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About this mod
The first weather mod optimised for stealth detection balance. Performance friendly. 1100+ hours of work.
- Requirements
- Permissions and credits
Using a 10 year old potato gaming PC ? Using Intel HD graphics? No problem. If you can run Skyrim, you can run RAID Weathers!
Introduction:
RAID Weathers is the first weather mod specifically optimised for stealth and combat detection balance. It is based on ELFX Weathers, but the visuals have been heavily overhauled. Performance friendly. 1100+ hours of work.
This is a backport to LE of my SSE RAID Weathers mod. The visuals are virtually identical to the SSE version, but further enhanced by separate depth-of-field settings for each type of weather - which LE supports while SSE does not (an advantage LE has over SSE), so the heavy fogs look even more epic than in SSE.
Screenshots and video note:
The pictures and video were taken on a mostly vanilla setup. No ENB or high-def texture/asset mods were used.
Here's a short video of some rain, snow, fog, and ash weathers in action:
(sorry, no weather audio, I'm no video expert and couldn't fix an audio sync issue. Hopefully others can make a better video)
Features:
- A consistent and understated vibrant look. A compromise between "high fantasy" and "realism".
- Dark nights (rain storms at night are *nearly* pitch black, but clear and aurora nights are not as dark).
- Uniquely optimised for detection balance. What you see = what enemies see. Darkness and bad weather realistically affect sneaking.
- Very performance friendly - optimised for use without ENBs (but you can use one if you want). All ELFX rain fps issues have been fixed.
- Improved rain/snow/fog weathers, and also added new extra-powerful storm variants, and super-extra-heavy fog variants.
- Adjusted weather probabilities for each region, for better variation, with slightly higher chance of rain, fog, and storm variants.
- Increased frequency of weather changes to every ~10 ingame hours (vanilla was about ~18 hours).
- Greatly reduced vanilla Skyrim's laggy and exaggerated eye-adaptation effects. This also enhances thunder flash visuals.
- Includes semi-realistic custom star and galaxy textures.
- Covers Skyrim and DLC weather.
A few examples of other technical/visual features (many of these are rarely found in other weather mods):
- implemented a basic rotation of mild weathers that are automatically used for most new lands mods if they don't have a weather system
- fixed a vanilla "bug" where stormy weather had a high chance to stay with you even when fast-travelling across the whole of Skyrim
- thunder flashes correctly illuminate the whole scene, instead of mostly just grass (a bug in some weather mods that make nights darker)
- minimised the ugly horizon seams
- the color of an aurora at night subtly affects the tint color of other elements in the scene (like snow, waterfalls, clouds, etc)
- optimised particle "effect lighting" values for vanilla, "Water Effects Brightness and Reflection Fix", and "Bright Waterfall Fix for ENB" users
- optimised "water multiplier" values to avoid glowing lakes/rivers at night
- optimised grass color and brightness for all weathers (no more odd colors or glowing grass at night)
- optimised Z+ axis DALC (ceiling ambient lighting) values for all weathers
Detection balance:
This is the first weather mod that has been systematically optimised for detection balance. This means what you can see is the same as what enemies can see. Darkness consistently affects detection visibility. The effect bad weather (rain/snow/fog) has on visibility is also fully simulated - both it's presence and it's intensity (if a snow storm blinds you, it blinds enemies too). Even differences in biomes are simulated - for example, it is easier to see someone at night in a snow covered environment than at night in a green forest.
While not perfect, this greatly improves sneak gameplay balance over vanilla and other weather mods.
This was helped by my experience gained making the "Realistic AI Detection" mod. JonnyWang13 also helped by testing which weather and imagespace properties control the detection light level - we now know that only the "sunlight" and "ambient" (grass color) weather properties and the "sunlight scale" imagespace properties affect light levels. I realised by carefully tweaking the ratios of these three properties while also adjusting DALC (directional ambient light), cinematic, tint, and other settings, it is possible to optimise a weather's detection balance, while only minimally compromising it's visual appearance. But this is very tedious hard work.
Also, none of this would have been possible without anamorfus who made the original Legendary Edition version of ELFX Weathers, on which this weather mod is built. The original ELFX Weathers already had great visuals and good detection balance, providing me with the ideal starting point. I would not have been able to make a weather mod like this from scratch. This project took me 1100+ hours, and that's on top of the huge amount of time anamorfus put into it.
Compatibility:
RAID Weathers must load below any mods that edit weather or imagespace records. LOOT often sorts it wrong - if in doubt put it near the bottom.
Not compatible with other weather mods.
Not compatible with True Storms, but RAID Weathers already has very powerful storms built in.
Compatible with all lighting mods that do not edit the weathers (like ELFX, Relighting Skyrim, ELE, RLO, etc).
