Kraaia's boy clothes

Ha, thanks, Nimue. I was having the same thought yesterday when I was talking about the Leofric Sim being sadistic... every fiber of my being was crying out that Leofric is not a bad guy at heart! Even I, who see the game in all its move_objects on glory, still have such a mental disconnect between the characters as they live in my head and in the story, and the mechanics of the computer game itself. So strange. And yet I couldn't do it without the game... the pictures make them come alive.

Are you using GunMod's Radiance lighting system? That's your first step! However, if you look at the first 10 years of my story or so (after I got it) most of my chapters were super-dark. It took me a while to get a better grip on lighting.

Since then -- during the year of 1085 only, really -- I have focused a lot on lighting and I have three techniques now that I use a lot.

First, I have modified the Radiance Lighting a little for my own needs, but I have also created some separate lighting.txt files of my own that have radically different lighting. For example some have very blue-colored lighting indoors, and I switch to that (using setLotLightingFile cheat) when inside a church with mostly blue-ish stained glass windows. I have also recently begun modifying the relative intensities of the light: where previously I might make a dark nighttime lighting by reducing all lighting intensities by 50%, say, now I might make the environment lighting a lot darker, but only lower the lighting on the Sims a little, so they stand out more. Without overdoing it making them appear to glow, of course.

The second thing is I often add supplemental lighting hiding away in corners. For example if I have a candle on a table, I hide a rather brighter light underneath the table to make up for the weak light of the in-game candle.

The third thing is I have very recently (only in the past 2 weeks or so) figured out how to modify the lighting parameters of lights themselves using a lighting override file. I have been working on making all my fire-type lights (table, wall, and floor candles, and fireplaces) have a much more orange-colored light, and I am working on increasing the directional lighting they produce while reducing the ambient lighting. This seems more realistic for candle light -- if you have ever tried to light a room with a single candle or even four, you will see that the game candles are WAY too bright. But I am still very much in the process of experimenting with that.

I think the high directional / low ambient lighting is awesome for stories since it makes the shadows on faces stand out so much more. Look at the recent chapter with Alred and Leofric fighting in the bedroom for example. Alred looks downright scary in some of those.

There's a fourth thing, too... in the past few months I have sometimes been doing some post-processing in Photoshop using a batch Photofilter that makes the colors warmer and more orangey, for scenes that take place indoors by candlelight. But I am hoping to stop doing this when I get my light overrides figured out.

Someday (if people are still playing Sims 2 by then) I will write an article on all of that, and put all my lighting.txt and light override files up for download. If you're interested, prod me a little and I will try to make it a priority. I am a rather scientific, experimenty person, but I have so little time these days. And now I am wanting to do some genetics experiments too after your other comment about the eyes!