Time Cycle? 24 hour or shorter?

[SuperMorto]

I did a search for this but couldnt find a thread, what do you folks think about the time cycle? Will it be 24 hours or will it be cut shorter? Not sure if this has been confirmed or not, but I did a search.

My reason for asking is, I will only be playing late on during the week and can imagine it will be night, but I do know some games cut the cycle down to about 8 or 4 hours so players get night and day during one game session.

And this picture is not related to the post but look how nice the world was before they split it!!!

http://pcmedia.ign.com/pc/image/planetside_052803_001_640w.jpg

[DviddLeff]

It cant be 24 hours or 12, 6, or 4 as then for example if someone can only play between 7-8 every night they will only ever see the same time on that continent.

It should be an odd number to keep it cycling.

[Lonehunter]

It cant be 24 hours or 12, 6, or 4 as then for example if someone can only play between 7-8 every night they will only ever see the same time on that continent.

It should be an odd number to keep it cycling.
Perfect
Edit: But, I don't want to see it any less then 4 hours. Keep in mind it should be different times on different continents. I'd like to see a global map that shows weather like the one Super posted, but also a slight shade creeping across the map indicating the sunrise/sunset line. Similar to...

http://download.chip.eu/ii/69728472_b89b88e218.gif

[Xyntech]

I think 5 hour days is about perfect. You don't want it to drag out too long, where you never get to see the transitions, so at least four hours makes sense, but you also want it to cycle around the real world clock, so an odd number is better.

7 hours just seems like it would be a little too long and I don't think 3 hours would be long enough to enjoy the daylight or nighttime properly.

5 hours? Any objections?

[SuperMorto]

It cant be 24 hours or 12, 6, or 4 as then for example if someone can only play between 7-8 every night they will only ever see the same time on that continent.

It should be an odd number to keep it cycling.

Good point, and like the rest say good idea. I think they will do research on how long the everage gamer is online and base it of that, but yea like you say odd number to make it rotate out of sync. Good plan sir! :) :groovy:

I would say about 3 hours, although my average gaming time is about 5/6/7/8+ :)

But this also bring up many more questions....

Night vision etc? (ill put that in the ideas forum if its not there already!)

[SuperMorto]

What they could do is have a 3 hour day and a 2 hour night. That sounds about right.

[Lonehunter]

I think some form of night vision will exist. When commenting on the level of darkness Higby mentioned someone could be working a spot light on a base wall trying to find people, like an acme cartoon. Personally I'd like to see a form of heat vision. It's not very high tech futuristic, but it could still involve things like cloaker detection, some kind of deployable heat field, vehicles could give off huge amounts.

[Hamma]

I think the cycle should be 3-6 hours, somewhere in there. Someone tweeted @higby a few weeks back and he responded that it remains in Flux and will likley change in beta.

[Graywolves]

I think the cycle should be 7.


As long as it isn't divisible by 24, everyone will eventually play in different times even if they play for one hour every day from 9pm to 10pm

[Sirisian]

We should get a planet with 15 minute day night cycles. That would be epic.

[Xaine]

We should get a planet with 15 minute day night cycles. That would be epic.

That would make me dizzy.

However,

Epic.

[EASyEightyEight]

That would make me dizzy.

However,

Epic.

Exactly how would we land on something like that? That might work during an event where some nutjob trips a Vanu thing-a-majig and for a whole week the world is going berserk. Though I think we can do without a second bending, and just use foreign planets as a means to introduce new game mechanics, while keeping the lands of Auraxis the classic Planetside warfare we all know and love.

I for one would love to collect modules from run down facilities filled with aliens/zombies while racing the other empires to them, but going into it any more than that is for another discussion.

[Traak]

One planet, please. A "year" lasts a month, and a "day" lasts 5 hours, at the equator during equinox.

During night seasons at the poles, we have continuous night, as the sun is below the horizon, and the opposite pole has continuous day as the sun stays in the sky, though it may swoop low to the horizon.

