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Tbh, I was really excited when the day/night schedules were first announced for DOS and then got really disappointed when they had to be cancelled. But after actually playing DOS I have to say that I haven't really missed the day/night cycles: the game had so many other mechanics that I didn't feel that it really needed day/night cycles to be eenjoyable and immersive. I would of course welcome the addition of day/night to DOS 2 but I would rather have a more polished existing game features than half-done day/night cycles.

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Pity, I like day/night schedules. Except when I need someone and it's night and trying to get hold of them means I'm trespassing and it all goes horribly wrong. Yes, I'm looking at you, Oblivion. But at least with Oblivion it actually worked well and was easy to add mods that did the same thing, and also made my character follow a suitable schedule that added to my role-playing malarky.

Er, yeah. Actually I'd really like a proper day/night schedule even if I can't realistically expect it to happen.


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Originally Posted by Vometia
Pity, I like day/night schedules. Except when I need someone and it's night and trying to get hold of them means I'm trespassing and it all goes horribly wrong. Yes, I'm looking at you, Oblivion. But at least with Oblivion it actually worked well and was easy to add mods that did the same thing, and also made my character follow a suitable schedule that added to my role-playing malarky.

Er, yeah. Actually I'd really like a proper day/night schedule even if I can't realistically expect it to happen.


Well if Larian would simply encode current technology you could text the store owner at night & ask him to open the door. Then poof no more trespassing concerns :p

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Originally Posted by gbnf
Well if Larian would simply encode current technology you could text the store owner at night & ask him to open the door. Then poof no more trespassing concerns :p

I think I prefer the established form of short-range communication used in mediaeval times: shouting. laugh Possibly accompanied by stones, but only small ones as broken panes would tend to see the prospective shopper being shooed away with a broom or worse.


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That is contributing nothing to the discussion. People already know about that.

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I only want this feature if they're able to implement it properly and without killing the game's other features. Otherwise, it could be sheer overload and burn-out for the teams.

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Day and night I could take or leave. Weather I would definitely like, even if it were mostly aesthetic, as I find it to provide a lot of atmosphere in other games.

One thing I'd like, knowing full well there won't be day/night cycles, is for the lighting on the world map to be a little more uniform. In DOS1, the starting area was lit as if it were morning, with the sun--and shadows--shifting as you moved further north on the map. It was great for creating a sense of the day passing the first time you explored, but if you ever visited past areas--or even scrolled back over to other areas of the map--the lighting would shift backwards to looking like morning. Also, if you scrolled outside of Cyseal, there was kind of an awkward shift between the sunny inside of the city and the rainy exterior countryside. It was a little immersion breaking for me. A minor detail, really, but one I always noticed and one I'd prefer reconsidered.

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I don't think weather and day and night have to be that complex, but I would like to see it in game.

Well, in older RPGs there were events that would make you play at night, or the weather would change. IMO, there's no NEED for a cycle, but it would be nice to have a part in the game when it would become night or the weather would change, something like that. To create rare rain weather that would make some npcs go to cover is cool and simple. The point is that the areas that one goes through in D:OS make one not miss weather cycles, because there was a snowy area, a dark area, a beach area, a windy area, and that was satisfying enough.

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Oh I think a proper weather system and day/night system IS complex. And I mean a proper system, where people actually realistically reacts to the environment condition. You can't expect a painter to hang around under the rain at night, on the town's central plazza, to sell his paintings. Not only would the guy be nuts not to run to cover and/or near a fire, but he wouldn't let his paintings risk being damaged smile

And that's just one obvious example. In the end, Larian isn't willing to have a purely cosmetic system of night and day, neither are they really interested in dedicating ressources to NPC behaviours...
On the other hand, sure, weather may be a tad easier to implement, especially since they already have static weather conditions in DOS1. Just make them dynamic, maybe force a specific weather upon towns or quest hubs in general. Either way, with or without, I'm okay with what I'll get. smile


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Originally Posted by Slapstick
In games that include day/night cycles, I often end up feeling that the nights are way too long. So much of the charm and flavour of how an area looks gets lost when the screen goes "no, it's night now. You can't see".

