Give Feedback
0 of 0
File information
Created by
CATACHR1SMUploaded by
CATACHR1SMVirus scan
Some manually verified files
About this mod
This mod restores dynamic lighting to Mass Effect 1 that was lost in the LE update. It aims to produce the best of both worlds visually between LE and OT. It's mostly lighting, but also contains a handful of bug fixes, cinematic fixes, and optional postprocessing updates (bloom, motion blur and film grain).
- Requirements
- Permissions and credits
- Changelogs
- Donations
This mod is better with LEUITM
Welcome to:
I made this mod because I was really let down when I saw LE in action, it looked great and also not great. And after a little close observation I could tell it was the lighting that was bothering me and after the wards scene in front of the Citadel window, the quest to make this mod began.
This mod restores the dynamic lighting to Mass Effect 1 that was lost in the LE update. It aims to produce the best of both worlds, visually maintaining the updated bells and whistles of the new engine, while restoring much of the cinematic look and feel of the OT version and generally making LE seem less flat/washed out in the lighting. Eden Prime and Feros are not overhauled artistically in that they still look like LE versions, they just have functional dynamic lights now. Noveria, Ilos, and the end stage Citadel are fairly overhauled and resemble the OT a bit more than they do LE.
There are customization options provided for various post processing combinations from all to none, note installing this mod will update the bugs and lighting of the game even if you choose none. Postprocessing in this case refers to bloom, motion blur, and film grain changes specifically. All changes are in engine, so no re-shade presets or anything like that with this mod. The mod is mostly lighting but it also contains a handful of bug fixes, cinematic fixes, and postprocessing restoration/enhancement (color curve, bloom, motion blur and film grain).
The mod was a bit masochistic to make, but I'm okay with that :P. But because of this, it took forever to make, as some of you will be aware if you have followed any Discord progress shots and updates over the past year. And due to the time consuming nature of making the mod, updates to the mod will likely be fairly spread out (unless a quick bug fix). Hundreds and hundreds of lights have been adjusted and reconfigured in some places moved. Hundreds of meshes (characters, static, and dynamic) have had lighting parameters edited to properly catch light and cast shadows etc.... Event sequences have been updated to trigger or not trigger lights appropriately in conversations.
This mod is not fully complete but it's in a state where most of the game is covered and it's representative in it's current state. I will update as I make more progress.
What is covered so far:
Bug and Cinematic Fixes:
On the to do list is:
This mod is already compatible with the Community Patch
Well, I don't know for certain. But here is my educated guess based both on game dev work I have done and also my anecdotal experience making this mod:
I hope you enjoy! Happy modding and Happy Mass Effecting!
Special thanks to MGamerz for being a wizard and helping me get this thing installable.
Special thanks to Audemus for support, bug hunting, testing, and pushing me to fix more vanilla bugs :D
Welcome to:
ME¹LLO
(Mass Effect 1 Legendary Lighting Overhaul)
Install with ME3Tweaks Mod Manager
(Mass Effect 1 Legendary Lighting Overhaul)
Install with ME3Tweaks Mod Manager
**NOTE**
This mod has no direct relation or interference with ISL mod from ALOT. That is a texture mod. This mod is real-time lights and lighting. One does not replace the other.
This mod has no direct relation or interference with ISL mod from ALOT. That is a texture mod. This mod is real-time lights and lighting. One does not replace the other.
I made this mod because I was really let down when I saw LE in action, it looked great and also not great. And after a little close observation I could tell it was the lighting that was bothering me and after the wards scene in front of the Citadel window, the quest to make this mod began.
This mod restores the dynamic lighting to Mass Effect 1 that was lost in the LE update. It aims to produce the best of both worlds, visually maintaining the updated bells and whistles of the new engine, while restoring much of the cinematic look and feel of the OT version and generally making LE seem less flat/washed out in the lighting. Eden Prime and Feros are not overhauled artistically in that they still look like LE versions, they just have functional dynamic lights now. Noveria, Ilos, and the end stage Citadel are fairly overhauled and resemble the OT a bit more than they do LE.
There are customization options provided for various post processing combinations from all to none, note installing this mod will update the bugs and lighting of the game even if you choose none. Postprocessing in this case refers to bloom, motion blur, and film grain changes specifically. All changes are in engine, so no re-shade presets or anything like that with this mod. The mod is mostly lighting but it also contains a handful of bug fixes, cinematic fixes, and postprocessing restoration/enhancement (color curve, bloom, motion blur and film grain).
The mod was a bit masochistic to make, but I'm okay with that :P. But because of this, it took forever to make, as some of you will be aware if you have followed any Discord progress shots and updates over the past year. And due to the time consuming nature of making the mod, updates to the mod will likely be fairly spread out (unless a quick bug fix). Hundreds and hundreds of lights have been adjusted and reconfigured in some places moved. Hundreds of meshes (characters, static, and dynamic) have had lighting parameters edited to properly catch light and cast shadows etc.... Event sequences have been updated to trigger or not trigger lights appropriately in conversations.