RAID Weathers must load below ELFX Enhancer and ELFX Hardcore to overwrite wild weather edits in those plugins.
"Audio Overhaul for Skyrim 2" - a patch is provided.
Compatible with new lands mods. RAID Weathers will not affect custom weathers in those mods, but will replace any vanilla weathers used by them.
Not compatible with "no bloom" and "no HDR" mods (RAID Weathers already has relatively low levels of bloom, and nearly no laggy HDR effects anyway).
Installation:
Install the main plugin as normal. I recommend using a mod manager like MO2 or Vortex.
If you use ELFX Enhancer/Hardcore, make sure to load RAID Weathers below it. LOOT often sorts it wrong.
Uninstall:
This mod is script free and safe to uninstall at any time.
Recommended gameplay mods to go with this:
(optional) My "Realistic AI Detection" mod - optional but highly recommended. The "high" exterior version works best.
(optional) My "Realistic Torch Light" mod - goes very well with the darker nights.
(optional) "Predator Vision" - to replace the useless vanilla night-eye power.
ENB Presets:
RAID Weathers is designed to look great without an ENB (I don't use one), but you can use ENB if you want, and many will not interfere too much with the detection balance as long as they don't make the nights darker.
Optimal Setup (optional):
You can use RAID Weathers with any other setup you want. You can also use it without a detection mod and still get good (but easy) sneak balance.
You can even use nearly any ENB that does not darken nights, and get good detection balance, as RAID Weathers is doing the heavy lifting for that.
The above optional “trifecta” just shows you how to get the very best gameplay balance if that is your priority.
FAQ:
Q1: Its too dark at night. I can't see anything. Its basically pitch black, even during clear nights. Is this normal?
A: No. None of the nights are pitch black. Clear nights are far from pitch black. If you can't see clearly during a clear night, something is wrong with your setup, not this weather mod. Possible causes:
1. It could be a load order or mod conflict. Test with this mod at the bottom of your load order. If its not that, test with no other mods active.
2. Do you have an ENB or ReShade that is making the nights too dark?
3. The ingame brightness slider should be set to the middle neutral position.
4. Do you have custom ini settings that may be messing with brightness?
5. Check your graphics card and monitor settings. Make sure dynamic range is set to "full" (0-255) for your monitor in your graphics control panel.
6. Are you using bad screen dimming software (like the one built into Windows)? If so, try the much better "Twinkle Tray" app that supports DDC/CI.
7. Your monitor may be exhibiting "black crush" - it is failing to render the difference between black and dark colors. This is either due to an unsuitable viewing environment (like sunlight or bright lights causing excessive screen reflections), or a problem with the monitor. If its the monitor itself, proper calibration may solve it. If that does not work, it likely means your monitor is just bad at displaying dark scenes - common among many budget IPS panels from manufacturers like LG - they tend to have bad IPS glow, bad factory calibration, and deliberate bad "black crush" as a cheap trick to artificially enhance the panel's contrast rating (speaking from personal experience).
Old cheap TN panels are often better in this regard.
VR users also don't have these problems, because the displays tend to be high quality, and there is zero ambient light interference.
If you discover what was causing the problem for you, please report back here, as it may help other users with the same problem.
Q2: Night vision does not work with this weather mod. Is there a fix?
A: Vanilla night vision has always been useless. Get the "Predator Vision" mod which works perfectly with the new dark nights.
Q3: There is visible color banding in a few of the weathers, particularly light rain at night. Is this normal?
A: Unfortunately yes. This is a limitation of Oldrim, which does not have 64-bit render targets like SSE does (which would fix color banding). Many other Oldrim weather mods also have this problem to varying extents. A few of the very dark rainy nights in RAID Weathers make the color banding more noticeable than in most other weathers in the mod. I have done what I can to minimise this problem, but it is not possible to eliminate (other than to make nights much brighter like in vanilla).
Q4: Could these detection balance optimisations be added to other weather mods?
A: No. It is not possible to simply "copy-paste" these settings into other weather mods - if you did that in xEdit, it would likely make things worse. To properly optimise another weather mod would require an extensive overhaul of many settings by hand, and possibly changes to visual appearance (as the detection properties are tied into essential visual settings) - easily 100s of hours of work.
Q5: Its so hard to find heavy cotton corduroy triple-pleated low-waist loose-fit trousers new anywhere! I don't want today's fast-fashion slim-fit rubbish!
A: I know... These are troubled times.
Credits:
mod by Olivier Doorenbos
built on ELFX Weathers by anamorfus
night star and galaxy textures - from Lorkhan's Vision by Doubloonz, and modified by Olivier Doorenbos
fxcameraattachfog.nif - from "no more blinding fog" by wSkeever
xEdit team (this weather mod was made entirely in xEdit, not CK)
JonnyWang13, for the light formula info, and their weather creation guide which was a useful reference for things like cloud layer identification
All DP earned go to the Doctors without borders charity. God bless!
