WHAT IT DOES

It makes your eyes naturally behave like the Friend Of The Night perk in New Vegas does, i.e., see better in low light conditions (i.e., at night and indoors.) It is also scripted to be a general purpose image improvement effect, both at night and during the day, without the performance penalty of ENB. In fact, it should have no performance impact at all.

So what it does is:

- Improve colour saturation in all lighting conditions

- Improve contrast in all lighting conditions

- Improve lighting range in all lighting conditions

- Actually work indoors during the day (the NV FOTN perk only activates from 8:15 PM to 5:45 AM even indoors, which I found beyond stupid. If my eyes can adapt in a bunker, then they can adapt at any hour)

- Actually brighten the image indoors (the NV FOTN made some dark spots even darker indoors)

- Not tint the image green-ish, like the NV FOTN did

- Includes 2 intermediate steps between day and night, to better cover the large but gradual changes in lighting during sunset and sunrise with Fellout installed. (Basically you don't just have an abrupt transition between "I can't see a bloody thing" and "oh, it's bright now" at 8 PM.)

And most importantly: it's automatically on. It does NOT need you to take any perk.

NOTE 1: This mod is calibrated for Fellout, which is to say, it brightens nights a bit more than the NV version, while not brightening days. You may want to get Fellout too, to get the results from the screenshots.

NOTE 2: This mod only affects what YOU see. Think of it as some unique mutation YOU acquired from some radioactive puddle. It will not make the nights brighter for anyone else. I.e., it won't affect your sneaking, nor how well your companions aim in the dark, etc. If a dark and stormy Fellout night was dark enough for you to sneak and backstab a raider outside, as far as the raider is concerned, it will still be just as dark with this mod active.


KNOWN ISSUES

All of these stem from this having no clue how bright a spot actually is, and only basing it on hour and whether it's inside or outside. I don't consider them actual problems, but just so you know what you're getting.

1. Some indoors places that were fairly well lit to start with, such as your room in Vault 101, will also get the indoors night boost and be even better lit. Which may actually be more realistic than half the vault being dark, not to mention more in-line with the Fallout 1 and Fallout 2 lore.

If that bothers you, just don't activate the mod until you leave the vault.

2. While mostly intended to make nights seem brighter, it CAN have the opposite effect of making dark places a little darker in day time, on a particularly overcast Fellout day. That's what increasing lighting range and contrast does: bright spots get brighter, and dark spots in the shade get slightly darker. It should still be possible to see there though.

Worst case scenario, if you run into some place where it bothers you, you can always just wait until 6 PM when your night sight starts to kick in a little, or 8 PM when you have it completely on. Again, it shouldn't be necessary, but there you go.


WHICH VERSION TO GET

There is a huge difference in light level at night between the unmodded game, and Fellout pitch-black nights, and to make it worse there are also mods which make the nights somewhere in between. So there's no way a single version of this mod would fit all those. So first of all you must make the choice of exactly what kind of nights are you trying to see in:

A. Fellout Nights. (You use only the standard Fellout, which is to say nights are nearly perfect black.)

B. Half-Night (You use mods that set the nights roughly half-way between vanilla and Fellout. Mods that add street lights are also a good candidate for this level.)

C. Normal Nights (Either you don't use Fellout, or restored its nights to vanilla.)

Each of those comes in a normal version, which means you can see at that particular kind of night, but it's not exactly daylight either, or brighter, which means you should be able to see pretty well.

More exactly, the difference between mod versions is just how much light they add to the scene. On a scale of 1 to 10 of how much light they add, it's kinda like this:

1. Normal Nights, normal night vision.
2. Normal Nights, bright night vision.
4. Half-Nights, normal night vision.
5. Half-Nights, bright night vision.
8. Fellout Nights, normal night vision.
10. Fellout Nights, bright night vision.

Why this matters is that there isn't some hard requirements of which version to use with which mod. If you picked a version and it's too bright for you, pick the next one down, as amplification level goes. E.g., if the Fellout Nights Normal version is a bit too bright, try the Half-Nigts Bright version instead. Conversely, if the one you picked is too dark, try the next one up.


REQUIREMENTS

None.

You may however want to get Fellout, since this mod was calibrated for it. And if nothing else, to get rid of the stupid green-tint of the sky. But the mod itself will work without Fellout just the same.


HOW TO GET IT

There is nothing to get. The hidden "Friend Of The Night" script in this one will start automatically as soon as you load the game.


HOW TO INSTALL IT

Extract the archive, with directories, in your game's "Data" folder. Select it in the list of plugin files in the launcher.


HOW TO UNINSTALL IT

Delete the .esp file from your Data directory.


CONFLICTS

It should be compatible with everything, including other image improvement mods. (Beats me why would you want to run both, though.)


LICENSE

I release it in the public domain. You can do anything you wish with it. I would, of course, appreciate it if you give credit, but if not, so be it, I can live with that too.


VERSION HISTORY

1.01:
Actually calibrated it for Fellout nights (turns out I had a brighter nights version when testing 1.0)

1.0:
First Fallout 3 Release