Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Mega-threads and Guides Day/Night Cycle

Don't waste everyone's time making spurious claims and then pretending to drop the burden of proof on other people.

THERE IS NO ENGINE LIMITATION. They have public demonstrations on the current version of the engine managing dynamic variations in lighting just fine, for once. And that's without going into the fact that no one was necessarily asking for it to be "dynamic" to begin with.
Not to mention even modders with limited access to advanced functions managed to implement rudimentary forms of a day/night variation with the previous DOS games using less advanced versions of the same engine.

Gotcha, so basically you have no experience in game engines and just wish to complain and make unfounded accusations. Good to know.

Beats making up shit on the spot about imaginary, unproved “engine limitations”.

Do you two actually love each other, deep down? o_o

So, they discussed this in a PAX east interview and mentioned it was a matter of complexity and manpower that was the problem.

https://wccftech.com/baldurs-gate-3-pax-east-interview-listening-to-fan-feedback-adding-raytracing/

Focus on the topic please, not the people.


That's my main... I can't think of the proper descriptive word for it. Not concern, but like... Reservation towards optimism of seeing Day/Night related systems? Assuming that atmospheres and how lighting is handled in BG3 is similar to Original Sin 2, then the way you'd even begin to making day/night features is strictly stuck to that. Though implementing Raytracing (Specifically global illumination, or RTGI for short) would need to at the very least rework that, which inevitably would break the design in how you'd make weather-based interactions as it is right now.

The coordination and code for that is a significant tongue-twister too, to keep things in order. The way it works is that you have "atmosphere triggers" which is an invisible box you assign to a specific area. Each area has its own light probe that maps out the lighting in that specific area. This area can have multiple atmospheres (think different weathers and lighting configurations eg. daylight or night) with one active at a time. You can swap between these through scripting, with a set transition timer between the atmospheres. You could set this transition to any length, but it's pretty performance intensive if you make it really long. So to make a day/night system for that game specifically, you'd need to add these atmospheres for each area individually, and write scripts that change all of these individual areas' assigned atmospheres. A time tracking solution would need to be made too, potentially with some modularity (as Tuco mentioned somewhere earlier, what about turn based events or if only a part of the party is in turnbased?). You could use really long timers, but that comes at a cost of performance too.

Point being, there's a lot of variables to keep in mind even at a glance, and all of would possibly need to be binned or heavily reiterated at the trade for RTGI. Though the other way around, redesigning the atmosphere/light probe systems could make it a slightly less daunting task, but if that's one of the last things to be done, then you might wonder what worth it would be if nothing else is made to recognize and make use of the day/night cycles. Again I want to stress, that's my thoughts based explicitly on comparing my experience with Original Sin 2, where I've been making a weather system for narrative reasons of my own, and it assumes that it's similar in BG3, which may or may not be the case.

I have a huge soft-spot for lived in and breathing worlds though, Zelda: Majora's Mask still remains a personal favorite just for the different activities and schedules the citizens were on, which was complimented very well by the game's time loop feature. So I'd be really excited to see some day/night passage of time too. But I can see many reasons why the idea could ultimately be decided against too.

I’m not sure of what “optimism” you are even talking about, Composer.

Some of us are basically BEGGING to get one but we are pretty much all resigned to the idea that Larian just doesn’t want to bother with it and it’s not going to happen.

My optimism. As in, I want it to be a possibility to happen, but I worry RTGI might be a factor, based on how the current systems work (if they're similar to Original Sin 2). I'm not too familiar with how you implement RT-features into an engine at a software level though. I'm not a tools engineer. I know how OS2 works and speculate if BG3 is using similar tech, and how RTGI works, but not how one would combine the two, in a way that would be compatible with how you'd approach making a day/night cycle for that environment, again assuming the systems are at all similar.

I've made my peace with Day/Night cycle. At least they have end day, go to camp, and it's night.

It just would be cool if you COULD do day/ night. Sigh. And many nocturnal creatures coming out to play.

I mean, how much more spooky would the different areas be if they were at night? Gnolls jump out you in the dark. Goblins. The Bog.

Sigh. This game COULD be SO much cooler.

Oh ok, it sounded like you were saying we were unreasonably optimist about it happening.
Because we are not.

I think despise arguing in favor of the feature MOST of the people here are very likely resigned to the idea it won't be a thing in the game at this point.

Like you, I really prefer "living, breathing" worlds rather than scene-based, more static worlds. From your description of the DOS2 design ( presumably from the tools they released ), Larian's engine is more scene-oriented. The simplest form of D/N cycle discussed earlier in the thread where you simply cut-scene from day to night and back again ( like BG2, for example ) would require implementation of rudimentary time-keeping in the engine, plus a night-time version of all outdoor above-ground map content ( assuming indoor and underground are unchanged ).

I can't judge how much extra work this would be as we have no idea of the total content in the game. But, on top of this change to the basic map content, there would need to be consideration of other asset duplication. Actor behaviour should/might be different between day and night, and dialog may need additional branches. The "knock-on" effects could be significant and potentially costly, and is probably the "complexity" Larian refer to. It would definitely have been better to design D/N in early!