In other words, make it like Earth, but faster. How long a day or night you wanted would determine where on the planet you traveled. If you like night fighting, you can stay near the poles for the duration of the one-week winter, if you like daylight only, you can stay near the other pole while it has its one-week summer.

If you like both, where you are on a continent will determine how long the days or nights are in any given season, just like on Earth.

Gives a variety, and you can fight in whatever environment you prefer.

[Bruttal]

I think the cycle should be 3-6 hours, somewhere in there. Someone tweeted @higby a few weeks back and he responded that it remains in Flux and will likley change in beta.

I think 3-6 hours would be good, and good cloudy days where the sun doesn't even peek out but maybe a small beem every 15-25 mins where sun brakes though the clouds before covering the sun agian.

[Canaris]

Everyone knows that the Sun travels around Auraxis, not the other way around :P
It says it in the book of TR!

[Traak]

I wonder how many suns Auraxis has?

[Redshift]

Depending on the lore there's no reason to say it has to be a standard cycle anyway, we know binary star systems exist, you could easily make the cycle oscillate between 4-7 hours or so.

[Hamma]

We should get a planet with 15 minute day night cycles. That would be epic.

:lol:

You jump in the air and the planet moves under you :lol:

[TacosWLove]

Yeah, something along the lins of 4-6hrs I think would be kewl and stagger it somehow so that it slow changes through next week. So this week it might go dark at 7pm, next week at 8pm, thrids week 9pm, etc..etc until it cycles all the way through in like 6 weeks.

[SuperMorto]

I wonder how many suns Auraxis has?

Im more then sure I read many years ago it has 3, that's why its always in daylight.

[Lonehunter]

I wouldn't mind a continent that stayed dark or light constantly

[Raymac]

Three shalt be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three.
Four shalt thou not count, nor either count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three.
Five is right out.

Sorry, couldn't resist. Frankly, I'm just looking forward to an actual day/night cycle instead of just the old day/purple cycle.

[Graywolves]

The world is how it is percieved.

Science and reason are but us making feeble attempts to understand what we believe to be surrounded by.

We accept the standards of a reality we are given. All one can do is observe.

[Talek Krell]

I'd like fairly long cycles for day and night (compared to what most people are suggesting). 9 or 11 hours maybe, so that the various times of day can all last for an hour or two.

[Brusi]

Me too... I kinda like the idea of having 23 hour days. WOuld mean that you would be logging in during night time pretty regularly though, and it may last for your entire play session.

I think it's awesome! Players who just don't like it™ such as those who never go to the caves will be very upset though.

[Xyntech]

What would be cool is if they accounted for the global position of each continent and added varying lengths of days and nights depending on where you were.

Ceryshen and Esamir could be at opposite sides of the planet and both be pretty close to the poles. One would have endless days and the other would have endless nights during one season of the year and vice versa during the opposite season. In between they would be more standard length days and nights.

I still prefer 5 hour days, but I could go as high as 11 without feeling too weird I guess. 23 just seems a bit extreme to me, I just don't feel like real world timescale would be as fun. 47 hour days would be a pain I think.

On the other hand, there would realistically be half of the world in daylight and half the world in the shadow of night at any given time. Why not have longer nights? If you don't feel like fighting in the dark, move to somewhere better lit. Still, I think 11 hours would be a better maximum. Prevents black ops missions from having too much time to fight over a continent before the daylight reinforcements come in to mop up. I also like the idea of big battles raging on into the night after starting in the daylight, which would happen more often with a shorter day cycle.

Actually the more I think about this, 11 hours may be a better choice.

So if you did have seasons, how long should a year be? 5 weeks? Just over one week per season?

[Talek Krell]

What would be cool is if they accounted for the global position of each continent and added varying lengths of days and nights depending on where you were.Ah, that's right. Treating it as an actual world complete with a dateline would mean that if you just can't stand night fighting then you can (hopefully) go fight on a continent where it's day. That should address the concerns of people getting tired of the dark, or the light, or the snow, or whatnot.

I'd say 5 weeks for a rotation of seasons is as reasonable as anything.

