That could work, using just colour ramps and no weather overrides. That's the way I worked out the correlation between the weather inis and colour ramps. It's just time consuming! I'll try it out as soon as I get time, thanks!

Especially since, I've been plagued by a bug for the last few game versions that I'm sure I wasn't seeing before. Namely, when I put some new weather ini files into a custom world, they work at first but then when I reload the game and reload the save, the sky is just blank with no clouds. I can see the colour ramps okay, and the other parameters like weather randomization interval work too, but just not the clouds/ fog settings. I get the basegame 'clear' sky.

The only way to make it work again is to save, exit to main manu and reload. Then, when I reboot the game, it happens again. Is anyone else noticing this? It makes testing out a new cloud/ fog type very frustrating!

Ok I am having a couple of problems:

I can't seem to add heat shimmer to any non-egypt stock INI's that I'd like to edit... I loaded Appaloosa and if I pasted in heat shimmer, I had a crash on attempt to load in game.

The other problem I'm having is that whenever I edit the color ramps, whether the 2 for egypt or the four that's AP's to test out, I'm getting very bizarre color/lighting issues. All I'm doing is tweaking hue one way or the other, and maybe one try I tweaked saturation, and I did not alter ANYthing else in the INI files, I just changed up the ramps with a hue tweak- the result was that I had what seemed like a full day's cycle of light to dark every few hours, and when I'd just nudged the egypt ramps' hue, for this example, a TINY bit towards a more greenish orange/yellow (with absolutely no changes to saturation, contrast, or anything else), I wound up with a world that a raver would wince at:




Now, I just re-opened the .dds in Photoshop, and am wondering if the problem is that I didn't save these ramps properly, because it has extra bits to it that the ones I altered did not. (am including them as .zip)

Bakafox- see post #43 and post # 3:


How ironic that no-one read my post about me complaining how no-one reads my posts!

Whoops. Wow I totally did just somehow miss that. *feels extra baka*

It made me laugh! You know I'm only kidding, I don't really mind, I do tend to write a lot at once, so probably people fall asleep by the end of the post.

Let me know if it works though, perhaps that was why you were getting the very vivid colours. If you have the alpha setting right then the colours shoud look toned down somewhat.

I'm not seeing that exact wording as an option with the PhotoShop plugin-

I'm guessing that the # and then bpp means the bit number/rate, there's nothing that says A8R8G8B8.. the closest I can find is:

8.8.8.8 ARGB 32 bpp | unsigned

Looks like that's the right one so far, am posting it here in case anyone else as noob as me sees the menu choices and goes "WAIT WUT?!"

Loaded them in, and these ones worked like a charm.

Yes, that's the one!

Make sure to untick the 'make mipmap' bit.

ETA: Thanks for the reminder, Baka- I've made the text bolder to make it clearer in the first posts, plus I've put some images to show the Photoshop DDS settings in post #3.

How many INI files can I have in my world? Is the number of INI files limited? Can high number of INI files cause lag?

My color ramps don't worked, so I need to determine the color of sky or clouds in the Ini files from base game. This folder contains 31 ini files. I think, this number is high....

Pleas answer.

Simsample, thank you for this great tutorial!!

andrej_8, if you read the bit in post #2 which begins 'INI files in EA worlds' you'll see that to override the basehame sea/sky/weather ini files you need up to nine ini files and up to five colour ramps:

S3_00B2D882_0076A684_7529C26EE8E2A9E6%%+_IMG.dds
S3_00B2D882_0076A684_28C841C9462BCDE0%%+_IMG.dds
S3_00B2D882_0076A684_E422CDDE7FE1F25F%%+_IMG.dds
S3_00B2D882_0076A684_ECCBBCB773C02131%%+_IMG.dds
S3_00B2D882_0076A684_F0A86F660985BF20%%+_IMG.dds
S3_1F886EAD_00000000_560C0FD7012DA7F3%%+_INI.ini
S3_1F886EAD_00000000_967BC6C3B3808C00%%+_INI.ini
S3_1F886EAD_00000000_FE1F6A95A24A604A%%+_INI.ini
S3_1F886EAD_00000000_2C02B3532B64EB49%%+_INI.ini
S3_1F886EAD_00000000_8DEA7AE7631A026A%%+_INI.ini
S3_1F886EAD_00000000_3EC0CF0CC4A6540F%%+_INI.ini
S3_1F886EAD_00000000_5E4F8E7B226066CA%%+_INI.ini
S3_1F886EAD_00000000_5E20253AF53E517F%%+_INI.ini
S3_1F886EAD_00000000_D89F9D186B7BB372%%+_INI.ini

There is also an ini file that some of the EA worlds have which contains the path for the camera flythrough.

These are the only files you need to override the weather/sea/sky in your custom world; the basegame ini files contain a lot of colour information in RGB figures, but that has been combined into the colour ramps for the EP worlds. The ini files in the basegame have several files dealing with each weather type; there is only one file for each weather type in the EP worlds, as the information is combined to one ini and one colour ramp per weather type, plus four (or five if you include the flythrough file) global files.

