A small but impactful New Atlantis edit.
– Changes the aquariums in the NAT station to be windows looking out into the lake.
– Lighting will look a little different.
– Includes architecture edits necessary to plug gaps.
– Added more underwater objects and plants, very soft overhaul to the lake.
– A few surface Lilypads that may have been intended for use in New Atlantis.
– Mod is based on concept art, and possibly early development, where the windows were underwater.
I’m not sure why the vanilla route was taken, could be related to signs the cities and water content were dialed back. This is just one of the unusually many water themed mods I work on, I should also have a boat home out soon and underwater cities and POIs in the further future.
This mod was initially easy to make, though it had to grow to plug gaps and add detail. It just took a jumpstart of inspiration from messing with aquatic assets a lot.
Things this doesn’t touch:
1. Navmeshes.
2. LOD layer.
3. Culling.
4. MAST itself though I was tempted to change the black glass texture. I avoided the urge to bloat a mod.
5. The station model or texture files. Mods reusing NA assets will work fine.
6. NPC/Crowd/Animal spawns, if you think it’s a good idea to place some fish let me know.
Does not affect quests, scripts, or save bloat, but I tested and if you add the mod while in NAT the station walls can come back/won’t be disabled. Most cell mods have a ‘leave area first’ disclaimer anyway.
Performance:
Tested on a heavily modded New Atlantis (Awaits+Positively New+house mods) and got 42fps without, 41 with. With no mods, NAT was 62FPS vanilla, 60FPS with early mod version, 57FPS once I added lighting and volumetrics.
With my above layman but below professional knowledge of games, the tanks didn’t save that much performance, I didn’t have to touch culling. I speculate it was done this way for style and effort reasons. There are occlusion volumes but they’re everywhere and didn’t rely on the lake heavily for frames.
Fully playable 1.0 mod but some avenues for future updates:
– Better window material; increase refraction and blur.
– Investigate thicker volumetric fog and performance impact of doing so.
– More underwater objects, thicker foliage.
Credits:
Hycas
Downloads
| Name | Format | Size |
|---|---|---|
| NAT-Station-Lake-Windows-1-0.zip | ZIP | 4.23 MB |
| NAT-Station-Lake-Windows-1-1-1.zip | ZIP | 4.21 MB |
| NAT-Station-Lake-Windows-2-0.zip | ZIP | 4.24 MB |
| Blue-Jellyfish-2-0-1.zip | ZIP | 60.49 KB |
To start download click the filename. To open archive files use one of these programs: WinRAR, 7-Zip, WinZip. Some mod archives may need to be extracted before the mods will work.
