Time & Day/Night Requirements Options

[Mole]

This topic is to discuss both how time will work in our game, and how day & night will work. Since these two topics are closely related, I've combined them into one.

Things like the ration of night to day, passage of game time compared to real time, etc should be discussed here.

[silmaril]

Some thoughts on this:

I want the nights and days of the game to be long enough so that they can impact what I will do. If I during a four hour gaming sessions see both day and night several times, it probably won't.
I think it's important that the day/night cycle measured in real-time hours will not divide 24. That means if I play the game during the evening local time, I won't be at the same place in the same night/day cycle every time.
Since the time of day can affect how players play, we should show it on our website with a nice graphical image with a sun and moon :)


Environmental effects:

There should be some :)
The growth of plants should be influenced by the time of day. Some will yield better harvest during the day, others during the night and others again won't be affected.
Range of missile weapons should take the time of day (the visibility) into account.
Some monsters should be more active during the night, others during the day. Same with NPCs. Shopkeepers could close up the store during the night, although this might ruin the game experience too much if players randomly log in and see that they cannot buy/sell from an NPC.
Certain items or item enhancements should be creatable only during special conditions. This could be during the night, during a full moon, during the day, etc.

[Jerky]

I very much agree that the time of a day should not be divisible by 2 (and therefore would not make it fit into our 24 hour days on the same time every day). It is obvious that players play on their schedules and it is obvious that we have players all over the world. One day they should be able to get on at 7 and it be night and another, day. For example, if our world's day was 9 hours, then there would be around 4.5 hours of light and 4.5 hours of dark. This would lead to 2 2/3 days per our day and would lead to the variety we need.

I agree with Silmaril that some monsters should be more active at night. I also think that there should be some that are only out at night. And, conversely, some that should be out only during the day and sleep at night. I think we could get away with spawning them and removing others (cause they are nature, and nature would be able to find ways to hide at night from pesky players). We could set up a spawn point for the night monsters in front of a burrow or cave or something to make it seem more reaslistic.

I like Emeraven's notion that we have more than one sun or other moons, but this does not necessarily have to effect the light in the world. It could just be for beauty/effect. I also think we can improve on the starry sky textures that Wish had (keep in mind however, that we do not normally see that many stars because of our city lights and electricity ruining our night vision. In a fantasy game where you are off in the wilderness, you would see a LOT more stars up there.)

[Melanthe]

Having seen the "real" sky several times in my life, on moonless nights in the few areas left in the world where there's low humidity and no light pollution, like west Texas, I can vouch that the sky is so full of stars that you almost don't see the black in between. It's amazing.

Anyway, I like the idea of nocturnal creatures, but I think we should be very very careful about closing down shops and NPC's. Players are active 24/7, there should always be convenient shops for their needs--if you want to make a day and night shop in the same town, fine, but don't make a player go to another town or something, especially if there's no instant travel.

[Pashta]

Hmm... won't there be magical spells that allow you to see at night, like night sight in UO?

[Razaekel]

The day/night cycle in wish was 10 hours long, broken down into 7.5 hours of day and 2.5 hours of night. i asked one of the devs about this. So prom what i see, a full day would bebetter off defined as NOT a factor of 24, such as 2, 4, 6, 8, or 12, but instead some number between those. also, if we were t o be realistic, the amount of night would have to be the same as the amount of day, but since this would be impratical in a game where most activity would be during the day, it would be better that night be kept to a fraction of the full time, such as 25% to 30% for optimum conditions. for example, somebody brought up earlier the possibly of a 9 hour full day period. that could be seperated into 6 hours of day and 3 hours of night, allowing for a fairly realistic experience without forcing everybody to spend half a day wandering around blindly in the darkness, if they dont have some form of portable illumination such as a torch, lantern, glow-rock or a spell of night-eye. Also, to keep the experience realisitic, we would have to fit 24 gametime hours into the shorter realtime hours, such as 24 hours into 9 hours. This would invariably cause a reduction in either the realtime minutes per gametime hour or realtime seconds per gametime minute. considering that there most likely would not be any form of mechanical clock in the game, the realtime minutes to gametime hour would be most effective form of conversion.

Using the 24 gametime to 9 realtime example, that would lead to hours w ith a length of 22.5 realtime minutes, which is fairly realistic, considering that it would take 3 realtime hours to pass 8 hours of gametime, equivalent to 180 realtime minutes. Of course, this is just an example.

[Mole]

Here is some more information on how the day/night cycle worked in Wish.

The year started with spring. There were 4 90 day seasons. There were 12 lunar cycles in a year, 3 per season. The day of the full moon marked the start of a new lunar cycle. The new moon was the 15th day of the cycle.

Each 24 hour game day passed in 10 hours of real-world time. For game play purposes, the night hours passed faster than the day hours. So while the game clock was built around 12 hours of light and 12 hours of dark, the actual passage of time was 3:1 in favor of daylight playing.

A day started with daybreak. Noon was 6 hours later, sunset 6 hours after that, and midnight was 6 hours after that and 6 hours before daybreak.

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That being said, I liked the idea of having 24 hours of game time pass in 10 hours of real-world time. That gives a nice offset to game time vs real-world time so people aren't always logging into the game at the same "game time" every day.

