This mod is probably the biggest visual overhaul of the game since it was released. To start, it reinstates the extended night areas that are missing from all main areas except Baldur's Gate. For example, an obvious symptom of the missing extended night occurs when you walk up to a campfire in (say) the xvart village and the lighting reflecting off the party never changes from night to firelight. Other obvious symptoms are areas with buildings (Beregost, Nashkel, Candlekeep, etc.) that have no lighting in the windows at night.
Now, when you open doors at night they show light from inside the building. Buildings actually have windows that are lit up. All areas have new lightmaps to go with the extended night so your party shows the correct shading as they walk through open doors and passed firepits.
I would have preferred to have also added light splashes to the ground outside the windows but working in 2D makes it (almost) impossible to work out the angle of all available light sources. This is the reason why the torches in the town of Ulgoth's Beard are not lit.
It adds the missing night minimaps to all main areas. The installer also includes all of the updated lightmaps for Baldur's Gate that were originally included in the Lightmaps mod. If you have the mod already installed you can uninstall it first if you wish but there is no real need to do so.
It also fixes around ninety percent of the visual stupidities in Baldur's Gate city. These ranged from windows showing at night and not in the day (or vice versa) to whole buildings that changed from nicely maintained habitations during the day to complete derelicts as the sun went down. All of the wall braziers were missing their flames. Other faults involved roofs that were oversprayed with ground textures, doubling-up of textures in an area, walls and walkways that were partly missing and objects that simply disappeared as the day changed. Many night textures were completely missing and showing as huge black holes on the ground; others had been totally destroyed by clumsy use of Dodge and Burn brushes. Occasionally whole walls appeared and disappeared and a couple of the huge drum towers along the walls were actually floating in mid-air!
In Candlekeep the temple torches are lit.
In the Ducal Palace interior all of the wall sconces are lit.
Night-time water now has new textures instead of re-using the day ones. This adds greatly to the overall night atmosphere.
There are separate installers for BGT, BGTuTu and BG:EE.
Optional Component
(As of BG:EE patch 1.3 the expanded Iron Throne area is part of the vanilla install, so the option to install it has been removed).
Almost all of the night-time nasty blue and purple patches can be removed from the streets if you don't like them. The real problem with these is that around 90% of them were simply cloned in from other areas to cover daytime shadows, so even before that awful colour was applied the textures did not match the corresponding day area. Once the colour had been applied, additional grass and weeds were applied on top but in places that did not match the day placement. I frequently found grass growing out of streetlights at night... In the majority of cases I have been able to patch in the daytime textures but in some areas it simply wasn't possible. I hope these don't show up too obviously.
I'm aware that some people like the blue and purple patches, which is why this part of the mod has been made optional. I'm also aware that there are other people who believe that Baldur's Gate as delivered has perfect graphics and does not require any correction at all. To those people: please do not download and install this mod because you will be terribly disappointed.
Note:
The birds will still display at night in Candlekeep starting area because the game starts there and so they can't be turned off.
The usual caveat for a mod that changes existing areas: if you've already visited an area then the changes made by this mod may not show up. To be certain to get all changes you need to start a new game. Having said that, it seems to work okay with existing savegames that don't know about the new night areas.
Edited by Yovaneth, 25 January 2015 - 05:47 AM.
