Cartographer
Cartographer is a light plugin that allows for swapping between various visual presets based on the players location. Currently, it supports both NVR presets, and interior image spaces and lighting templates.
Acknowledgement
First of all, a short note of appreciation - a big Thank You goes to Mathieu for his awesome work on NVR, to Salamand3r for his New Vegas Visual Renewal guide and showing me what NVR is capable of, to the various communities (The Wasteland Supplemental, ModdingLinked, xNVSE, TES Reloaded, ...) over on Discord for the many insightful debates, and to Anro for his Atlas which served as a direct inspiration for this work.
Description
Cartographer is first and foremost a framework for aspiring authors looking to change or improve various facets of the in-game visuals based on the players location. While we have various mods that accomplishes that partially (as does NVR with it's suite of shaders, or the various interior lighting mods such Atmospheric Lighting Tweaks, General Lighting Overhaul, (S)ILO, etc.), this mod aims to bring the various things together under a single, highly configurable and customizable roof.
As an addition, Cartographer can now handle game settings as well, both numeric and strings. This was done to faciliate usage with Vanilla Plus AO, but can be used for any game settings!
As a framework, this mod does not do anything by itself. As will be explained in much greater detail in a separate article (or articles), for Cartographer to actually do anything, it requires a suitable configuration. You can either dabble in the configuration yourself, if you want full control over your visuals, or use a configuration (or preset if you like) made by another author.
Presets using Cartographer
- H2O by Salamand3r
- Uranium Haze by Kamchatka
Features
Current features include:
- modular, light presets to build a final look,
- NVR preset swapping based on location,
- interior image space swapping based on location,
- interior lighting template swapping based on location,
- interior dynamic ambient lighting based on location and time-of-day,
- game settings based on location.
How does it work?
This mod is built with two main goals in mind - extendibility and modularity.
The first goal is mainly accomplished by a liberal use of keywords. Each preset in a particular configuration is understood as a keyword. Suppose the player enters a cell Cell with the keywords Mojave and Factory. Cartographer looks through the presets available in its configuration, and tries to find presets with these names (Mojave, Factory) - those that do exist are then applied. This works for both NVR and interior lighting (lighting templates/image spaces).
Cartographer also uses a notion of keyword aliases - the configuration author can, for example, decide that a keyword MojaveFactory should expand to Mojave, Factory, Dark. If a cell with the keyword MojaveFactory is encountered, all three of these keywords are then matched for presets separately.
This brings us to the notion of modularity. Presets supplied to Cartographer do not have to define every single parameter separetely. In fact, suppose that the preset Dark noted above should only change the brightness in NVR, and ambient lighting of the interior's lighting template. The author can then decide to apply this "partial" preset to any situation in which he wants to accentuate the darkness of the given (interior) cell, on top of any other changes done in other (partial) presets.
Both of these goals should encourage authors to work in a modular, tightly defined fashion. This should in turn enable authors to be way more productive when tweaking the visuals of the various worldspaces and hundreds of interior cells. As long as the author is able to properly modularize his presets, they can use these features to their advantage and cut on the time it takes to get everything together.
Requirements
Cartographer has been built using several of the modern modding tools we have available including:
All of these are a hard requirement for Cartographer. They should be covered by all the major modding guides, but if you would like to use this mod, definitely check that you have all of them installed and working properly.
This mod would not be possible without these, so if you are, for whatever reason, against using these, then this mod is not (and will not be) for you.
A note on compatibility
As noted above, Cartographer by itself does nothing. There are no edits to existing records, and therefore no hard conflicts.
However, note that (depending on the used configuration), there are soft conflicts with Atlas (both mods swapping NVR presets) and the various interior lighting mods (ALT, (S)ILO, GLO for interior lighting, Natural Interiors, ...).
A note on performance
Depends on the used features - with no configuration, it does nothing, and thus costs nothing.
Both NVR and interior lighting preset swapping happens on entering a cell. With a properly made configuration, this should only happen on entering/exiting interiors. Therefore, it should at worse increase loading times slightly.
The dynamic ambient lighting system is based on a periodically ran calculation, while in an interior. This should be totally negligible. In exteriors, it is disabled.
Note that NVR performance hit depends on the used shaders and their respective settings.
Instructions
Install as normal. Requires a preset to do anything.
Requirements
Cartographer
Main file: Framework for NVR presets.