So you get it, this mod restores dynamic light. But what does that mean and why does it matter?
Spoiler:
It means, basically, that when lights hit your character and other characters or vehicle etc... the lights illuminate and cast shadows and your character gets lighter or darker depending on these lights. It's dynamic and changes in real-time in conjunction with any light sources you pass through that are setup for dynamic ligthting. LE often doesn't use them and/or has made them so faint that they aren't noticeable leaving the game looking almost flat and washed out in many scenes. The end result of installing this mod is that with the dynamic light restored the game feels legitimately more 3D/has more depth, more moody due to the nature of shadows, and more like your character is rooted in the environment. Screenshots kind of work to see the effect depending on the scene, but you'll get a much better feel once you see it in motion, so videos and gameplay are the best way to experience the changes.
Show
It means, basically, that when lights hit your character and other characters or vehicle etc... the lights illuminate and cast shadows and your character gets lighter or darker depending on these lights. It's dynamic and changes in real-time in conjunction with any light sources you pass through that are setup for dynamic ligthting. LE often doesn't use them and/or has made them so faint that they aren't noticeable leaving the game looking almost flat and washed out in many scenes. The end result of installing this mod is that with the dynamic light restored the game feels legitimately more 3D/has more depth, more moody due to the nature of shadows, and more like your character is rooted in the environment. Screenshots kind of work to see the effect depending on the scene, but you'll get a much better feel once you see it in motion, so videos and gameplay are the best way to experience the changes.
This mod is not fully complete but it's in a state where most of the game is covered and it's representative in it's current state. I will update as I make more progress.
What is covered so far:
Spoiler:
Show
- Normandy -all- (now including romance scenes)
- EdenPrime -all
- Citadel -all
- Noveria -all
- Therum -all
- Feros (Most)
- Virmire -all
- Ilos - all
- Presidium
- Maintenance Shaft
- Exhaust Plain
- Defense Grid
- Tower
- Agebinium
- Antibaar
- Rayingri
- Trebin
- MSV Ontario
- Sharjila
- Edolus
Bug and Cinematic Fixes:
Spoiler:
Show
- Flickering Normandy when landing on UNC planets fixed
- Joker's lighting in the cockpit scenes at the end of the game will now make sense and be much more consistent.
- Garrus's lighting is fixed when we see him at the medical clinic, not overly dim and no longer flickers.
- Cherry trees properly placed at the med clinic to OT location
- Conversation at the med clinic, the conversation with Dr. Michel will now be lit.
- Conversation with Eddie Lang now has lighting triggered.
- Conversation with Chakwas on the Normandy at her small table is now lit by the lamp on the table.
- Liara on Therum now is lit correctly when you first converse with her without that weird top-down shadow issue.
- Wrex and Fisk scene now working proper with Wrex's shotgun blast, and the scene had dynamic lighting back.
- Saren scene leaving Ilos properly lit and door properly framed (No more orange glow inside the spaceship).
- Mako lighting transitions from shadowed to sunny areas have been smoothed to no longer flicker on and off rapidly when driving through shadowy areas.
- Saren in the end scene is now properly placed on his hover board rather than having his feet clip through into it's base.
- When meeting the Thorian, the scene is now real-time shadowed with the Thorian casting down a dynamic shadow on the crew and avoid the light and dark flickering issue cause by characters leaning in and out of a light zone
- Snow has been restored/storm no longer stops on Antibaar in area with Thresher maw (this was an old performance patch for PS3 OT version from what I can tell?).
- Ilos sound fix where the volume of the deep drum that adds a great sense of suspense, urgency, and awe to the mission has been restored to OT levels.
- Realtime reflections should no longer jitter
- Feros building now cast a shadow on the clouds in a direction that matches the sun.
- Virmire the Salarian troops were not set to the proper lighting channel causing come of them to be flat and others to be lit during the "Hold the line" speech
- Ilos vines material restored to show blue glowing veins.
On the to do list is:
Spoiler:
Show
- Fix nuke explosion on Virmire so that it flashes the screen like in OT - this one is driving me nuts, spent dozens of hours and nada...
- Fix LE's lack of foot prints/footprint glitch
- Fix eye materials - to remove glass doll LE eyes -this can partially be done via texture mod which I will release as part of LIEUITM in the near future.
- Finish off side planets internal levels and real-time lights (post already configured and lighting already generally improved- but can be better with manual work)
- Fix any bugs that arise or that I have missed
- Any touch ups necessary
For Mod Creators
This mod is huge, it has a very low load order just above the community patch, so there will be file overlap with other mods and I apologize for any headaches this causes my fellow modders. I give full permission to modders to patch their files to work with this mod should they want to do so. I have categorized the files in subfolders so you can find the base files that never change and see what they do/why they are needed. These are separated out from the files that have 8 possible variants due to the post processing configuration options (hopefully there is not too much overlap with these files and other mods.)This mod is already compatible with the Community Patch
What the heck happened with the un-modded game and why was this mod even needed to restore dynamic lights?
