Day/Night cycle

Danelo · 2012-06-26, 08:36 AM

Ok this is my simple idea for the day/night cycle timing

Instead of having for example a 1 hour time cycle we could instead have 1 hour and 2,5 minutes time cycle.

If you add 2,5 minutes that makes the cycle jump up 1 hour every day so players who work and come home around 16:00-19:00 will not experience the slight repetitiveness of day/night/day/night everyday but day/night... on Monday and night/day on Tuesday.

MacXXcaM · 2012-06-26, 08:51 AM

I don't think it'll be 1 hour after all. Probably 2-3h or even more. So a problem like that there's the same time of day when you're playing wouldn't exist anyway.

Danelo · 2012-06-26, 09:10 AM

Originally Posted by MacXXcaM

I don't think it'll be 1 hour after all. Probably 2-3h or even more. So a problem like that there's the same time of day when you're playing wouldn't exist anyway.

Cycles from 1 up to 4 hours will always repeat itself and I think 5+ hours is to long.

Knotz · 2012-06-26, 09:22 AM

i think 5 hours would be best, that way the time jumps forward by 1 hour every day

MacXXcaM · 2012-06-26, 09:28 AM

Originally Posted by Danelo

Cycles from 1 up to 4 hours will always repeat itself and I think 5+ hours is to long.

You're right. Wasn't thinking... ^^

Well then 4,5h or so...

Dagron · 2012-06-26, 10:57 AM

There were a few threads on this a little while ago, search for them if you want to (i'd link them, but i'm on my way out).

The day/night repetition issue was discussed and some people suggested having 7h cycles (3.5h days / 3.5h nights) to not only prevent that, but to have a repeating weekly day/night schedule (so night ops could be planned in advance, etc).

Another solution was to have days longer than nights (there was even talk of seasons, days would be longer in the summer, nights would be longer in the winter).

Memeotis · 2012-06-26, 11:22 AM

Having a short day/night-cycle will make the whole cycle seem... pointless. The whole point about having different lighting in a game is to force players to adapt, and if it's only 1 hour, then spec-ops teams will be sitting around for 30 minutes at a time, waiting for their 30 minute 'time to shine'.

I'm assuming people want it to be short because then players get to experience the whole cycle. The main demographic the developers especially need to focus on are the players who play at the same time every day, for the same amount of hours. For example the husband who plays from 10pm to midnight every night.

The different times of day: morning, mid-day, evening and night-time need to be several hours long each, because otherwise they will not have an relevant impact on the gameplay, but at the same time you want the husbands to experience a variety of timezones.

Simple. Make the day/night-cycle 19 hours long. This way different timezones will have a tremendous impact on how the game plays, but it will also mean that every time the husband logs on at 10pm, it will be a different timezone than it was yesterday.

EDIT: I originally wrote 18 hours, but that would result in the husband experiencing only 3 different in-game time-periods. Changing it to 19, means that even though the fourth day in a row is largely a repeat of the first day, it will have shifted marginally.

Dagron · 2012-06-26, 01:00 PM

Originally Posted by Memeotis

Make the day/night-cycle 19 hours long. This way different timezones will have a tremendous impact on how the game plays, but it will also mean that every time the husband logs on at 10pm, it will be a different timezone than it was yesterday.

Sounds interesting, but i know some people don't want long nights. If it was up to me the day/night cycle would be like that, close to 24h (or at least over 12h) and with different timezones in each continent, but i don't think it's gonna happen.

I don't see why people are so bothered by darkness in an FPS game... overcoming adversity is part of the fun imo.

Zolan · 2012-06-26, 02:12 PM

I'm all for 6 hour cycles. 4 cycles per day seems enough to give everyone a taste of each.

Memeotis · 2012-06-26, 02:53 PM

Originally Posted by Dagron

Sounds interesting, but i know some people don't want long nights. If it was up to me the day/night cycle would be like that, close to 24h (or at least over 12h) and with different timezones in each continent, but i don't think it's gonna happen.

I don't see why people are so bothered by darkness in an FPS game... overcoming adversity is part of the fun imo.

Hadn't considered the different continents having different timezones. That would still make it somewhat "exploitable" by outfits, but it wouldn't have the same bad after-taste, since outfits wouldn't wait around for their preferred timezone. So yeah, good idea.

Baneblade · 2012-06-26, 03:05 PM

5:55 revolutions. This will slowly shift the ingame cycle, but not so rapidly as to need a suspension of belief.

BillyBob · 2012-06-26, 03:58 PM

Originally Posted by Baneblade

5:55 revolutions. This will slowly shift the ingame cycle, but not so rapidly as to need a suspension of belief.

That sounds a whole lot better than a 19hr cycle which is FAR too long IMO.

The important factors to me are:

- Not too long in order to experience a cycle transition within a somewhat reasonable timeframe.

- Not too short in order for it to still feel believable and somewhat "natural".

- Not in sync with RL, for example night in game always occurring at 5 PM every single day etc.

There's certainly a sweet-spot, and I'm personally guessing it would be somewhere around 4-6 hours.

/BB

Dagron · 2012-06-26, 04:34 PM

Sounds reasonable to me.

Toppopia · 2012-06-26, 05:06 PM

http://www.planetside-universe.com/s...ad.php?t=41329

This was a poll that i made about all the different issues about day/night cycles, everyone agreed that each continent should have different time zones, and everyone thought that night should be around 5 hours, because many people provided good calculations on why 5 hours is good, because each day, the night will end up starting at a different time and everyone can enjoy all times of day when playing.

But the comments and results speak for themselves.