As for implementing Ray-Traced Global IlIumination, I doubt that D/N cycle would affect it or be affected by it. Calculation of global illumination at any arbitrary point in a game scene is ( to the best of my knowledge ) usually a discrete calculation that can be replaced by an alternative discrete calculation.

Aside: For background, early 3D rendering on weak hardware just used a constant value for the "ambient" light in a scene to represent global illumination; this could vary with time of day, but not position within the world geometry. More recent renderers have used a variety of "occlusion" calculations to multiply the constant value for "ambient" light with a "percentage value" derived from examining how the geometry surrounding an arbitrary point blocks incoming light ( the various "Ambient Occlusion" settings you see in games, for example ).

Ray-Traced Global Illumination ( not the same as fully ray-traced rendering ) improves this by calculating the real amount of light from each light source that local geometry reflects towards an arbitrary point, rather than the amount "ambient" light that is blocked.

Very good and informative post etonbears.

Ive actually made my peace with Day/Night. Still think it'd be cool, but Id rather have them focus on other things.

I'm glad you found it helpful. Realtime rendering used in games is an increasingly complex "soup" of computational components, each of which trade-off "realism" and "performance" to provide an appealing outcome. It can all be fairly described as "smoke and mirrors" rather than physically realistic, which is generally OK, since the visuals for many games are "artistic", not "realistic".

There is no shortage of useful information about rendering for programmers, but I haven't seen much for gamers themselves that is particularly good. A lot of what NVidia, AMD, Intel, Microsoft et al put out while marketing their products is of questionable value.

Yeah I have been working with making a game for the last year. Personally, I use Blender/Unreal. Although they have made the game engines so much easier than years ago, it still is as you called it, a complicated soup balancing realism and performance. Every time I think I have learned something new, there is a dozen little things I have to adjust. But I love any info from more knowledgeable people in regards to utilizing engines. Also, Unreal has an incredible community, and online "classes" and the things I have learned just from the Blender Cloud subscription is so great. I have absolutely fallen in love with character sculpting. I used to think Blender was not a professional modeling software, but it is a beast! I love it!

Agreed, tooling has become very sophisticate; Unreal 5 looks to be very impressive. I particularly like the look of automatic LOD generation, as it will significantly reduce the load on asset production, which is possibly the largest cost for any games that want their own unique style.

Its quite a simple problem having nothing to do with <engine limitations> (give me a break, this isn't a indie studio...) more to do with TIME standing still itself in the game. There are no calendars, dates and any sort of time flow withing maps. Time is showed by just switching map zones or camping. Easy way out to a somewhat complicated problem, which does not have to be that complicated...
But to Larian it seems that day/nights MUST BE <next gen> dynamic and be like the Witcher3 and Elder scrolls games...(including its baggage of NPC scheduling AI problems), and will not accept anything less. So sadly its a big NG for them. That would indeed be a huge time sink. They do not want to settle with a 6/10 score half baked day/night system. They aim for a 9/10 10/10.
My interpretation of whats going on anyways...

So they would think a 0/10 day/night cycle is better than a 6/10?

What about proper timed meteo effects ? Does that require that NPCs all run under a roof when it's raining to be a 10/10 feature ?

Some things make me think that they're so (too?) proud of their previous games that they don't think they need to put efforts in such features. The chain, the balance of their games and the origin system may be other exemples. Hope this is a wrong interpretation.

This https://forums.larian.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=776950#Post776950 post of mine is not exactly the same thing, but has some related to the D/N-cycle information.

I feel, again, that time is just a fake problem. Except for some realism unless software companies start to put time limits to the quest both principal (in Daggerfall it was amusing how you could explore all the frigging huge map and the main quest still be there) and side ones time passing just becomes a decorative item. I play Eso and there you have day and night, and rain, and sun, but monsters are the same, you can explore the full map without finishing any quest (but with days passing) and none of those quests become botched (hell, with some characters I decided to dithc the main quest and move to the new ones opened with the dlc released). Another problem is that programmers should take better account of consequences and how they influence the world (for example: why can't the Tav inform the hih druid that the woman he nominated is conspiring with drak druids? Or why the druids in the cove don't get the news that you freed the high druid or why, if you encouter auntie in the druid's cave when you encouter her she acts like you're a stranger, or the tav's dialogues doesn't aknowledge that you knew her? In Skyrim the must laughing situation was in the city were the magic shcool was: even after the character become the archmage in town dialogues still settled as if you were a newcomer without affiliation to the school)

I would love some signs of time passing instead of a time freezed (partially because the camp rests states that you end the day and there are night cut scenes) in a due moment even if for cosmetic reasons but nevertheless I think that to seriously manage time the video games production philosophy should pass a revolution, that would involve players too are players (specially occasional ones) ready to a game were the result of the main quest can change based on how much time they used to complete it, would they manage to accept botched side quests because of bad player time management? and so on.. ...