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About this mod
The ridiculously aggressive default brightness and exposure system of the game makes even Ray Tracing NOT ABLE TO DISPLAY ANY CORRECT LIGHTING behavior. This mod rebalances the default lighting system
- Requirements
- Permissions and credits
please watch the videos directly on youtube because here on nexus is VERY blurry
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WHY THIS MOD
...because What's the point of implementing the best Ray Tracing in the world to display REAL lighting, only to ruin that purpose with FAKE brightness and exposure systems underneath??
This way we end up with incorrect, weird and unnatural lighting behavior...
To give you an example: vanilla lighting system is like if you look at the world through your mobile phone camera, try it and you will understand what I mean.
Basically the camera brightens dark areas and darkens bright areas, but this means you will always have the same level of brightness everywhere you look, which is already totally unnatural, and on top of that when it brightens a dark area it overexposes already bright areas making them blindingly white, and when it darkens some bright lights, at the same time it darkens already dark areas making them ridiculously black .....and also gives wrong tones and colors because of that
Real life lighting is nothing like looking through a mobile phone camera
WHAT DOES THE MOD DO
<> Realistic brightness levels, so areas that should be dark are now actually dark, and brighter areas like exteriors during sunny weather are very bright, as they should, without the "nauseating" vanilla auto-exposure (that constantly brightens dark areas and darkens bright areas, at the point that every area always has the same level of brightness, no matter if interior, exterior, day, night, tunnel, sunny, rainy....) for example in vanilla, even areas like tunnels and some interior buildings that should be very dark, are instead bright exactly like exterior areas...
<> Real nights with real lights, nights without lights around you can get very dark, and interior areas too, also Cyberpunk is a very dark and mature type of experience, so why should everywhere be ALWAYS clearly visible? If there is no light sources, an area is very dark... Flashlight mod or night vision is highly suggested,
NOTE: Activating "Path Tracing" ( but also with Raytracing on Ultra) makes a noticeable difference with the mod, because it displays real lights, noticeable especially at night, while with normal Ray Tracing lights are not bright enough, and without any Ray Tracing nights quite darker unfortunately, so I also made a brighter nights version, but I FISRT SUGGEST TRYING A DIFFERENT LUT, they can brighten interiors and nights, or the opposite if it has too contrast and black tones
<> More difference between each weather, for example "sunny" is more sunny and exposed (in desert areas type like Night City is set in, the sun is blinding bright and has a deeper blue sky), "heavy clouds" is darker, "foggy" feels colder and bright , "cloudy" has less contrast, "heavy rain" is darker....
"TECHNICAL" EXPLANATION OF THE MOD AND LIGHTING SYSTEM
By default (developer choice to achieve lighting depth) the brightest areas of the game are brightened even more( to the point of overexposed bleach) and the darkest areas of the game are darkened even more( to basically total black), just to use the auto-exposure effect so they can flash our eyes when we transition from one area to the other( for example like when you exit from somewhere).
Problem is shadow areas become ridiculously dark and lit areas become just white bloom, and when you slightly move the camera the frenzy auto-exposure instantly inverts this process, this makes the lighting so FAKE that not even Raytracing ( which has the purpose of displaying REAL lighting), can deal with such a mess, and we end up with wrong and very UNSTABLE lighting system.....
This mod balances that ( kind of, because the crazy contrast I explained before is hardcoded, so even with the mod active shadow areas are still too dark and bright areas too bright...) by lowering the max. exposure of bleached areas and raising the min. exposure of total black areas, this way I can allow the auto-exposure activity only when strictly needed, and slowing it down significantly to not feel nauseating, this way Raytracing can actually display correct NATURAL lighting (almost)
INSTALLATION
download and extract the mod, then put the "archive" folder directly in the Cyberpunk main game folder.
so you will have : "main_env.archive" and "weathers_env.archive" inside "mod" folder that's inside "pc" folder that's inside "archive" folder that's inside "Cyberpunk" main folder