GameBanshee Forums

I've recently purchased an NVDIA GeForce 9600 GT. Playing Oblivion, I find that the Bloom setting gives me an ink-black sky at night, with a sharp border into one-shaded blue mountains. This shouldn't be--especially since I have view max'd out on my new dual core CPU. The problem even occurs during some days.

With HDR I get incredible night skies, but have to put up with typical glare. I'd rather run Bloom, but all the INI settings I've tried in Oblivion haven't made a bit of difference. Any useful ideas?

Have you made any modifications to Oblivion's ini files?

Have you installed mods that altered lightening?

Tricky wrote:Have you made any modifications to Oblivion's ini files?

Have you installed mods that altered lightening?

I've tried many INI modifications, to see if I can remedy the problem: no dice. And I have no mods affecting lighting save Texian's, which replaces window textures during nighttime hours. It's completely static, and doesn't truly affect lighting. It's more a matter of coloration.

Hmm, can you provide a screenshot of exactly what you're referring to?

I've not heard of a problem like this but maybe I've seen it before somewhere or another.

Odd--grabbed several screens after turning it on in the INI file, or tried to. But no screens were actually taken. This is getting stranger and stranger.

Here's the deal with Bloom. Simply put, HDR takes into account lightening. Bloom only takes into account color and treats black as such. If you would hold a totally black object in front of a not particularly brightly lit sky, you would see a sort of black bloom around it if you looked closely.

Add that to mods like 'darker nights' and such. They change the base color values of ambient light. If memory serves, darker nights also adds a darker sky texture with perhaps finer, speckier stars? It could have been another mod that did that, but I didn't use too many.

Anyway, I think you might have just crossed some point where the black simply outshines the gradients of the night sky. Including the stars. You might go through the oblivion ini and find the setting that controls the color of the night sky (or ambient light during night time), find a color value that is less dark.

Tricky wrote:Here's the deal with Bloom. Simply put, HDR takes into account lightening. Bloom only takes into account color, and treats black as such. If you would hold a totally black object in front of a brightly lit sky, you would see a sort of black bloom around it if you looked closely.

Add that to mods like 'darker nights' and such. They change the base color values of ambient light. If memory serves, darker nights also adds a darker sky texture with perhaps finer, speckier stars? It could have been another mod that did that, but I didn't use too many.

Anyway, I think you might have just crossed some point where the black simply outshines the gradients of the night sky. Including the stars. You might go through the oblivion ini and find the setting that controls the color of the night sky, find a color value that is less dark.

I hear what you're saying, except that I'm not using such a mod. Texian's doesn't change light, it only changes window color. I've tried changing the settings controlling the color and light of the sky--with no results.

Only tweak that might be affecting matters is bAllow30Shaders. Since my video card does support 3.0 Shaders, it shouldn't have caused any bad effects, but I suppose I could try reversing it.

EDIT: That was the problem. It was a tweak I've seen recommended all over the place, and all the evidence points to its working just fine. So it did, with HDR, but not Bloom. Reverting to bAllow30Shaders=0 restored the skies.

Thanks, in any case.

Mods like that don't usually change the ini as well anyway. I've seen programs, scripts that can rewrite part of the ini to take into account new color values, but not like that.

You could try FakeHDR if nothing works. It's a dll mod that changes HDR to work a little like Bloom. You can still FSAA with that I think.

Edit: too late, that's what I get for chatting during writing forum posts.