Have you ever noticed that the light on your lot doesn’t match the direction of the sun in the neighborhood?
No? Well, now that you have and you can’t unsee it, let’s fix it…
I’ve never found a complex lighting mod I like, but I do use Hook’s Lighting file that lets me change the direction of the sun on a lot with a cheat. I have these cheats in my userStartup.cheat file. This is useful, especially for picture taking.
Hook also changed the default lighting direction so that the hood view would match the lot. However, Hook’s file, which is meant to replace the Seasons lighting.txt file, was being overwritten by my later EP (Pets with UC) so that the default sun direction was back to being the Maxis default meaning hood and lot are reversed. I took Hook’s changes and mixed them into my Pets lighting.txt and now it works as expected and the two view match.
Anyone with this issue can do the same:
In my installation of UC, it replaces this file:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Origin Games\The Sims 2 Ultimate Collection\Fun with Pets\SP9\TSData\Res\Lights\lighting.txt
There’s a more indepth discussion of issues around this on MTS which is where I first realized it was an issue. If you don’t use UC, check out this post to see where it might go in your game. As for Hook’s original files, I left mine in Seasons since I still want to use his cheats to change the direction in individual lots if I want to. (Alternatively, I probably could have moved all Hook’s lighting to Pets and merged the Pets file into his, but, since it was already working…. if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, I say.) I also haven’t tested, but, logically, this text file should work without his others if you just want to change the default. You shouldn’t use it if you don’t want to overwrite your current lighting.txt file, though, so as always, back up!
There’s another separate issue with the sun direction that involves how lots are placed when they are first built. I address this in another post.