Sorry to indulge in off-topicness, and also I sincerely apologize if I in any way offended, master Boris. Twas not my intention!
I was working again the other day on updating my own humble config and ran into a familiar limitation you might consider for a future release, regarding configuration of interiors. It was actually the fog anchor concept that got me thinking on it, but I have also attempted in the past (with limited success) to edit interiors separately in the CK for this reason.
I speak of how there seems to be several distinct TYPES of interiors in the game, with very different lighting conditions. A few that spring to mind are of course the regular interiors that are used in most buildings, towns, etc. Then you have caves, and SNOW caves, mines though they tend to be similar to caves, Falmer zones, and Dwemer ruins. There are others but these are the major ones used in 90% of world interiors. Getting one to look right results in glowing nuclear snow in another and pitch black shadows in another, etc.
The idea I had is very much like the current weather system, only NOT for weathers but for interiors, and for enbeffect.fx.ini (the config files for enbeffect.fx inside the enbseries folder. Specifically, it would be EXTREMELY helpful to be able to create
templates for each of these interior color and lighting "schemes". As I see it this would require one master file like _weatherlist.ini (call it _interiorlist.ini), and then individual files that would contain the names of all the interior cells that were "tagged" from the in-game editor to a certain one of these templates, and the settings for that template. Then whenever that cell loaded, the helper mod would load the enbeffect.fx.ini values from whatever file that cell belonged to, or the defaults if not tagged.
Instead of using a separate ID for each interior, create static ID's the mod author could name. So, the _interiorlist.ini file could start off something like this:
Code: Select all
_interiorlist.ini
[INTERIOR001]
InteriorID=001
FileName=ExampleNameCave.ini
[INTERIOR002]
InteriorID=002
FileName=ExampleNameIceCave.ini
[INTERIOR003]
InteriorID=003
FileName=ExampleNameBuilding.ini
[INTERIOR004]
InteriorID=004
FileName=ExampleNameFalmer.ini
Then, the individual files would look something like this:
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ExampleNameCave.ini
[INTERIORLIST]
CaveCellNameFromHelperMod01
CaveCellNameFromHelperMod02
...
[ENBEFFECT.FX]
(settings for this interior template)
The in-game editor would need a feature added to tag the current interior with a template number. Once "tagged" the helper mod would grab the cell name and append it to the [INTERIORLIST] section of whatever named file is in that position. So, in the example, if you tagged the current interior as 001 (possibly from a drop-down menu for ease of use), the name would get appended to ExampleNameCave.ini. From that point on, the in-game shader editor window would display and modify values from this file instead of enbeffect.fx.ini.
Of course the option to "tag" a cell would only be available when in an INTERIOR cell.
I know is sounds complex, but it really just involves the use of some clever regular expressions and minor modifications to the shader value loader routines, and it would be a HUGE improvement for config authors. Right now, it is basically impossible to get interior shader values that look correct for all of these diverse interior cell environments.
To pre-empt a likely response to just "modify the cells in the CK" I already tried that, and I found that while this does allow SOME improvement the reliance on an .ESP file was cumbersome and put many users off, and also there simple weren't enough options in the image spaces to really have the desired effect without editing individual light sources as well for every cell in the game, which is an impossible task for most config authors. I did it, to an extent, then abandoned the project as too time consuming to maintain with each new feature upgrade.
The system I have outlined would be simple, and allow any mod author to click assign cell tags to have templates for shader settings. Just a though, I hope you might consider it. I would be happy to lend my own novice programming skills to the cause, FWIW.