Day / Night Cycles
 

Having day and night cycles can add a whole new dimension to a server if they're done right; different quests can be made accessible for better pacing, vampire mobs can walk the streets, different shops can be opened for alternative produce or pricing, unique species of Pokemon can be caught, the list goes on. The problem is though, no server has really utilized the concept well, and the effects of "night" have always seemed annoying. Some servers use cycles where days are over in the matter of minutes, while some seem to be in constant darkness, and I've set to see a happy medium come forward.

I'm just wondering what kind of cycle you think would be appropriate on a server. I'm finding it hard to pitch one that would allow the majority of players to play during a day setting, with night being a less common occurrence, especially since most people play in different timezones.

Something I have always wanted to do with a server is create a very nice day/night cycle. The way I would make it is so the day/night follows the day/night time of EST time in the US, which is where a lot of players are.

I like the idea of a full 24 hour day/night cycle per day for a server.

I'm with Tig here.

However, the problem that will come with that is if you have 'night only' quests on a true EST 24-hour cycle. Seeing how a large part of the Graalian population will probably have a bedtime when school season comes back around, a lot of people would miss out...or be really sneaky. ;)

Maybe you could set it up like Pokemon Silver/Gold does, make it so you adjust your own time but it would suck for multiplayer quests or someone trying to help you out.

Right now on Era Dev, the time is displaying roughly the EST time (it's off by a few minutes, thanks to timevar2 being hopelessly inaccurate), but I don't really know how that can be worked in well to the gameplay. 99percent of players have disabled the day/night system anyway, to the point it may not be worth even adding one.

Quests don't exactly fit into Era well, and I don't plan to have HP quests like we do now, or at least similar to how they are now. Time can't really be worked in if on a real life time schedule because, like Neim said, some people can only play during certain hours.

What would be cool is having a weather system. Zodiac use to have 1, but it was way to laggy and got removed

Weather systems just get disabled. GK has a very nice one, but unfortunately, no one uses it (from what I can tell).

They tend to just annoy people. The same goes for day/night systems.

day/night system's always seem like much more of a hassle, though i think it's cool to have; the hassle being that having a system where it doesn't affect anything makes it pointless and most will just turn it off, while having the system affect things makes it annoying if not implemented correctly

if you are going to try it out, i'd make it so that a day/night happens twice to maybe three times a day. this way if you happen to miss out on something that can only happen at day/night, you can at least have another chance at it on the same day. a 24 hour one would be cool, but then the timing for quest-related events would be tougher on the crowd of people who can only sign on at certain times of day, and most of them would always just be on at night

I turn mine off, because to be honest, when I am playing such a server like Maloira or Zodiac I am mostly fighting and on the move. When it is dark out it is hard for me to see and it really gets annoying. So I like being in the day most of the time because it makes everything easy.

Bump. Especially for Zodiac and Unholy Nation, this would be interesting.

The only problem with this is that the server would basically don't give a **** about the European players.
I live in Sweden and I would not like to play on a server who would have this day/night cycle. Everytime I would log on that server it would be night. :/

I would push for maybe a 12 hour cycle instead, you'll still have plenty of time to add the different events and it would probably work better considering the ranging timezones.

I always figured if I were to implement a day/night cycle, it'd be a global one, but one that would be very short-lived, like G2k1's. Basically, 1 RL second = 1 minute or so in the game. This would be fair to all players, as there would be many cycles of day/night in a single day, giving everyone an equal chance to participate in scripted events.

Even outside of online gaming, I'm not particularly fond of games that use real clocks. I mean... in some ways they have their perks, like Pokemon and Animal Crossing, but at the same time... I don't like having to go out of my way to participate in unique events, especially when I end up missing them and sometimes having to wait a whole year, or otherwise 'cheat'.

The downside is that the actual visual effects can be distracting, and effect gameplay in a negative and positive way. I hate walking in the dark, and to some it can be very taxing on their graphics cards and thusly lag them. On the otherhand, I'm on the fence about being able to disable/enable it. It's very easy to portray day and night without blacking the whole screen, via house windows and such... but I always find it odd that one player's screen can have darkness disabled and the other players screen not, thus a huge difference in what they're experiencing. So if one player's effects are disabled, the other player will most likely disable it to balance things out, then the next... and so on. It's a huge downward spiral that I think almost everyone does.

I agree 24 hours would not be a good idea, as some players would always be in the same time if they play for the same periods (such as a couple of hours each weekday after school/work and weekends)

I think a 7 day system can be maintained, because then perhaps more exciting things could happen at a weekend, such as a discount on prices perhaps - a little something nothing too significant, to add to the excitement of a weekend.

However, hours wise a 12 hour system essentially has a similar issue as a 24 hour one, and all the advantages discussed of triggering events, quests and shops etc would still be lost.

I think you'd need a number that does not divide into 24, such as a 7 hour cycle, so that each time you log on it is different or so. Would be no problems with a single day having multiple day/night cycles (3.x) or so!

Seriously speaking this is just ridiculous. Graal should be running smooth on even the lowest end computers, there's no excuse for how incompatible and "demanding" this game is in comparison to it's graphics.

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.

Yeah, and last time I checked night time isn't really pitch black thanks to our good old pal the moon.

Not sure what you mean.

Aye, that's why I tend not to make it too dark. Just dark enough to portray that it's night time.

it would be crazy cool if the sun and the moon were somehow implemented into a day/night system. i have no idea how that would be done correctly, but it would be pretty cool if the light particles that change the setting matched the positioning of the sun/moon in game

you could have quests where the moon has to be at a certain point to shine light into the cave that has the loot you want, or maybe you could have some sort of class-skill that is affected by the positioning of the sun

It can get nearly dark, actually... the only time the moon has a large effect on light at night is during a full moon. Regardless, a day/night effect only has to be dark enough to let the player know that it is night.

On The Darkness I have a simple day/night system. Certain things happen during certain times, monsters give a little more exp at a certain hour of the day and such. I I could set mine to the EST standard but I shift it a few hours so there's more day time in the real life evenings. Cause playing in the dark can get a little repetitive to me. I also have a calender which runs along with the day/night for holidays and such special stuff happened (in game time, not real life holidays)

Everyone mentions making day/night shorter to make sure everyone experiences different times-- I think it'd be cool to have day last for 48 real life hours followed by 24 hours of night.


So 48 hours for day, then 24 hours of night.

Meh, I don't like having to wait a whole day, let along two, for an event.

XP of course. And It would be nice to have backpals back. Perhaps fixed/changed so they do this sort of thing?

There is absolutely no reason to have backpals back. As I've posted before, virtually the same effect can be done via changing the colors of tilelayer[0].

This is totally possible. If 2D per-pixel lighting were implemented into Graal. Not only could you do day/night way better than just darkening the screen, but you could have real time shadows, dynamic light casting over 2D images to give them the appearance of depth, and just generally a way more polished looking game.

Check out this example:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q020X...eature=related

Granted, they have the room really dark for dramatic effect, but the same sort of setup could be done with a better lit room or area. Take note of how the level looks without the lighting. Definite improvement with the light system turned on. It helps break up repetitive tiling patterns as well.

There's also this one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqz4dunlhX4

In my opinion, this sort of system would improve Graal ten fold. However I doubt it would ever get implemented... people are still waiting for tile layers to be added.

I'm honestly surprised it hasn't been added. Graal is still using images for lights... which is like ancient nowadays.