Well, I don't know for certain. But here is my educated guess based both on game dev work I have done and also my anecdotal experience making this mod:
Spoiler:
Some background, for performance reasons not every light in a game is real-time and/or dynamic. Usually, a smaller sets of specific lights are used for this while the rest are baked into the scene and environment or use cheaper lighting that don't cast shadows etc... The Original Mass Effect had many fully dynamic lights on every stage and really helped make the game look modern at the time, it also is likely one of the main reasons it's performance dipped into the single digit fps often and regularly hung below 30 fps on launch back in 2007. But now in LE instead of many dynamic lights it seems the game relies heavily on 4 or sometimes more, main directional lights that are used throughout the levels. They do not behave fully dynamic, in that they shine through walls ceilings, and other obstructions where lights would normally be occluded. They are essentially acting as ambient light creators. They work great for getting things visible and setting color pallet etc... But they do so in a way that doesn't react to the area your character is in. Because of this they soften the look of the game greatly and illuminate characters even when they should be in shadow, making them flat and washed out. Sometimes they look like they are glowing depending on the scene. This seems to be a trend in remasters in general for the last few years.
These specific far reaching main directional lights, are simply not present in the OT game files. But, if you turn them off in LE and try to use the old lights (most of which are still present) the game is way too dark. This tells me that the update to the newer version/features of Unreal Engine 3 they ported to may have borked the old lights and they needed a fast solution so for production, efficiency of quality vs. deadline and in a way it was an elegant solution. It took me months to get this far and I didn't do the whole game yet, so if there was tight deadline and low manpower (which I think was the case) this would have been impossible.
So long story short, I believe this to be more of a quick fix due to lack of time to properly go in and reconfigure all the real-time lights, but I could be completely wrong and someone just thought it looked better the way LE did it, that case I think there should have been more talk with the original artists since they had created a masterpiece with the tech they had and mad every deliberate decisions artistically with the lighting. pope forget because they are old now, but each one of those games was a cutting edge show cased their tech when they were released. While many post processes, textures, and meshes were technically improved in LE1 over the original game, I don't think lighting is on the list of actual improvements when considering the lack of dynamic lights and shadows throughout the unmodded game.
Show
Some background, for performance reasons not every light in a game is real-time and/or dynamic. Usually, a smaller sets of specific lights are used for this while the rest are baked into the scene and environment or use cheaper lighting that don't cast shadows etc... The Original Mass Effect had many fully dynamic lights on every stage and really helped make the game look modern at the time, it also is likely one of the main reasons it's performance dipped into the single digit fps often and regularly hung below 30 fps on launch back in 2007. But now in LE instead of many dynamic lights it seems the game relies heavily on 4 or sometimes more, main directional lights that are used throughout the levels. They do not behave fully dynamic, in that they shine through walls ceilings, and other obstructions where lights would normally be occluded. They are essentially acting as ambient light creators. They work great for getting things visible and setting color pallet etc... But they do so in a way that doesn't react to the area your character is in. Because of this they soften the look of the game greatly and illuminate characters even when they should be in shadow, making them flat and washed out. Sometimes they look like they are glowing depending on the scene. This seems to be a trend in remasters in general for the last few years.
These specific far reaching main directional lights, are simply not present in the OT game files. But, if you turn them off in LE and try to use the old lights (most of which are still present) the game is way too dark. This tells me that the update to the newer version/features of Unreal Engine 3 they ported to may have borked the old lights and they needed a fast solution so for production, efficiency of quality vs. deadline and in a way it was an elegant solution. It took me months to get this far and I didn't do the whole game yet, so if there was tight deadline and low manpower (which I think was the case) this would have been impossible.
So long story short, I believe this to be more of a quick fix due to lack of time to properly go in and reconfigure all the real-time lights, but I could be completely wrong and someone just thought it looked better the way LE did it, that case I think there should have been more talk with the original artists since they had created a masterpiece with the tech they had and mad every deliberate decisions artistically with the lighting. pope forget because they are old now, but each one of those games was a cutting edge show cased their tech when they were released. While many post processes, textures, and meshes were technically improved in LE1 over the original game, I don't think lighting is on the list of actual improvements when considering the lack of dynamic lights and shadows throughout the unmodded game.
I hope you enjoy! Happy modding and Happy Mass Effecting!
Special thanks to MGamerz for being a wizard and helping me get this thing installable.
Special thanks to Audemus for support, bug hunting, testing, and pushing me to fix more vanilla bugs :D