. I'm not seeing how this comes together to create useable information. Is it some entry I need to look up in each cell in question or entries in the Lighting template categories? If someone could walk me through how the light level of a certain cell is (or isn't) modified by anything related to image space and then how that light level is (found and) used in the above detection formula to determine of a character or NPC of a certain stat and skill level to ... detect.

What is really not clear is if image space manipulation has anything at all to do with light level or detection formulas. I don't see that it does, but that may not mean much since at this point I can't put together how light level is derived to plug into the detection formula. Any help here?

I'd like to reiterate that the purpose of this is not to tear down ENB modders or those taken by the image space modding, but to provide a game mechanic minded person a way of evaluating the lighting mods.