Same for me, actually, but there's nothing wrong with having short nights and long days in Summer time. And night has charm and flavor too, albeit of a different kind and in smaller doses.

Personally I'm still hoping they make "Night & Day" the main theme of D:OS 3. That, and the passage of time. If it's too complicated as a stretch goal and too complex to include at all when there's so much else going on... then focus on it completely and give it the attention it deserves.

It could be tightly integrated with the main story, some obscure and all-encompassing light and darkness duality problem. Or, more down to earth, something to do with the sun, the moon, and the source. Divinity already has all the elements, but no real light and dark magic (curious, given its name). There could be a whole gameplay system behind the night and the day, although of course there's always the question of whether it would be enjoyable. Waiting around is boring and dark towns are bleak, so they need to be made fun in other ways during those hours.

Dreams are one thing that could be explored at night, as are nightmares or course. What if they were corporeal? If you could enter them at night and return with physical manifestations?

Or how about this then: Zelda - A Link to the Past had a whole world to explore, which featured a "dark" parallel world that you could switch to at will via a magic mirror. It opened up all kinds of interesting possibilities. Would something like this not work just fine in D:OS? Have a second teleporter pyramid pair, one that doesn't teleport through space, but through time (or through dimensions). Maybe exactly 12 hours back and forth. Invent reasons for stuff to prevent time paradoxes. ... or, uh, perhaps it would be easier to just do dark and light mirror worlds like in Zelda, or simply have a phase-shifted continuum on top of the real world. The latter would defeat the purpose of having a day/night cycle though...

Anyway, there are lots of (explored and) unexplored gameplay opportunities with night and day, on top of all the usual benefits.

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Thinking from the perspective of a modder... If we can make maps, we can make maps dark. If we can create scripts, we can force a certain time or event to trigger 'night,' aka a duplicate map of the original in dark form. This would be more akin to games where it's always day until you 'sleep.' It's not a realistic solution, but modders could certainly create this version.

I imagine, depending on how open the scripting engine is, we could create a night/day system from scratch. On certain events, check the time (or maybe the game is always listening for time). If it's between certain numbers, cause a recalc of alpha and color based on predefined settings. Might be jarring, and it would be fairly resource intensive. The benefit of a system like this in code is efficiency.

At the end of the day, though, I'm not sold it's necessary for a game like D:OS. Certainly it's a cool feature, but not one that would sell the game.

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Originally Posted by HolmstN
Thinking from the perspective of a modder... If we can make maps, we can make maps dark. If we can create scripts, we can force a certain time or event to trigger 'night,'

If I remember correctly SniperHF faked some.
I saw that on youtube I think. Maybe he can talk about what he has made.

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Originally Posted by HolmstN
Thinking from the perspective of a modder... If we can make maps, we can make maps dark. If we can create scripts, we can force a certain time or event to trigger 'night,' aka a duplicate map of the original in dark form. This would be more akin to games where it's always day until you 'sleep.' It's not a realistic solution, but modders could certainly create this version.

I imagine, depending on how open the scripting engine is, we could create a night/day system from scratch. On certain events, check the time (or maybe the game is always listening for time). If it's between certain numbers, cause a recalc of alpha and color based on predefined settings. Might be jarring, and it would be fairly resource intensive. The benefit of a system like this in code is efficiency.

At the end of the day, though, I'm not sold it's necessary for a game like D:OS. Certainly it's a cool feature, but not one that would sell the game.


nice thoughts, but not necessary, b/c as far as i can remember the divinity engine already supports "dynamic lighting". dont know whether this is the terminus technicus, but what i mean: ie a technology that changes ambient light (and everything else connected to that) according to time of day based on a slider/single variable dynamically.
So, "everything" that is needed for a (cosmetic) day/night cycle is a script that changes that variable continuously (or based on certain events if prefered)

Last edited by 4verse; 13/10/15 03:27 PM.