Introduction:
RAID Weathers is the first weather mod specifically optimised for stealth and combat detection balance. It is based on ELFX Weathers, but the visuals have been heavily overhauled. Performance friendly. 1100+ hours of work.
This is a backport to LE of my SSE RAID Weathers mod. The visuals are virtually identical to the SSE version, but further enhanced by separate depth-of-field settings for each type of weather - which LE supports while SSE does not (an advantage LE has over SSE), so the heavy fogs look even more epic than in SSE.
Screenshots and video note:
The pictures and video were taken on a mostly vanilla setup. No ENB or high-def texture/asset mods were used.
Here's a short video of some rain, snow, fog, and ash weathers in action:
(sorry, no weather audio, I'm no video expert and couldn't fix an audio sync issue. Hopefully others can make a better video)
Features:
- A consistent and understated vibrant look. A compromise between "high fantasy" and "realism".
- Dark nights (rain storms at night are *nearly* pitch black, but clear and aurora nights are not as dark).
- Uniquely optimised for detection balance. What you see = what enemies see. Darkness and bad weather realistically affect sneaking.
- Very performance friendly - optimised for use without ENBs (but you can use one if you want). All ELFX rain fps issues have been fixed.
- Improved rain/snow/fog weathers, and also added new extra-powerful storm variants, and super-extra-heavy fog variants.
- Adjusted weather probabilities for each region, for better variation, with slightly higher chance of rain, fog, and storm variants.
- Increased frequency of weather changes to every ~10 ingame hours (vanilla was about ~18 hours).
- Greatly reduced vanilla Skyrim's laggy and exaggerated eye-adaptation effects. This also enhances thunder flash visuals.
- Includes semi-realistic custom star and galaxy textures.
- Covers Skyrim and DLC weather.
A few examples of other technical/visual features (many of these are rarely found in other weather mods):
- implemented a basic rotation of mild weathers that are automatically used for most new lands mods if they don't have a weather system
- fixed a vanilla "bug" where stormy weather had a high chance to stay with you even when fast-travelling across the whole of Skyrim
- thunder flashes correctly illuminate the whole scene, instead of mostly just grass (a bug in some weather mods that make nights darker)
- minimised the ugly horizon seams
- the color of an aurora at night subtly affects the tint color of other elements in the scene (like snow, waterfalls, clouds, etc)
- optimised particle "effect lighting" values for vanilla, "Water Effects Brightness and Reflection Fix", and "Bright Waterfall Fix for ENB" users
- optimised "water multiplier" values to avoid glowing lakes/rivers at night
- optimised grass color and brightness for all weathers (no more odd colors or glowing grass at night)
- optimised Z+ axis DALC (ceiling ambient lighting) values for all weathers
Detection balance:
This is the first weather mod that has been systematically optimised for detection balance. This means what you can see is the same as what enemies can see. Darkness consistently affects detection visibility. The effect bad weather (rain/snow/fog) has on visibility is also fully simulated - both it's presence and it's intensity (if a snow storm blinds you, it blinds enemies too). Even differences in biomes are simulated - for example, it is easier to see someone at night in a snow covered environment than at night in a green forest.
While not perfect, this greatly improves sneak gameplay balance over vanilla and other weather mods.
This was helped by my experience gained making the "Realistic AI Detection" mod. JonnyWang13 also helped by testing which weather and imagespace properties control the detection light level - we now know that only the "sunlight" and "ambient" (grass color) weather properties and the "sunlight scale" imagespace properties affect light levels. I realised by carefully tweaking the ratios of these three properties while also adjusting DALC (directional ambient light), cinematic, tint, and other settings, it is possible to optimise a weather's detection balance, while only minimally compromising it's visual appearance. But this is very tedious hard work.
Also, none of this would have been possible without anamorfus who made the original Legendary Edition version of ELFX Weathers, on which this weather mod is built. The original ELFX Weathers already had great visuals and good detection balance, providing me with the ideal starting point. I would not have been able to make a weather mod like this from scratch. This project took me 1100+ hours, and that's on top of the huge amount of time anamorfus put into it.
Compatibility:
RAID Weathers must load below any mods that edit weather or imagespace records. LOOT often sorts it wrong - if in doubt put it near the bottom.
Not compatible with other weather mods.
Not compatible with True Storms, but RAID Weathers already has very powerful storms built in.
Compatible with all lighting mods that do not edit the weathers (like ELFX, Relighting Skyrim, ELE, RLO, etc).
RAID Weathers must load below ELFX Enhancer and ELFX Hardcore to overwrite wild weather edits in those plugins.
