SKYRIMLE Vivid Weathers - a complete Weather and Visual overhaul

[Octopuss]

https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/articles/50689/?

It's about this mod, right?

[Mangaclub]

as wellas this: 

Edited March 12, 2016 by Mangaclub

[Octopuss]

I think I will rather trust someone who knows his own work of several years inside out and can tell a theft when he sees one.

[Mangaclub]

Thanks for trusting in me, yes it took me years indeed to get there.. Vivid clouds and fogs...extendend weathers, extended groundfogs.. windyclouds.. vividian enb. Real skyrim snowflakes.. all lead finally to this mod vivid weathers.

Edited March 12, 2016 by Mangaclub

[Monobloc]

Idd, mangaclub worked his ass off to make climates of tamriel somehow not ugly, and enb compatible with years of constant updates. this guy worked much much more and deserves as much respect.

 

What kind of thievery could it be, everything is completely different.

[Neovalen]

Thanks for trusting in me, yes it took me years indeed to get there.. Vivid clouds and fogs...extendend weathers, extended groundfogs.. windyclouds.. vividian enb. Real skyrim snowflakes.. all lead finally to this mod vivid weathers.

A++ man.

[elenhil]

Having checked the 'wronged' side of the argument's... arguments I must say I am thoroughly stuffed with that 'copyright' business. No-one can copyright 'style, art, vision'. Impossible. You can't copyright ideas either, only patent them (and God help us if we get patenting - and patent wars in modding). If someone does copy your style, art and vision (all of them artistic terms) , this is not theft, this is the proverbial best form of flattery. So it all comes down to the quality of the alleged 'copy'. If you're a Raphael, and that person's copy is but a shadow of your work, congratulations! If you're a Raphael, and that person is a Picasso, congratulations to both of you. Heck, even if you're a Raphael and - BOOM! - there's suddenly a whole brotherhood of artistic upstarts painting breathtakingly beautiful stuff implicitly contrary to your 'style, art and vision' - even that cannot diminish the latter.

[Exoclyps]

Well. It's a rough one and near impossible to see in latest version of VW. But the weathers from CoT was merged together with the other mods that are included and then all the weathers where reimagined.

 

To but it in a different way. Say Artist A made a sketch and then painted it, everyone loves it. But one day Artist B comes by and uses a copy of the Sketch and put it together some of his own sketches and makes a bigger painting that looks a bit different from Artist A.

 

Artist B did use the sketch that Artist A made, even if the final painting looks different. This is also why the whole debate is in the gray zone and the moderation was lifted. The final painting looks different and you can hardly tell he used Artist A's sketch to begin with anymore. However this does not change the fact that he did use Artist A's sketch, not his vision, but a copy of his draft, of the product that he produced.

[Mangaclub]

exo, that compare is a bit vague, you see a draft from a artist is analoge. There are thousands ways how how to sketch stuff. But when it comes to modding , you have todo things just in one way. There is no place for that kind of creativity freedom there because it simply wont work. Things have to be done like bestheda coded the weathers to be done otherwise it would not work right or look pretty ugly. That extremly limits the possibilities todo every single small bit in a complete different way than others did.

[Kesta]

Exoclyps : The actual problem is way different than that. And trying to find compare with real life situation with books or painting will hardly be accurate.

 

Here are a bit more detail on what happened exactly. First, you need to understand that a weather is about the following data :

Day/dawn/dusk/night colors (both ambiant and "sunglare" aka directional), and sky/star/aurora colors also.

Clouds layers/textures/colors

Fog effects, colors and distance

Precipitation type

Imagespace (in-engine post-processing).

 

Manga first created vivid clouds, new clouds textures and revamped all of the clouds colors for vanilla weathers. He made patchs for most major weather mods for his new cloud setup, including CoT.

Then he expanded vivid clouds for vivid clouds and fog, revamping fog as well. Again, patches for major weather mods, revamping all of the fog settings on any weathers. He took this opportunity to adjust several weather colors by this time, especially fixing CoT's night in the CoT patches long before CoT 5.0 was up.

Then he made vivid snow, and revamped all of the precipitation types for snowy weathers.

All this time, he also had been working on Vividian ENB, redoing the imagespaces in order to make them more suitable for Vividian ENB, and redoing all of the clear weathers so they'd look better with the ENB.

