Once upon a time, the night in Azeroth was dark, and it felt like a night. Torches enlightened your way and the cities offered shadowy corners.

But then, the night got reduced and the feeling of a real night vanished.

To get back this feeling of night, NightIllusion tries to imitate the shadow of the Azerothian night by adding a more or less transparent layer. The night starts and ends at a setable time and the darkness increases with dawn and decreases with dusk. When you are entering a building, i.e. you are "inside" by engine, the shadows are removed until you go back out. Feel free to brighten a radius centered on your character, but the shadows might remain around you.

While we are dreaming of an engine option to get back the feeling of a real night in warcraft, I hope that NightIllusion will help you out until then.

Modes

You can enter three different modes:

1) Automatic Mode [default]

When the time for starting the night is reached it begins to darken. Then it will be dark for most of the night (60%), before it dawns again. At entering a building (being inside by engine) the shadows are removed and at leaving added again. You can choose whether you want to take some illumination with you which creates a lighter part in the center of the screen.

2) Dungeon Mode

But if you are on adventures and need a shadowy house or cave you can use the "Dungeon Mode" which disables the automatic shadowing. Another way to enter Dungeon Mode is to increase/decrease the shadows. Resetting it will reactivate the automation (1). As a side note: don't forget to bring a torch or similar light with you...

3) Disable NightIllusion

Also, you can just turn this addon off without deactivating it completely. For example, if you want to go raiding or PvP/PvE. The update and shadow mechanisms are disabled in this time.

Commands

The default settings are:

Night starts at 20:00 (8:00 p.m.)
Night ends at 6:00 (6:00 a.m.)
This results in a 10 hour night, inclusive 2 hours each for dawn and dusk respectively
Maximal alpha is 0.7 so that you are not sitting in full darkness at the first login

You can change some of the settings via key binds and chat commands.

Key Binds

Following commands can be key bound:

Increase shadow (enables dungeon mode)
Decrease shadow (enables dungeon mode)
Reset shadow (disables dungeon mode and activates automatic alpha calculation)
Toggle illumination
Toggle Dungeon Mode
(De-)Activate this addon

Chat Commands

As I'm still working on it, some commands are only changeable by chat commands for now.

Change transparency

The maximum and minimum transparency can be set by commands currently:

/nightillusion minalpha x.x
/nightillusion maxalpha x.x

The alpha must be a value between 0.0 and 1.0.

Change start and end time of the night

/nightillusion startnight hh:mm
/nightillusion endnight hh:mm

You can use either the 24h or 12h (a.m./p.m.) format. For a.m./p.m. please use it as follows

/nightillusion startnight hh:mm a.m.
/nightillusion endnight hh:mm p.m.

Enter /nightillusion in the chat for further options.

Idea

I guess many people had thought every now and then about an illusion of a night in Warcraft. But as I haven't had this idea initially I want to thank Konogar-Forscherliga for sharing it with me and let me code it.

Known Caveats

Chat bubbles are behind the shadow.
No scaling of the light currently.
The shadows might be too small for high resolutions (tested it only with my 1680x1050).