Midnight black skies and terrain lit up like it was midday don't make any sense together and should be fixed

[Roma_Victrix]

This is a funky looking battle map problem that should be addressed, as it is jarring to look at and breaks immersion. It's just not realistic at all to have midnight black colored skies with a terrain that's about as bright as it would be during high noon. It wouldn't be much of an issue if the game wasn't so damn obnoxious in just allowing you every time to toggle through different sky models with the "wait" feature, but sometimes the game FORCES you to fight battles with this stupid nonsense, which you can bypass by exiting the battle and trying to play it again, but that's stupid. The problem pops up way too frequently, enough so for it to crawl under my skin.

Although I thought it was you guys who introduced this, as explained in a post I made in the suggestions thread, I'm not going to directly blame the EBII team for this anymore, since I looked back at old SSHIP submod pics and realized even it had the same problem on occasion. However, I would like to see someone attempt to tackle this by either fixing it or eliminating that type of weather condition altogether. You guys are able to do that, right? I'm fairly certain those things aren't hard-coded into M2TW, as I remember modders changing the look of the skies, not just vegetation on the ground. Hell, didn't the EBII team make a few of their own custom skies? I don't know why I vaguely remember that.

Anyway, here's what the problem looks like:



Seriously, who is the brain-damaged birdbrain MT2W developer or visual artist who looked at that and said to themselves "well, my job is done here, everything looks peachy!" Uh, no. No it doesn't, you rube. Compare it to how a nighttime sky usually looks otherwise and how it should look if we want to portray things realistically:

[Roma_Victrix]

delete

[Roma_Victrix]

So nobody is going to address this issue? I just had it happen AGAIN for the umpteenth time and it is driving me nuts, like nails on a chalkboard. It's the number one immersion breaking issue for me, but that's just my opinion. Could somebody, anybody jump in and volunteer to fix this problem? Anyone?

[xHolyCrusader]

Looks like a texture is missing/not loading for you, can you load custom battles at morning, midday, afternoon + clear/cloudy settings and check for which of those you get the black sky? Perhaps try deleting the globallighting folder inside ebii/data (make a backup), so the game loads the skies from vanilla files, and see if that fixes it. Alternatively try upgrading your pc, those 4:3 screenshots at low graphics settings are a pain to look at

[Roma_Victrix]

Looks like a texture is missing/not loading for you, can you load custom battles at morning, midday, afternoon + clear/cloudy settings and check for which of those you get the black sky?

Yep, confirmed: it's supposed to be nighttime.

Perhaps try deleting the globallighting folder inside ebii/data (make a backup), so the game loads the skies from vanilla files, and see if that fixes it.

Thanks for the suggestion! Doing that now! And making a backup copy just in case, as you suggest. I'm not sure if I'll notice it right away. This seems more like a thing I'll gradually come to notice, but if this solution doesn't work and it pops back up again, I'll let you know.

Alternatively try upgrading your pc, those 4:3 screenshots at low graphics settings are a pain to look at

Yeah, yeah, yeah, one of these days. I shouldn't have sold my desktop PC, but even that was outdated. I'm playing on a crappy HP Pavilion Notebook with a "family" graphics card (whatever the hell that means). It's definitely not even capable of running Attila: Total War (my computer would probably explode and burst into flames), perhaps isn't even capable of running Empire: Total War, but it can play the original Rome: Total War like a boss.

I have a nice MacBook Pro for work, but that's not going to do me any good for gaming, obviously, although I did have Feral Interactive version of M2TW on an older MacBook. It didn't run very well, though.

[Roma_Victrix]

UPDATE: I can't tell you enough how much that solution of removing the global lighting folder not only fixed my initial concern entirely, but has seemingly improved the entire performance and FPS rate of the game as a whole. I even kicked the graphics up a bit, including turning "bloom" back on and improving anti-alaising, and I can still play the game normally! Even on my crappy laptop.

Jesus, man, how big are those "global lighting" files? I can't believe that is the thing that has been holding me back this whole time. I'll gladly settle for vanilla M2TW skies, because honestly I barely notice the difference if at all. Are EBII skies better looking somehow? More detailed or something?