 

Since his patch supported multiple weathers mods, he also offered completely redone (not even revamped, really redone) region settings (aka weather distribution) made by Unmeix in his patches, so CoT could be used alongside NLA for instance.

 

What was left from the "patched version of CoT" which you can still find in the Vividian ENB installer was the following :

 

Rain precipitations.

Some colors he hadn't modified from CoT, and a few effects from the imagespaces.

Sounds.

 

Then CoT 5.0 came out, with a few sky colors adjustment (brightened blue) to adjust to the new skymeshes and the night sunglass effect fix.

 

This is when I recall manga saying "Jeez, serisouly, 2 years and none of the actual colors oddities seen everywhere have been fixed. I'm done patching all of this so it doesn't look awfully weird, I should do my own weather mod". He had this idea some month before (last summer), but Hishutup convinced him it wasn't a good idea by the time, because there was already so much weather mods available.

 

So he merged all of its changes into the original CoT along with his other weathers, listed what was left from the original, and redid all of it to prevent any re-using issue (new sounds, new rain precipitation and effects, revamped the visuals of the few weathers he hadn't completely redone already). He also scrapped all of the imagespaces and redid them to fulfill his unending passion for bloom settings. (I remember he streamed this part... that was... long, to say the least xD)

 

 

I've been trying to figure out what felt "wrong" in this, and came up to the conclusion that the "weather creation process" had been extremely simplified compared to what had been done in CoT by the time it came out :

The way CoT is designed suggest that JJC removed all of the weather for any region, and the went through each region by thinking "OK, in here, I need 3 different clear weather, 2 snowy ones, and one storm". Then designed them, and added them to the region, before moving to the next one.

 

Instead, VW started from a pool of 580 available weathers that weren't assigned to anything, just looked nice and had a purpose (a foggy weather, a storm, a clear cost weather, ...), and assigned interesting weather to each region.

 

The eternal question is "why didn't he just recreate the weather in a new plugin instead of merging them since nothing was left from the originals". This would have prevented all of its fuss. But weatherID assignation was already done for CoT weathers in hundreds of ENB Presets. By keeping the same purpose for each weatherID, ENB presets authors could just run their ENB with VW and adjust them to suit VWs settings, instead of having to rebuild the preset from scratch. But this really cost a lot of credibility to the work done. 

[Exoclyps]

Perhaps my analog was a bad one. But you did explain exactly what my impression of the process was, with some added details.

 

Do not get me wrong though. I'm using Vivid Weathers, I've endorsed it and I've even given it my vote for the mod of the month.

 

All I think is that it wasn't clear enough what and how he used parts of CoT.

And perhaps a better dialogue should have been made with JJC, as he did use his mod as a base.

Finally I believe that JJC deserves all the credit he can get for initially making the weathers, even if VW improves and utilizes them better.

 

The credits have been improved since before this started, even if I think it could be a bit clearer on what is being credited.

 

All in all, I think that it should be clear for the users of VW what comes from CoT so appreciation can be given where it's due.

[Razorsedge877]

Exoclyps, The moderators Oked VW so maybe everyone should drop trying to explain who gets credit for what. I'm sure Manga gave credit to who ever deserves it. Time to drop your analyzing

[TechAngel85]

I agree with Razorsedge. Let's drop the subject and get this thread back on track, please.

[FourOne]

Vivid Weathers is outstanding, i almost **** my pants when suddenly thunder in the distance appeared.

Someone has Tips for better lightning at night? Interior light is great, but Exterior not so much. I'm using Enhanced lighting for ENB, Relighting Skyrim and ELFX - but some lightsources are glaring 2 much. I'm pretty much using STEP as a base, SRLE Setup for lighning (with custom Relighting Skyrim version from the SR:LE guide), Dreadflopps-Modular-patches (merged together with Unofficial ELFX SMIM ENB fps performance patch).

Load order:
ELFX
Relightning Skyrim
Vivid Weathers
ELE

Edited March 13, 2016 by FourOne

[Kelmych]

I downloaded the new version 1.2 of Vivid Weathers. When I try to use Mod Organizer 1.3.11 to install it I get an "Extracting error (9)" error. The archive file opens properly when I use 7zip. Any idea why this might happen? I've never seen this before with MO even when I open larger files. The previous version of Vivid Weathers had no problems installing.