Actually the sun is the light source. However there is also ambient lighting from the opposite side. In maps with all nebula it is ok, but in deep space with no nebula it is unrealistic.
There is a way to change the ambient lighting to make it darker. We did it for the SoA 2 mod to brighten the ships up a little bit. It requires some tweaking of the GS_Ship file. This is straight out of the SoA 2 Readme file.
Open the GS_Ship file located in the Pipeline Effect folder.
The line itself is over half way down and looks like this:
float4 GetLightColor(float3 incidence, float3 normal, float4 liteLightColor, float4 darkLightColor)
{
float dot = max(dot(incidence, normal), 0.f);
float lerpPercent = 1.f - clamp(pow(dot, 5.f), 0.f, 1.f); <------ This is the line you are looking for.
float blackThreshold = .65f;
float colorLerpPercent = min(lerpPercent / blackThreshold, 1.f);
Now, its the Float lerpPercent = 1.f that is the magic number. I have mine at .89, yours should be at 1.f (the default setting). When you lower the number, the ships get brighter. Raise the number they get darker...
Now this works for most NVIDIA users. For ATI users you do just the opposite. You RAISE the number, and the ships get brighter. When you lower it they get darker. Play around with the setting until you get desired results. I would have incorporated this into the mod, but since Nvidia/ATI use different rendering methods it is here as an optional tweak. Just make a backup of the original files in case you screw it up.
Hope this helps.
