Could someone explain to me (a programing ignoramus) a step by step to setting up a room to be really dark, so torches etc really have an impact please?.

I am trying to work out how to make a room where you come in, the door locks behind you an the room goes dark. You have to light a torch to see what your doing. an find your way out. I have the door lock thing sorted out, just that I have tried making rooms really dark an it just hasn't worked.

I am checking the threads, an the tutorial links but so far have not found anything relevant.
Trouble I have had so far is when I make the roombound lighting black it makes everything look grainy as hell when you put a light in there.

You could set up an imagespace modifier to fade to nearly black, Have the same script that locks the door apply the modifier, and remove it when you want to lights to come back up. Should work fine, although if someone teleports out they'll probably be stuck in darkness. it might be worth adding an onSingleUpdate loop to see if they're still in the dungeon cell and remove the modifier if not.

It's also possible to apply lighting modifiers to room bounds, or so I seem to recall, but that would be a constant effect and you want this to be toggleable.

[edit]

Look at the werewolf transformation in the companions quest for an example of a fade to black effect. You can find the ImagespaceModifiers in the object window. I'd probably copy the ones used by the werewolf effect and fiddle with the values until I got the darkeness level.

Note that you need three modifiers: one to reduce the lighting over time, one to keep it in a steady state and one to bring it up over time. Although if you want a "lights out" effect, you might be able to get away with just the middle one.

Interest, most of that has me even more confused than I was in the beginning hehe....
The door lock thing I worked out by having someone pick up a diamond on floor, this would close the door an have no way to open it from inside. The trick now is to find something that opens the door after you kill the mobs inside that room.
Gonna see if I cna work it out by looking at the quest battle in the beginning dungeon of the main game. Where you fight the priest critter. Once dead it unlocks a barred door behind him.

You're going to need a script, whatever happens.

You can add one to your diamond if you want. There's an OnContainerChange event that should fire when you pick it up.

You can use that to close the doors and lock them with "needs a key".

Easiest way to unlock them is to give priest critter a key. Alternatively, give him a script with an OnDeath event and add the unlock code to that.

With Room Markers, you can set a specific lighting template and imagespace modifier to a particular section of your dungeon.
Check the "Optimisation" official Creation Kit video if you're not familiar with Room Markers.

Could that be toggled with a script? I didn't think you could disable room markers.

Hmm, no I don't think so. But he could easily have this really dark room, add some bright lights so it first looks as well-lit as the rest of the dungeon. Then disable all these lights via a script when he picks up the diamond.

That sounds like a plan.

Yeh there's an idea. To make it easier in the script you could add an xmarker. Then select all the lights, press the "-" key to bring up the http://www.creationkit.com/Batch_Assignment window. You will see all the lights you have selected in the list on the left. Tick the "set enable parent" option, select your new xmarker as the Target Reference, then press "do". Now in the same script that locks the door, http://www.creationkit.com/Disable_-_ObjectReference the xmarker, which will in turn cut out all the lights at once. For the effect to work, you'll also have to right click on your cell in the cell list and press edit. Then go to the lighting tab and play around with the ambient colours until you get to what you consider "dark"

- Hypno

Yeah, using an xmarker as the lights enable parent was what I had in mind.
But I had no idea the Batch Assignment windows even existed. Now i think back of all the times i tirelessly set an enable parent to billions of objects manually.
THANKS.

Ok so heres what I did in end. I worked out how to enable the image space lighting, an found the bleakfalls close lighting. Did a reasonable job, but the whole lock unlock thing is still taking some work...

My trouble is, all your advice is great, but I am having trouble putting it into practice at moment .... Watched the tutorial on scripting wasn't to bad, but I would kill to have someone do a writeup or a tutorial vid on making doors lock an unlock. The Diamond thing worked, but people get wise to that after the first time.

Edit what I have done in the interim is to make a key an put it on one of the NPC's inventory's. But again it isn't exactly ideal.

I use the "BorderWallFarDarkTemplate" lighting template for a lot of things. It's much darker than what you'd see in a vanilla dungeon, and makes torches all but necessary, but it's just bright enough that it's not pitch black, which I personally think looks terrible.

I then throw in a few tactically-placed lights (unless I have to, I never put in a light without an actual light source- like a fire or something- for example, a dark dunegon might be realistic, but no self-respecting bandit's gonna wander around in the dark, they'll put up torches). For Dwemer ruins, I make the majority of their gas lamps broken, and then put in one or two that are still in working condition.

cheers jara I'll try it, sounds exactly what I am looking for.