"Audio Overhaul for Skyrim 2" - a patch is provided.
Compatible with new lands mods. RAID Weathers will not affect custom weathers in those mods, but will replace any vanilla weathers used by them.
Not compatible with "no bloom" and "no HDR" mods (RAID Weathers already has relatively low levels of bloom, and nearly no laggy HDR effects anyway).
Installation:
Install the main plugin as normal. I recommend using a mod manager like MO2 or Vortex.
If you use ELFX Enhancer/Hardcore, make sure to load RAID Weathers below it. LOOT often sorts it wrong.
Uninstall:
This mod is script free and safe to uninstall at any time.
Recommended gameplay mods to go with this:
(optional) My "Realistic AI Detection" mod - optional but highly recommended. The "high" exterior version works best.
(optional) My "Realistic Torch Light" mod - goes very well with the darker nights.
(optional) "Predator Vision" - to replace the useless vanilla night-eye power.
ENB Presets:
RAID Weathers is designed to look great without an ENB (I don't use one), but you can use ENB if you want, and many will not interfere too much with the detection balance as long as they don't make the nights darker.
Optimal Setup (optional):
You can even use nearly any ENB that does not darken nights, and get good detection balance, as RAID Weathers is doing the heavy lifting for that.
The above optional “trifecta” just shows you how to get the very best gameplay balance if that is your priority.
FAQ:
Q1: Its too dark at night. I can't see anything. Its basically pitch black, even during clear nights. Is this normal?
A: No. None of the nights are pitch black. Clear nights are far from pitch black. If you can't see clearly during a clear night, something is wrong with your setup, not this weather mod. Possible causes:
1. It could be a load order or mod conflict. Test with this mod at the bottom of your load order. If its not that, test with no other mods active.
2. Do you have an ENB or ReShade that is making the nights too dark?
3. The ingame brightness slider should be set to the middle neutral position.
4. Do you have custom ini settings that may be messing with brightness?
5. Check your graphics card and monitor settings. Make sure dynamic range is set to "full" (0-255) for your monitor in your graphics control panel.
6. Are you using bad screen dimming software (like the one built into Windows)? If so, try the much better "Twinkle Tray" app that supports DDC/CI.
7. Your monitor may be exhibiting "black crush" - it is failing to render the difference between black and dark colors. This is either due to an unsuitable viewing environment (like sunlight or bright lights causing excessive screen reflections), or a problem with the monitor. If its the monitor itself, proper calibration may solve it. If that does not work, it likely means your monitor is just bad at displaying dark scenes - common among many budget IPS panels from manufacturers like LG - they tend to have bad IPS glow, bad factory calibration, and deliberate bad "black crush" as a cheap trick to artificially enhance the panel's contrast rating (speaking from personal experience).
Old cheap TN panels are often better in this regard.
VR users also don't have these problems, because the displays tend to be high quality, and there is zero ambient light interference.
If you discover what was causing the problem for you, please report back here, as it may help other users with the same problem.
Q2: Night vision does not work with this weather mod. Is there a fix?
A: Vanilla night vision has always been useless. Get the "Predator Vision" mod which works perfectly with the new dark nights.
Q3: There is visible color banding in a few of the weathers, particularly light rain at night. Is this normal?
A: Unfortunately yes. This is a limitation of Oldrim, which does not have 64-bit render targets like SSE does (which would fix color banding). Many other Oldrim weather mods also have this problem to varying extents. A few of the very dark rainy nights in RAID Weathers make the color banding more noticeable than in most other weathers in the mod. I have done what I can to minimise this problem, but it is not possible to eliminate (other than to make nights much brighter like in vanilla).
Q4: Could these detection balance optimisations be added to other weather mods?
A: No. It is not possible to simply "copy-paste" these settings into other weather mods - if you did that in xEdit, it would likely make things worse. To properly optimise another weather mod would require an extensive overhaul of many settings by hand, and possibly changes to visual appearance (as the detection properties are tied into essential visual settings) - easily 100s of hours of work.
Q5: Its so hard to find heavy cotton corduroy triple-pleated low-waist loose-fit trousers new anywhere! I don't want today's fast-fashion slim-fit rubbish!
A: I know... These are troubled times.
Credits:
mod by Olivier Doorenbos
built on ELFX Weathers by anamorfus
night star and galaxy textures - from Lorkhan's Vision by Doubloonz, and modified by Olivier Doorenbos
fxcameraattachfog.nif - from "no more blinding fog" by wSkeever
xEdit team (this weather mod was made entirely in xEdit, not CK)
JonnyWang13, for the light formula info, and their weather creation guide which was a useful reference for things like cloud layer identification
All DP earned go to the Doctors without borders charity. God bless!