[AG007]

Heya MC

So I've been trying a few different "darker nights patches" for vanilla wow, but they all seem to have the same problem and I really don't know if this can be fixed, but I thought that this site would be the best place to ask.

The problem is that the darker nights mod doesn't seem to affect places such as Orgrimmar, Battlegrounds, Dungeons, Raids etc. So for example, while in Durotar it can be pitch dark, but in Orgrimmar it will still look bright as if it was day. Another thing is weather changing, like whenever it starts to rain or snow it removes the darker night effects and these problems kinda ruins the whole thing for me.

Now, I do not have any knowledge regardning any of this however I think it has something to do with the "skyboxes" or whatever it's called, being different in each zone and each weather has its own skybox, so maybe a darker night effect has to be applied for each skybox. (I don't know).

I was wondering if anyone here could be interested in making a patch that would apply darker nights everywhere in WoW for patch 1.12.1.
I personally don't want it to be pitch dark nights, but just slightly darker would be perfect. - Less is more concept.

Cheers and thanks in advance!

TL;DR: read bolded text.

[Elrena]

Not sure about the Orgrimmar thing. That might be one of the lights that doesn't appear on the Light Mapper. Maybe with enough fiddling you might be able to figure out which ID its using if you decide to make your own edits. However it does have its own lighting in some areas such as The Drag, which would not work well without knowledge of WMO editing. 

The weather problem is something I overlooked when I created Darker Nights. I'm not sure who else is making these patches now, as I've never made one for vanilla, but the reason it becomes brighter when it rains is because weather conditions have their very own Light.dbc entry. Clear weather and rainy weather use entirely different settings, but both can be changed if you have the time.

With that being said, a patch like this easily takes a solid 2 weeks of hard work. So don't expect anyone to do it for free. 

[AG007]

Thank you for your answer.

3 hours ago, Elrena said:

a patch like this easily takes a solid 2 weeks of hard work

Yea, that's what I thought. Unfortunatly I do not have time at the moment to learn all these modding stuff and what not and I suppose to takes years to master anyway(?)

But if I were to give it a shot one day, where should I begin? Could you recommend a guide or video tutorial I could follow?

What would you say the average price would be, to have someone make this for me?

EDIT: obviously this site would be the best place to begin. But could you tell me what I should focus on when trying to make darker nights?

Thanks in advance!

[Razmataz]

You would need to begin with a WMOEditor and examining a small WMO, like the farm.wmo.

If the software cannot help you then you need to delve into the raw file data of the wmo. You look inside it with a program like HexView and determine where the lighting chunk is by reviewing https://wowdev.wiki/WMO/v14.

Research, figure out how to reproduce it on other WMOs, and if you're feeling inventive enough, write a script to loop through all of them and set them to use natural lighting.

[Elrena]

If you're interested in learning how to make your own darker nights patch, you need a program called Lightmapper which will show you all the light sources in Azeroth. Each node that you see on Lightmapper refers to an entry in the Light.dbc. Use the WoW Dev Wiki to understand the structure of that dbc file, and you shall see that it refers to LightIntBand.dbc in two columns. One contains information for clear weather lighting and the other for rainy/snowy lighting. There are also entries for underwater lighting, use that if you wish.

With the numbers you find in the Light.dbc columns you have to multiply them by 18 and subtract 17. That will be your starting row in LightIntBand.dbc. That row and the next 17 rows in LightIntBand.dbc all contain information regarding that specific locations light settings (the one you found on Lightmapper). You'll need to specify the time of day intervals as well as the color of the lighting using hex color codes. Black lights would make it extremely dark while brighter colors will make it brighter.  It's a lot of copy and paste work. The WoW Dev Wiki should help you. 

There's another way of modifying the lights a little bit faster using Sharp WoW if I remember correctly. I've never done it myself though.