New Halo: Campaign Evolved Mods Add Dynamic Time of Day & Dynamic Point Lights That Cast Real Shadows

Two new cool mods have been released for Halo: Campaign Evolved, aiming to further enhance its visual quality. The first mod adds a full dynamic time-of-day system, and the second adds dynamic point lights that cast real shadows.

Let’s start with the first mod. Created by ‘LewdSCP1471’, this mod makes every level have a dynamic day and night cycle. Players are also able to adjust the sky brightness, giving every level a very different feel as time progresses naturally.

To use it, you will need US4SS. Once installed, you can increase or decrease the speed at which time changes via the UE4SS external console.

TrueLight Shadows replaces non-shadowing Niagara simple lights from muzzle flashes, plasma projectiles, energy swords, shields, and other combat effects with dynamic point lights that cast real shadows.

TrueLight Shadows detects supported Niagara effects and replaces their simple lights with dynamic point lights. The new lights match the color, brightness, size, and other settings of the original Niagara effects. They also move and update in real time as the effects play. When supported by Unreal Engine, the mod enables dynamic shadows and uses the MegaLights rendering system. This makes lighting look more natural and realistic.

Here are the main features of TrueLight Shadows:

• Shadow-casting muzzle flashes for player, NPC, and vehicle weapons
• Dynamically lit plasma projectiles
• Energy sword lighting
• Plasma pistol charging and overcharge effects
• Covenant and portable shield lighting
• Support for other compatible weapon and energy effects
• Dynamic color, intensity, and radius capture using Niagara simulation data
• Effect identification using full asset paths
• Separate profiles for different effect variants, preventing colors from crossing between weapons
• Pooled point lights to reduce actor creation and destruction overhead
• MegaLights and ray-traced shadow properties enabled when supported
• Fixed 0.032-second muzzle-flash duration for tight visual synchronization
• No recurring global UObject scan during normal gameplay

You can go ahead and download these two mods from here and here. In theory, they should be compatible as they overhaul different things.

Speaking of Halo: Campaign Evolved, here are a few other mods for it. Earlier this week, I shared two mods that attempt to bring back the classic Cortana. So, if you were not happy with how Cortana looked in the remake, you should definitely grab them.

Then we have this mod that enables local split-screen co-op on PC. The PC version of Halo: Campaign Evolved shipped with the entire code for local split-screen co-op mode, even though there is no in-game setting. So, modders were able to enable it so that you can play with your friends on one PC.

I also highly recommend using these custom commands to disable Chromatic Aberration and Film Grain. Halo: Campaign Evolved does not have any in-game setting to disable them. And, honestly, the game looks bad with them. By removing them, you will greatly improve its visual presentation.

I should also note that even though there is an in-game setting for Mouse Smoothing, mouse movement felt weird. It did not feel like pure 1-1 mouse movement. Only when I used the custom mouse settings was I able to get proper raw mouse movement.

Have fun and stay tuned for more!

John Papadopoulos

John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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