Well it depends I think... I think having alpha transparency mask the whole screen in real-time can be graphically demanding no matter how efficient the game is coded. Then again, I don't code much. I have a 128mb graphics card and I rarely get any sort of lag unless there are like 200+ images being displayed, but I know on my older cards that were like, 16mb max, seteffect and such could slow it down a bit.

Well yeah, 16mb is understandable but my point is that Graal takes far too much CPU for what it is. Look at it, and then look at how demanding it is in comparison to what you're getting. For a day/night system to drop one's FPS says a lot about Graal itself...:|

Oh, well CPU and graphics memory are two different things :P day/night should only drop FPS if you have a bad graphics card, otherwise it's not very CPU intensive.

I'm talking about Graal in general but if the day/night is dropping anyone's FPS it's kind of pathetic and I don't know on who's part; Graal's or the poor lad with the 16mb ATI RAGE~!!!1 gfx card.

it's graal's fault from my perspective

it wasn't as laggy in V2, but after V3 it's just been terrible

Funny how we could still be running V2 and would hardly notice a difference on the public playerworlds.

When we had V2, I was still using dial-up. And it ran incredibly smoothly. In fact, it ran as smoothly, if not better than with the cable modem I use now.

As for graal being taxing to the gfx card/CPU/whatever, Im using a computer that isnt even a year old yet. Pretty good hardware, so nothing here thats bad. Plus a few gigs of ram, tons of space on the hard drive, etc, etc, Yet for some reason, when I play zodiac, I have to run it with damage text off, particles off, weather off, lights off, event notifications off, shouts off, trade channel off, sometimes even nation chat off, And even then, the lag can get pretty bad. Even being in a party with all these features turned off can lag me. Especially when im in a party taking part in a raid, my speed is effectively cut in half, more or less. Yet I can run a game like Guild Wars with no problems at all.

Which of course, leads me to believe that it has to be a problem with graal.

Are you using Vista or XP (or some other OS)?

Or Zodiac, in this case :p

zodiac is the worse as it probably uses the most NPCs. it's still pretty bad on most servers though. the best is on delteria in my opinion, though i've gotten used to unholy nation's lag (which isn't too terrible anyways)

A lot of you seem to be highlighting that day/night systems are usually disabled, and they are. I don't believe that it is because of the concept itself, rather because effects wise they are done in a pretty bad way. I don't think I've yet to see a day/night cycle that didn't just slap on a dark overlay, and simply making the players' screens darker is obtrusive. Here is an example of what we've been kind of limited to on Graal servers as far as "night" goes, and beside it what I feel is a much more classier and less obtrusive effect:

http://i284.photobucket.com/albums/l...ht_current.gif http://i284.photobucket.com/albums/l...ynight_new.gif

Yeah I don't script so I don't know how possible transitioning something like this would be, and obviously I wouldn't want it to change that fast, but I think it comes across way better; actually making the tiles look like they're in a night setting. If I couldn't achieve something like this then I'd rather not have a day/night cycle because I have yet to see an overlay effect that looked aesthetically good.

Day/Night cycles can have many perks to them, but overall I think they really assist in the immersion and pacing of a server and its gameplay. I have played Animal Crossing and fished in the morning, then fished at night, and knowing that there are going to be different types at different times is exciting. It doesn't throw everything at you at once, and this is what a lot of the servers do already, especially those with quests; everything is open field, you rarely have to do something else to gain entry to other branches of quests, and therefore there really isn't any kind of pacing. Pacing is important because it helps you bring out hours of gameplay, and contrary to what I think people are going to say, doesn't always mean stretching things out so it's slow as hell. If I know a graveyard lights up at night and I'd be able to quest in it, I'd have an opportunity open to me at a specific time, rather than just going there and doing it when I like. For things like Era, it would allow you to pace your economy, and imagine what kind of people come out at night in a real world setting ;). The opportunities are pretty big, but nobody has really used them.

I'm not sure about a 24 hour cycle, because like others have expressed concerns about, I wouldn't like to log on and play entirely in night and have to wait up for hours to get into a decent setting. Depending on play time, people could only come on for a couple of hours each day, and to be playing at night every time you log on might come across as unwelcoming. I like your idea about a 3 day cycle per real day Spark, but that might be too many days? I don't know, but another concern I have is not being able to keep track of days through a calendar because of this through having 2x the amount of days. I think that might be the most suitable however.

http://i284.photobucket.com/albums/l...ynight_new.gif

Makes me think.. Setbackpals.

Instead of scripting it using seteffect, you can change the colors of the tilelayer itself to have the same effect... but I don't like the look of just the tiles being colored, but all sprites/NPCs not. This includes doors and such as well. If we had more image layers we could use a polygon with mode 0 to have a much better looking effects, but ya...

The lighting themselves could be very smooth if done right. All it needs is a buffer calculation between the hours that will smooth for each minute/second or so. It's not that hard and I've done it plenty of times before.

Nice.

When you color tiles using script that's all it comes down to. I doubt you'll get a similar night setting just coloring in the tiles with one tone.

It's a just dark overlay, and like already mentioned, obstructive to sight rather than aesthetically conveying a "night" setting.