New low-res night skies

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bearhead
Posts: 21
Joined: Thu Sep 23, 2021 10:00 pm

New low-res night skies

Post by bearhead »

I like the look of the vanilla low-res skies, but the night versions seemed a little strange to me - no clouds, too bright, and the ground is a lighter color than in the preceding sunset. These inconsistencies aren't usually noticeable, but become very apparent if you're using accelerated real-time travel.

So I created new versions of the night sky images to better fit with the existing day time skies. Ideally I would also edit a few frames of the day time skies to make the transition from day to night more seamless, but I don't think modding SKY images is currently supported?

Below is a comparison of the original night sky to my new version:
Spoiler!
nite_examp_old.jpg
nite_examp_old.jpg (85.8 KiB) Viewed 822 times
nite_examp_new.jpg
nite_examp_new.jpg (84.24 KiB) Viewed 822 times

I've attached a zip file with the .pngs for the new night skies. To get them in your game, just copy them to your "StreamingAssets\Textures" folder. Note that unlike other IMG files, these *do not* need to go into the Img subfolder.

Also, I thought I would note that even though these are low-res image replacements, they look fine without disabling modded texture compression in settings.ini - I guess the darkness of these images makes the compression artefacts difficult to notice.
Attachments
new_night_sky.zip
(78.05 KiB) Downloaded 103 times

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haloterm
Posts: 391
Joined: Sat Feb 16, 2019 5:21 am

Re: New low-res night skies

Post by haloterm »

Beautiful, thank you!

... ehm, while you are at it, do you maybe plan to do day versions, too, without these fixed mountains and trees? (I know that this would be a lot of work, though)

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bearhead
Posts: 21
Joined: Thu Sep 23, 2021 10:00 pm

Re: New low-res night skies

Post by bearhead »

I'm glad you like it :)

Does DF Unity currently support modding the SKY files? I tried messing with the day skies, but I couldn't figure it out. The night sky images are different because they are IMG files.

I'm not sure if it would be worth introducing new retro-style skies without the hills and trees though... if you're wanting that kind of look I think your best bet would probably be to use Enhanced Skies with retro rending mode turned on, and some kind of post processing effect. Maybe also try changing "UseMipMapsInRetroMode" to "true" in your settings.ini file if the hard pixelization for distant objects is bothering you.

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