Eye Adaptation Auto Exposure Fix – No More Blinding Lighting Changes
“I was blind, and now I can see!”
~~ John 9:25
Alright, listen up you beautiful people. You probably believe that driving in first person is impossible during the day and you probably think that going from dark areas to a brighter area is insanely blinding. If we talk about vanilla CP2077, then you are correct…
This mod fixes it. You have to try it yourself or watch my video that I uploaded (check “VIDEO” tab) so that you can understand the extent of this fix.
However, this fix will impact the entire game except for certain cutscenes/interior areas that have fixed exposure. You can expect your entire game to look different, sometimes it’s just 5% different, sometimes it’s noticably different. The eye adaptation has been reworked and slowed down. It follows your eyes now.
As a rule of thumb, going from dark screen to bright screen is SLOWER than going from bright screen to dark screen.
The game will be slightly darker on average, but I did NOT modify in any way the maximum exposure that the game can achieve.
You will still experience the beautiful sights of sunny weather in Night City driving on the highway or in the Badlands. You will still be warmly embraced by the sunlight, but you will see the road ahead of you instead of a wall of white light while driving in the first person. I hope I described this mod well enough, but once again, you have to try it yourself.
This mod has not been tested with HDR devices before the release, but it should work with HDR without any issue. My mod modifies the camera properties when it analyses in the lighting of the current screen-space for the game’s final rendering pass.
[post-release comment by user wmulls on 19th April 2021]: “Works great with HDR as well. My monitor is 1000+ nits and being blinded in game as well as real life wasn’t fun.”
This is a ‘release’ version of my mod. It has been tested to an extent by a small group of people.
This mod is not compatible with any lighting mods or weather mods that modify CP2077_master_env_v008_m8.env or weather .envparam files. I named the files in such a way that it will always load first, overwriting your LUT/weather mods if they modify these files, otherwise this mod will not function.
Since my mod is incompatible with weather mods, I took the opportunity to also alter the weather probability so that the game’s weather is a bit more varied. There’s no reason why you should always have sunny weather when there’s so many more weathers available.
If you find huge issues in any particular area or weather that become comparable with exposure issues in vanilla, let me know, but hopefully the files I modified cover most of the game.
“Why was this mod only released now? Game has been out for so long.”
As far as I knew at the time of making this mod, nobody else was willing to spend hours going through the files of the game – all of them, from scripts through .env through game settings through checking the cyberpunk2077.exe with hex editor – to find out what controls auto exposure without giving up on their way. Lots of trial & error and annoying step backs whenever I hit a dead end.
Took me a total of 20+ working hours. Granted, I’m not a great modder, but hey – we started at the bottom, now we’re here.
Full list of changes:
– Eye adaptation / auto exposure has been reworked to avoid blinding effect on the screen when going from dark to bright places
– Eye adaptation / auto exposure is now adjusting slower, but more consistently
– Weather probability has been rebalanced so that it’s “sunny” less often, just a small adjustment of probabilities for each vanilla weather conditions but should be a consistent improvement over a long period of game time
Installation
Drop the .archive file of my mod in [your Cyberpunk 2077 folder]/archive/pc/mod/ and enjoy.
To uninstall, you can remove this file any time you like.
