Storms & Sound 3.0

by Deathless Aphrodite and lilith

NEW PATCHES AVAILABLE:

Foghorne has created some great patches to add Storms & Sound functionality to the interiors added by many famous mods. You can find the patches in the downloadable files.

Important: to use the patches you need to rename your esp to
Storms & Sound.esp
It doesn't matter which version you're using, rename the esp, make a clean save and activate the esp with the new name.

Here's a list of the mods which get Storms & Sound functionality:

AFK_Weye v2.1
Amajor Imperial Furniture v1.0
Bank of Cyrodiil v1.11
Bartholm v7.0
Better Cities v4-7-1
Blood & Mud
Imperial Furniture Renovated 1.0
Shezrie's Villages
The Lost Spires v14


COMPATIBLE WITH OFFICIAL 1.2 PATCH AND SHIVERING ISLES

Important: There's the possibility of a conflict with Warcry. If you're using Warcry and experience missing lightning textures you should try loading this mod after Warcry in the load order.

NEW VERSION:
+ Full inside sounds added to Shivering Isles too (thanks lilith!).
+ New options to enable/disable all visual and sound effects added by the mod.
+ New Obse version compatible with all past and future weather mods, including All Natural.
+ New non-Obse versions for compatibility with Arthur's natural weather and Enhanced weather.
+ Some small bug fixes and tweaks.

WHAT THIS MOD DOES:

The mod has a version for Vanilla weather, one for AWS, one for NW, one for Arthur's NW and one for Enhanced Weather.

There's also an Obse version which works with any weather mod, and my advice is to use this one. There's no reason not to use Obse, really.

Basically I merged the "Weather Inside" mod by vine and Morbus and the "Better Storms & Weather" mod by PsychEroc, adding many tweaks and features. The latter seems to have left the scene, so I couldn't ask for his permission.

Besides merging the two mods I tried to optimise the scripts for performance and I added some features.

So this mod:

1) Adds weather SOUND when you're in interiors, you'll hear rain, wind but the thing I added compared to Weather Inside is the fact that you hear PsychEroc's STORM and THUNDER sounds from interiors too! This adds quite a lot to immersion in my opinion.

2) Adds THUNDER and LIGHTNING. When it starts raining there's a 50% chance that thunder and lightning will kick in. So there won't be lightning only during thunderstorms as in previous mods of this type, I think that's better for variety.

3) Uses IMPROVED SCRIPTS with no placeatme calls: this means smaller save games and no activators clogging up the game world.

4) Introduces delayed thunder when lightning is distant

5) Has a CONFIGURATION MENU (see below): you can tweak parameters to your liking, make lightning hit farther or nearer depending on your taste, change the frequency of lightning and more.

6) Changes LIGHTNING COLOR and effect, SHOCK SPELLS look BETTER now in my opinion than in previous versions.

Check out also the excerpts from the original readmes by vine and PsychEroc which I included in the archive.

INSTALLATION:

1. First of all you need to uninstall similar mods and in particular mods that add weather sounds to interiors and mods that add lightning and flashes to storms.
In particular remove any version of Weather Inside (don't forget to delete the "weather inside [seasons] v1.2.bsa" file in the data folder if you decide to keep my mod) and any version of Better Storms & Weather.

2. IMPORTANT: If you were using a previous version of this mod, deactivate it.

4. Make a clean save with no storm mods active.

3. Then you'll need to copy all the contents from the archive to your Oblivion\Data folder. Just choose the right esp file for your situation.

4. IF YOU USE OBSE, JUST CHOOSE "OBSE-Storms & Sound.esp" OR "OBSE-Storms & Sound SI.esp" for the Shivering ISles compatible version. YOU HAVE TO USE JUST ONE ESP, EITHER THE SI ONE OR THE NON-SI ONE. Activate it, skip points 5 and 6 and jump to point 7.

5. VERY IMPORTANT: If you use NW (including Arthur's version), YOU HAVE TO RENAME YOUR VERSION OF NATURAL WEATHER TO NaturalWeather.esp OR MY MOD WON'T WORK (this was done to cover all the different versions of NW)

6. Activate ONE of these files if you don't have the Shivering Isles expansion:
-"EW-Storms & Sound.esp" for Enhanced Weather
-"ANW-Storms & Sound.esp" for Arthur's Natural Weather
-"AWS-Storms & Sound.esp" for Atmosperic Weather System
-"NW-Storms & Sound.esp" for the classic Natural Weather
-"Storms & Sound.esp" for vanilla weather (no weather mods)

If you have Shivering Isles, activate instead the appropriate esp file ending with the SI tag.

YOU HAVE TO USE JUST ONE ESP, EITHER THE SI ONE OR THE NON-SI ONE.

7. CONFIGURATION:

To get to the configuration menu, start the game and type this in the console:

startquest stormmenu

read carefully and make your choices. You are now able to choose which components of the mod to keep.

8. You're done. The mod is ready!

OMOD VERSION:

There is now an omod version for OBMM users, with a wonderful installation script by Ismelda Lasombra.

TO TRY THIS MOD RIGHT AWAY:

Go to the console and type

startquest stormtest

After you've seen the lightning try to enter a cave or house or any interior to hear the storm resound in all its glory!

COMPATIBILITY:

Incompatible with Sunlit Interiors and all thunder and lightning related mods.
This mod changes the Darkness & Shock Damage magic effects. Thus it may potentially conflict with any other mod tweaking Darkness or Shock.
Natural Interiors has a compatibility version for weather inside which works with this mod also.
IMPORTANT: load after MightyMagic

ISSUES:

-If you are having audio issues such as glitching or sounds being cut off, try this setting in your Oblivion.ini file (located in My Documents\My Games\Oblivion): iMaxImpactSoundCount=64 (default 32)

-This mod changes the Light, Darkness & Shock Damage magic effects. It will cause noticeable visual changes to spells using Shock damage. The spell effect gets different, I tried to find a compromise so I think it is quite interesting to see even in its new version. Try to cast a shock spell and judge for yourself anyway.

-Two methods were used to create lightning "flashes". The first method, only for flashes from distant and sky lightning, quickly loads and unloads a new weather system, which is a relatively extreme method. As a result, during each of these flashes some systems will experience FPS loss & rain glitches, however each flash only lasts for a fraction of a second.

-The second "flash" method is used for close lightning strikes, and now works without modifying the light effect. Looks quite better too, if I may say so myself.

RECENT HISTORY:

3.0: lilith added full inside sounds to Shivering Isles. Added new options to enable/disable all visual and sound effects added by the mod. Added an Obse version compatible with all past and future weather mods. Added non-Obse versions for compatibility with Arthur's natural weather and Enhanced weather. Plus some small bug fixes and tweaks.

2.9: Got rid of the annoying icon appearing when lightning strikes. Made the script lighter when there is no storm. Removed modifications to the light effect since it is no longer used by the mod. Fixed some small bug inherited by weather inside, mostly misplaced sound activators.

2.7: Fixed a bug someone was having with storms being too short: now no storm should last less than 3 minutes (real time).

2.6: I made a mistake with the AWS esp, please don't use this version.

CREDITS AND THANKS:

PsychEroc, vine & Morbus, authors of the original mods. They have done most of the work here, so all props to them.

The authors of all those great weather mods.

EnTropiA, Triton and Skycaptain for great help on the official forums (sorry if I'm forgetting somebody).

Ismelda Lasombra for the omod version script.

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This is an old video, the latest version is quite different but I wanted to test out the Youtube functionality :).
The small icon appearing on lightning strike is forever gone.