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The Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion "Illumination Within" | V1.0

By: Slap & ModMan


Information on Version 1.00
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This mod lights up in the evening, the external windows of most buildings throughout the world of Cyrodil based on various scripts that control time and duration of the "Light on" period. Houses, Inns and Taverns are timed differently from Guilds and shops, to give a staggered feel to the illuminating windows. Cathedrals also have their own time schedule, but offset against the others and a shorter period for them quick confessions. The "glow" of the windows are new meshes overlaid on top of the original window pane, which are also accompanied by numerous extra shutters and hand placed lights to complement the immediate area around the new window. This creates a truly beautiful view for most evenings in the cities and smaller settlements, when the lights come on. Many new textures and 3d windows components had to be created for the mod to function the way we wanted it, and to give that true feeling of a building being lit from the inside. The end result is over two thousand hand placed window/shutter meshes and lights, covering all buildings that had a window and potential evening light. Oblivion nightime with this mod running, makes for a totally different gameplay experience. With hardly any performance hit when the scripts run, most people with a half decent computer will be able to run "Illumination Within" without the concern of a major performance loss.
Two versions of the mod are available, one with shutters present around window frames in some cities, and another "Lite" version with just window glows and extra lights. The shutter version impacts framerates an extra 2/6 fps.

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Original Concept: ModMan
New Concept:  Slap                                                                  
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"Illumination Within" is now a reality thanks to ModMan and his original plugin of Morrowind Window lights. His simple but very effective mod all them years ago changed the way we feel about nightime in RPG's forever. The windows in the evening throughout Oblivion amazingly lacked this simple feature that we all have come to love and expect in games these day. Both ModMan and myself set about in earnest to remedy this unforgivable omission in Oblivion. Windowlights as the title was originally called, was a little static for my taste, so I went for something a bit more in feeling with the game, but only after taking over the mods production as my own due to ModMans inescapable realife schedule. Scripts and concepts continued to flow from Modman during the production phase though, and all the lights and windows are controlled by his coding. Without all his contributions, the mod would be far from complete. Many thanks go out to this hard core modder..!

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2. Future Versions
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This is the initial release of "Illumination Within" V1.0.

Production will continue on the mod and new features added such as wooden shutters for lower class buildings, comprehensive "under the door" glow placement for most buildings and a slew of other ideas that will further enhance the mod. Skingrad will be getting a complete overhaul for exterior nightime lighting, and will include new models and animation to further enhance that city feel.

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3. Technical Specifics                                                
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1. 163 New and altered Textures: Mostly Original game window textures heavily edited and changed, with additions.  18.7mb

2. 89 Window models/meshes: Taken from original game models.   

3. 11 shutter models: All handmade.

4. 40+ Unigue Lights and setups in CS

5. 40+ Multiple activator models in CS

6. 4 Unique Scripts controlling shops, Inns, guilds and homes. All follow general evening patterns of activation and duration. Inns for example stay on between 6pm and 7am

7. All windows use normal,specular and diffuse maps in various degrees of hue/saturation and glow.

8. Window shutters are low poly and use lower resolution normal maps to keep fps high.

9. Shutters and window meshes do not use collision.

10. Glow mapped windows display correctly in all Weather conditions, and distance fades the amplitude of the glow.

11. Windows randomly start to turn on over a set period of time to stagger the lighting up period. When a Thunderstorm begins, it takes a while for the scripts to activate and overide all lights to turn on after the storm has gathered momentum, and darkened the sky considerably. If it clears up again, the lights revert back to thier original schedule.

12. The difuse maps on the windows have been darkened in areas to compensate for what I call "OverGlow" effect, where the window was appearing to bright in places. The resulting change in the overall diffuse works to create the illusion of darkening the window frames due to being "backlit" by the interior lighting.

13. Most new windows are accompanied by a specific, script controlled omni light, that spawns to complement the surrounding glowing area, or "faked refraction" effect. These lights are many in number, size and colour, and dotted all over each city and settlement. You will experience framerate loss in
some areas, but nothing more that about 5 percent or so.

14. Placing and ligning up hundreds of window meshes was mind numbing work, so dont expect every single one to be a "perfect fit", some are not. But if I had to say a number, 95 percent are highly acurate in placement and the other 5 not so. But not that you would ever notice this slight window movement during the change, unless you were directly looking at the window very closely. When playing, you hardly notice the lights comming on.

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1. INSTALLING THE PLUGIN
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1- Place Illumination Within.esp, or Illumination Without.esp file, into your "Oblivion/Data" folder. 

2- Place the 2 folders inside the "Data" folder from the rar (textures & meshes), into your "Oblivion/Data" folder. If asks to overwrite, choose "Yes".

3- When launching the game, select data files and double click on either esp depending on which version you want to run.


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5. Credits
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Mod Re-Designer & Creator:   Slap
Models & Textures:	     ""
Window & Light Placement:     ""  (All external citys & Settlements 	
				 Inns,Stables and priorys. Plus 
                                 misc buildings.)


Scripts & Base concept:   ModMan
Window & Light Placement:  ""     (All ImperialCity districts.)

Beta Testers:

Slap
ModMan

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6. Contact Info & Bug/Error reporting
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sgt.slap@ntlworld.com      Slap
gsherfy@midsouth.rr.com    ModMan 
http://www.freewebs.com/xura/oblivionplugins.htm


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7. Known Bugs/Issues
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The only issue you may experience when running this mod is major slowdowns of fps in cities directly related to water reflections and what you have set to reflect in your ini. If statics or misc objects are set to 1, this will kill your framerate with the new glow mapped windows, so I recommend you set both to 0. This way  when the window and lights script kicks in and the windows spawn and lights turn on, your computer wont blow up, but instead hardly notice any change in framerate. The impact might be 1-4 fps give or take. It will depend on where you are standing at the time, and of course your rig. But generaly making sure these are set to 0 will ensure almost no performance hit with the new windows. Only the new Omni lights will cause any slowdown you experience. Tested on a Vanilla Geforce 6800 128mb standing facing the Guild  in Leyawiin (a heavy polygon area) before and after window spawn, and noticed a "tiny" framerate loss, which was barely perceivable on that card.

No conflicts reported using [b]ModManager[b]


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Screenshots
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