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Larian has said that you could create day and night through triggers to change the lighting.


Making a duplicate map though, is not a very efficient plan. Each map in D:OS has a buttload of things to interact with, move around, destroy, and the state of each and every one of them is saved. That's why the saved games are so big. So, you would need to duplicate the current state of the map, which probably means a lengthy load time. And that's also hoping that duplicating the map doesn't also break all the intertwined story and script triggers.

Plus, because of multiplayer, you'd have to put this trigger in a separate map than the one you want to change the time of so it doesn't change suddenly when player 2 is wandering about in the middle.

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Originally Posted by HolmstN
Thinking from the perspective of a modder... If we can make maps, we can make maps dark. If we can create scripts, we can force a certain time or event to trigger 'night,' aka a duplicate map of the original in dark form. This would be more akin to games where it's always day until you 'sleep.' It's not a realistic solution, but modders could certainly create this version.

I prefer the approach of the "weather" (including day/night cycles) as well as NPCs, creatures and so on just following a clock: I'd rather not see a sudden transition or two maps that could get out of sync.

My main experience of modding was with Oblivion, but a simple clock that dictated the weather as well as triggering schedules seemed to work very well. From an RP perspective I preferred to have my PC questing during daylight and catching up with some much-needed sleep at night; and where nights were concerned I added a mod that made them typically dark enough (dependent on weather and the location of the moons) where I couldn't see my hand in front of me, and decided I'd be better off in a comfortable bed (or even a straw mattress with fleas!) than using a torch and various spells to combat the darkness.


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Originally Posted by norD
Originally Posted by HolmstN
Thinking from the perspective of a modder... If we can make maps, we can make maps dark. If we can create scripts, we can force a certain time or event to trigger 'night,'

If I remember correctly SniperHF faked some.
I saw that on youtube I think. Maybe he can talk about what he has made.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceqq2JFWI4g&list=PLJA_Rkb-8ptvIzBNT2-GuRMv5KEtxWSBo

Last edited by 4verse; 13/10/15 06:18 PM.

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Thanks mate. Exactly what I was talking about smile

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Also, if I may shamelessly plug, here's a different, more organic look at what a day night cycle might feel like, though the cycle should be even slower than that. Where Sniper uses 15-24 atmospheres (I don't recall how many exactly), I just use four:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Eih7CW4ph8

If Larian could make the atmosphere triggers a bit more versatile, that's be awesome. I wish I could edit the transition time of an atmosphere with a script for example, so I could make the atmospheres have different lengths, say if I wanted a slightly shorter night than the day atmospheres without screwing up the transition times. And it'd be nice to not have the transition could bypassed when you teleport in or out of the transition trigger. Sniper's many atmospheres makes this less noticeable probably, since if you have a different atmosphere for your upstair rooms, then you can have a teleport trigger send you there, and then come back, and while it'll still skip ahead to finishing the transition time, the timer will soon boot up again to transition the atmosphere again, so it won't be sitting there still for very long. That's compared to four atmospheres, which if you skip ahead of the transition time with 300 second transitions, the atmosphere might be stuck as it is for 250 seconds instead if giving that slow transition.

Another option is to have maybe 8 atmospheres to represent 3-hour cycles, and just make the transitions quick (5-10 seconds) but hold those atmospheres, which would also use a lot less CPU than constantly moving the shadows. But not quite as immersive.

Anyway, hope Larian gives us the capacity to add a day night cycle to the main game if we want.

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Originally Posted by HolmstN
I imagine, depending on how open the scripting engine is, we could create a night/day system from scratch.


Yes, a few of us have implemented day/night cycles and NPC schedules in our prototyping and/or WIP. It requires a bit of 'fiddling' though and is not user friendly by any stretch of the imagination. The primary problem is that atmosphere triggers only fire when a player is moving inside of it. If a player just stands there, even if you update the atmosphere associated with the trigger, the atmosphere won't change. It introduces a bunch of unhappy workarounds that have to take into account numerous scenarios.


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