Hi everyone! Been a while. [Mod related question]
 

So, I've been looking to try out SH3. Been playing a lot of SH4 OM Dark Waters but y'know people tell me SH3 is really the way to go for U-Boat action.

So, since I wanted GWX (Since, again, everybody and their dogs recommend it. :P ) I decided to give the OneAlex's modpack a try. Primarely so I don't have to go insane trying to run this widescreen and all. I just like the "One-Mod does it all" approach usually.

Anyway, sank a ship and I am proud of it. (Even thought, it was so close it would have been embarassing to miss...) And went on my merry way.

But, I noticed something... Is it normal that nights are so dark I literally cannot see anything? Like, not even my own deck or stars or literally anything. Almost as if the whole graphics went "OFF" during nighttime. It's actually crazy...

Is there something I can do to fix that? Like, there is dark and there is just too damn dark. XD

It shouldn’t be that bad. Try adjusting your brightness level. If that doesn’t fix it, something went wrong.

I cranked up my brightness to maximum. Yeah, graphics are not off. Now, of course it looks like my screen got smoke over it.

It's very odd. I ran the mod as-is without changing anything in it. I don't know if that might be the problem?

Okay, I investigated a bit and it seems the mod just makes it VERY dark during the middle of the night. Probably because "realism" except realism comes with a price when there is no actual reflection of anything including moon/starlight making it pretty much pitch black. Increasing brightness does make things better but the problem seems to come from the Skybox that becomes pretty much all black at that time of the night.

While I can appreciate this dedication to realism. I still want to play and I find no joy in barely seeing anything during night. Especially when nighttime is when you are encouraged to attack to preserve stealth as much as possible.

What I did is I installed the Ocean Madness mod V2. It sure makes nights unrealistically bright. Like, clearly it's brighter than it should be but not to the point where you wouldn't need to be attentive. You still need to lookout for warships approaching as they are still hard to spot from a distance.

If anybody else feels like this is waaaaaaaaaay too dark. I'd recommend giving this mod a try. Does cut a bit on the whole realism thing but that level of realism is not for everyone when it does interfere with gameplay.

I compared it with vanilla and it's about the same level of visibility but a bit nicer looking.

I'm probably too used to SH4/SH5 where that kind of graphical limitations have less impact. =/

Okay! Crisis aborted. I found the culprit.

I had the black boost of my monitor completely off to have better colors and black. Wich is not a problem in 99% of games I played.

(To the point I even forgot about that... not joking its the ONLY game I own that cause me any problem with that thing off. Even SH4/SH5 dosent have that problem.)

The guy who made/tweaked that mod clearly have a good display so he could afford that level of darkness without any real loss of visibility. My display just have a contrast so bad it thought it was all black. Thus, acted like it was all black.

That one is on me for cheaping out on display. XD But, as soon as I pumped up the black boost a little bit and lowered brightness to compensate, it was all fine.

Okay, now there is one last problem I have but I'm not sure if that can be fixed.

Is it some limitation of that game or is there a setting I can change somewhere to make this better.

I don't know how to explain it but its like the textures display in strip instead of a smooth gradiant of color.

I expect that in old games really so maybe that's just a thing I have to live with in SH3 but I'd like to know if something can be done about it.

Here is a screenshot I took since I suck at explaining things clearly.

https://imgur.com/a/JkMwler

I think that problem is present for everybody, I see that all the time... :yep:

Same under water...