Dark on the inside

Hi everybody!

I'm building a secret lair. It has (or will have Real Soon Now) banks of controls with dials and knobs and levers and that. It's got a great big glowing thingie in the middle, which looks real nice when I force the sun to midnight.

There's no windows. How do I make it dark indoors during the day? The lighting looks great but unless I tell my visitors to set force-sun they'll be none the wiser, and that rather breaks mimesis.

I tried fiddling with the colours on the texture settings, setting everything to a mid grey - but that'd make it darker at night too.

Suggestions? Or work-rounds?

(This is my scary first post! Eeeeee!)

Someone's discussed how to make the inside of a building darker before. With what you are describing I'm not sure these will solve your problem.

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I think darker textures would be your best solution. But since the textures will also be much darker at night you might want to look into a way to switch between darker and lighter textures based on the time of day. Maybe use a script to detect if its night or day and switch textures accordingly.

http://rpgstats.com/wiki/index.php?title=LlGetSunDirection

Only problem with scripts to detect the time of day...most people have a preferred time of day setting for the sun and they change it to this whenever they go to a sim that isn't set that way.

The easiest way to make it dark inside a building/area is to put it a good ways underwater.

As someone already said, there is a discussion of this. The short version is that you hang lots of dark colored partly transperent phantom prims around. Visitors will walk thru them without really noticing them, but the visual engine will use them to reduce the amount of light visible.

lee

Although that'll make using your camera inside pretty painful.

conversely, you can make your textures dim and murky.. so that it looks right during the day.. and then use LIGHTS to bring the light level up to a similar-to-daytime level at night.

Turn all your textures to fullbright. They won't be affected by day or night.

<laughs>

Thanks folk - lots of good suggestions, I'll start experimenting with them later today.

Where is it?

Ah .. behind you!