[Xyntech]

Ah, that's right. Treating it as an actual world complete with a dateline would mean that if you just can't stand night fighting then you can (hopefully) go fight on a continent where it's day. That should address the concerns of people getting tired of the dark, or the light, or the snow, or whatnot.

Conversely, if someone was tired of fighting in the daytime all the time, they could deliberately seek out continents that were in the middle of the night cycle. I'm sure quite a few tactical outfits would love to make trouble everywhere it was dark.

Right now I'm trying to imagine dogfighting in a deep dark nighttime environment. This game has the potential for some pretty epic shit.


I'd say 5 weeks for a rotation of seasons is as reasonable as anything.

They could also go for 7 weeks as an alternative, a little over 2 weeks per season. I think somewhere around a month would be the limit for acceptable season length though, but I think that would already be pushing it a bit far.

[NapalmEnima]

Someone tweeted @higby a few weeks back and he responded that it remains in Flux and will likley change in beta.

Yep:


We haven't locked that down 100% yet, it's a bit too fast internally. I have a feeling it'll be a couple hours long eventually.


Dunno if they've considered doing different "time zones" or anything like that... though they Really Should. Make it feel more like you're on a Planet. Even if they're all scattered across 3-4 hours "hours" on one side of the planet, at least it wouldn't seem like they're all lined up on the same longitude.

[Traak]

One planet, please. A "year" lasts a month, and a "day" lasts 5 hours, at the equator during equinox.

During night seasons at the poles, we have continuous night, as the sun is below the horizon, and the opposite pole has continuous day as the sun stays in the sky, though it may swoop low to the horizon.

In other words, make it like Earth, but faster. How long a day or night you wanted would determine where on the planet you traveled. If you like night fighting, you can stay near the poles for the duration of the one-week winter, if you like daylight only, you can stay near the other pole while it has its one-week summer.

If you like both, where you are on a continent will determine how long the days or nights are in any given season, just like on Earth.

Gives a variety, and you can fight in whatever environment you prefer.

There you go. For those of you who are re-stating the exact ideas I already said. This way you don't have to risk whatever it is you figured you would lose by going back a page and reading.:lol:

[Hamma]

Different time zones on different continents would be just awesome, I hope they go that way.

[Infektion]

We should get a planet with 15 minute day night cycles. That would be epic.

and one with 24 hour cycle =D like some icy planet, we can call it "Melaska"

and it's past inhabitants are all dead due to suicide caused by depression from living in such a cold, gloomy, dark place.

[NapalmEnima]

Actually, if they did scatter the continents around their time zones relatively evenly, then folks who wanted to fight in a particular section of the day/night cycle could just follow it around from continent to continent.

Pop locks might put a crimp in that though. Hard to go from continent A to continent B with your 20 mates when there's no room for you.

Even so, we might see night-specialist outfits that were particularly good a being all sneaky-like in the dark.

[Xyntech]

Actually, if they did scatter the continents around their time zones relatively evenly, then folks who wanted to fight in a particular section of the day/night cycle could just follow it around from continent to continent.

Pop locks might put a crimp in that though. Hard to go from continent A to continent B with your 20 mates when there's no room for you.

Even so, we might see night-specialist outfits that were particularly good a being all sneaky-like in the dark.

If they were evenly distributed, you could just go somewhere else. At least half of the continents would have some level of daylight to work with.

I guess that also depends on how many continents we have at launch.

[Traak]

I don't care if we have 1000 continents. As long as they are all on one, spherical planet. Spherical, with the continents on the OUTER surface, like Earth. Not some HALO-on-crack ball with all the conts on the inside of sphere.

The Bending of the Story Beyond Usefulness is not something we need again.

If we want to get to a "locked" cont, then we can swim. It may take hours, but we can swim, or fly, or drive a Magrider, or whatever.

Put in some extreme oceanic weather, with towering waves smashing against the ship. The PhysX should not be too difficult in this day.

A whole sub-game could evolve n the oceans, and under them.