While waiting for an updated release, some enthusiasts are refreshing parts of the game themselves. Sleek, tech-inspired clouds have begun appearing in the sky.
Recently, a modder known as doodlum returned to Fallout: New Vegas and unveiled a mod called Perfect Skies, created to expand the game’s weather variety.
The author prepared more than 200 new weather presets and described his approach:
In the past, game and mod textures were made in image-editing tools by cutting clouds out of real photos. By contrast, this mod uses no real photographs at all — everything is entirely computer-generated.
Consequently, doodlum was able to deliver clouds of “near-perfect quality, free from the flaws that were common previously, especially in modded clouds” — problems like poor transparency, lighting artifacts, and similar issues.
The clouds are also “baked” into two separate textures: one that simulates direct lighting from the sun or moon, and another that represents light scattering in the atmosphere. That allows a single cloud texture to mimic different times of day and blend into any location, because it doesn’t contain baked lighting tied to a specific time or place. This system is more advanced than the one in Fallout 4. To build the ESP plugins, a script was used to extract lighting for each weather type and time of day individually.
Perfect Skies is distributed free on Nexus Mods. It is compatible with Viva New Vegas.
Source: iXBT.games