If you look in post #3 you'll see some links to download the files from the EA worlds, or you can extract your own from your game files if you like, or download my basegame edited files to play with.

There is no limit to ini files, and indeed there are other parameters such as video camera settings contained in the basegame files in ini form; however if you wish custom weather in your world, the above nine ini files and five DDS files will override all weather types.

Hrm. Has anyone sorted whether one can add time settings to say, the heat shimmers? I've never dabbled in code/program so don't know if the basic setup for EA's would let one patch in the time stuff from say, fog settings, to the heat shimmer somehow. If I were to try this, would I need to bracket [Heatshimmer]? or do those who've done more editing and tweaking have any other thoughts/advice?

bakafox, if you look at the Egypt files, you'll see that it is added to S3_1F886EAD_00000000_5E20253AF53E517F%%+_INI.ini. Open Egypt in S3PE or download the Egypt files from post #3 and you'll see it. It looks like this:



As far as I can see there is no fine tuning or time aspect to that; it's either there or not. You can adjust the amount, though.

In theory then, can you just add the heatshimmerdistance tag into the ini file and it should work in your world?

Yes; I've tried it out in my own worlds. And there's at least one custom world can think of that uses this.

It would be good if we could make the heat shimmer vary during the day, though.

Aye, I was thinking about the varying it, already had messed with just putting that in and playing with Egypt's INI

Out of pure curiosity I did try patching in some 'time of day' code. First I just pasted in the fog time of day stuff and replaced the fog1 etc with HeatShimmerDistance1 and so forth- did not, surprisingly, crash anything, but also did nothing =)

I tried it again, dropping numbers and brackets and just varying the = # and adding a time of day = X under it, but while again having multiple HeatShimmerDistance did not (surprisingly) crash, it didn't work =)

Guess varied heat shimmers through day was too logical an idea for EA? ^_^

I was wanting to do something similar in relation to the moon.
Was thinking of trying to create two moons at different points in the sky and of different sizes.

Doubt that would work though so didn't attempt it.

Would be great for alien worlds.

Should I be unchecking 'load mipmaps'? This is in Gimp, when loading a DDS.

And, another question! There is a glow, for lack of a better word, around many objects in my game. I thought reducing daytime bloom would help, but nada. Any suggestions?

Have you reloaded the ini files after you saved the world? CAW removes ini files when saving. I haven't had time to really test the weather files the way you guys have, but sometimes when I forget to reimport the ini files after I save in CAW I get a standard-looking weather with huge glowy bloom look to my world, much the same as that pic.

I should've mentioned, this isn't in CAW, but an already-installed world. I used the Appaloosa Plains INIs, maybe I'll try importing them from elsewhere :-/

EDIT: hmm, that seemed to do the trick. I guess it's something in Appaloosa's INIs. On the left is with the unedited Appaloosa files, quite bright and glowy, on the right is with the basegame INIs.

It seems to happen when you do have colour ramps in a world, but no ini files alongside them.

Have you had a look at the AP ini files compared to base game ini files?
Any noticeable differences that could be the likely cause of the glows?

Odd. Both were definitely present.

No, I haven't compared INIs just yet--at that point, I was just happy to get back to playing!

Right now my beef is the sunrise. Changing the sunrise time in the INI files isn't affecting what time the stupid sun comes up, it still comes up at 6am.

EDIT, the first difference that I notice is Appaloosa has higher "end" figures for fog, as compared to simsample's basegame edited INIs. Fog isn't something I know much about beyond that, unfortunately. I would prefer not to have it at all except in overcast/stormy weather types.

EDIT, after spending over 24 hours wondering why I couldn't alter sunrise time, I finally remembered I had a moon override in my package folder

Appaloosa does have different lighting parameters (bloom ramp and saturations) to the basegame, not sure if that's it. The fog shouldn't make any difference to the bloom though.

kiwi_tea makes a good point about the ini files being eaten though, I've added a note to post #3 about that to remind people. Thanks for that, Kiwi_tea!

This thread is exciting! I'm going to keep a close eye on it even if I don't have the time to experiment right now (people quitting left and right at my new job, so I've got more hours than I know what to do with and no brain left when I get home).

I wish there was some way to keep CAW from overriding the ini files.
When creating texture packs, you're supposed to uncheck that button, as Gimp creates new mipmaps based on your save. Otherwise you end up with two or more sets of mipmaps, which cause file size bloat and confusion. I can only assume the same would still hold true for creating anything else in DDS format.

You know, I have this vague memory of seeing a thread elsewhere about this. I'll have to see if I can dig that up before I forget.

Thanks skmt999- I completely missed Margaret Pendragon's post about the Mip-maps.

You are right, you need to untick 'load mipmaps'. The EA colour ramps do not have mip maps, so if you tick that GIMP will just generate them- which you do not want.

Having the DDS file in the wrong format could cause strange graphical effects, and possibly the glow you see, as well as game crashing.

To clarify, they need to be 32 bit A8R8G8B8 file, no mip-maps.

I put more details in post #3 about that.