V 3.0: Lens flares & dirt, visor reflections / water droplets, god rays, depth of field, night & thermal vision scopes, dynamic wet surfaces with reflections, rainbows, volumetric light & fog, colored speculars and many other effects.
It's incredibly been one year and a half now since I published here on moddb the very first screenshot with sun shafts ever done in SoC, made by Ket and me. Other modders followed remaking the effect, some of them in all honesty quite nicely, others rather poorly.
After having been working on many other features since then, Ket and me have taken our time to make the best of our sun shafts effect, at least what we would define as being the best. The result is now very close to what could be called a final release state.
I am very well aware that not everybody will completly like the final results, but I can ensure that there will be more than enough settings allowing you to adjust whatever part of the effect you like to your personal favor ;)
IMHO this is the type of location where the sunshafts really work, they add an extra layer of immersion into the indoors (hope that makes sense :)), it now appears to be a dusty interior highlighted by the light coming in through the window. The work you and Ket have put into this is paying dividends judging by these latest screens you have posted. The fact you can adjust the settings to personal preference is an added bonus.
I know what you mean. Unfortunately there is currently no means to restrict the sunshafts to certain locations (besides using heavy scripting, which would probably make X-Ray unstable like hell at some point). But who knows, maybe we'll find a good way to do that somewhere in future ;)