What I don't like about it is that there are no seasons or time changes. I would like to see our game have 2 distinct equinoxes, one in spring and one in fall. During these 2 days, the game day and game night should be exactly the same length (12 game hours assuming a 24 hour game day). We should also have a summer solstice and a winter solstice.

This will lend itself nicely to seasons and things.

A big question we should answer first is this: how long should a game day be? 24 hours? something else? This is something that we should decide before we move on deciding other things.

[Pashta]

I say 24 hours game time should take 8 hours real time. That way even casual gamers would still get to see night sometimes.

[silmaril]

As I posted in my first post, I think this is a bad idea. That means that if people play the same time of the day each time they play, it will be the same time in the game each time they play.


I think it could be worth considering to have hours in a PW day than in a real world day. Often in MMOGs the days seem to pass very fast ending with night and day almost merging (oh night again, I thought it was just morning). If we pumped the number of hours in a day up to around 30, the game would lend itself more to strategic thinking depending on the hour it was. Scenarios like "night is coming, better head to town to get the Sword of Slaying Creatures That Walk Around at Night then" and "Morning soon in PW so I should log in and start planting some herbs" will become more likely since you won't see several days and nights during a gaming session.

On the other hand this can be a problem as well. That means that you can't do exactly like you want every gaming session, since you won't see a complete night/day cycle. This might be comperative with waiting for spawns in other MMOGs, which we all know is not much fun at all.

[Mole]

I think having a game day cycle that is evenly divisible by our real world day cycle is a bad idea. People will tend to login at the same time from where ever they live, and that would mean that the game day time (day or night) is always the same. That doesn?t lend itself for variety very well.

Having a game day cycle that equates to 10 real world hours (for example) prevents this overlap as you almost have 2.5 dame days for every real world day and thus have a natural offset to the game calendar.

We could still and a longer game day (hours wise) than we do in RL. What ever it is, I think that it should NOT evenly divide into whatever our ratio is; we want that stagger.

[Jerky]

hmm, I think I said that already ;).

I very much agree that the time of a day should not be divisible by 2 (and therefore would not make it fit into our 24 hour days on the same time every day). It is obvious that players play on their schedules and it is obvious that we have players all over the world. One day they should be able to get on at 7 and it be night and another, day. For example, if our world's day was 9 hours, then there would be around 4.5 hours of light and 4.5 hours of dark. This would lead to 2 2/3 days per our day and would lead to the variety we need.


That was written on March 9 in this thread (scroll up) :P

[silmaril]

And also in the post above the one you quoted :)

But to nitpick a little, it's not being divisable by 2 that is the problem, it is dividing 24. So 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, and 12 hour days will give us a world where the time of day in the game is given by the real world time.

[Mole]

hmm, I think I said that already ;).
That was written on March 9 in this thread (scroll up) :P

I know you said it. I was actually referring to Pashta who said it would be a good idea to have the game day equal 8 hours of RL day.

As many of us have already agreed, this would not be good.

[Pashta]

Well, my point is that there are casual gamers who would be hurt by having extremely long night/day cycles. I'm sure there is a way to fix it so it's not too long and not too short. Whatever you do, DON'T make it too long or you will lose most of the mmo gamers due to frustration.

[Mole]

Right Pashta. The day/night cycle needs to be long enough that people can actually get something done in a day, but short enough so that it doesn't seem like it's always day.

The length and duration of the day/night cycle is something that Wish exactly right. The 10 hours of real time equaling 24 hours of game time was a good cycle. You could login for one hour every day and you would eventually experience the entire range of a day/night cycle. (Granted, most of us played for WAY longer than a "normal" gamer.)

[Pashta]

LOL, I don't know about that... Everybody I have known that has played MMORPGs has played for long amounts of time. ;) It depends on how good the game is and how dedicated the player, I guess.

I know DnL has a night/day cycle of 83 or 84 real life minutes. There's a starting point for ya. :)

[Kerwik]

What about 5 hour days... 2 hours night, 3 hours day. It would be a somewhat short cycle, so you could log in and if it wasn't the time you wanted, you wouldn't have to wait that long. On the other hand if you need lots of either daytime or nighttime to get things done, then you might be yearning for the 9 hour cycle, or perhaps even 10, 11, or 13... but then it would take forever to get to the time of day you needed it to be if you logged on at the wrong time.

Maybe 7 hour days would be a nice compromise... 3 night, 4 day. If you intend to have seasons and solstices, then 3 night 4 day for summer solstice, 4 night, 3 day for winter solstice. It wouldn't make things too terrible inconvenient for people by making the play times irritatingly uneven... but would be something a few people would think is a nice touch.

As for what someone said about nighttime monsters spawning at the mouths of caves... howabout they merely spawn deep in the caves, and just sleep in there during the day, and at nighttime they begin to roam out from the caves... and at about 30 minutes till sunrise, they could begin wandering back towards the caves. This would eliminate them from suddenly vanishing as someone was considering engaging one in battle near the end of night. For the daytime creatures that sleep at night... have them hide under bushes and in trees. This way we could sneak up on them in the night and catch them with their defences down. You could make their reaction times slower to show that they're sleepy... while some of the more vicious ones would sometimes wake up angry and be harder to fight for the first minute before slowly tiring out and becoming more docile.

As for lighting at night... anything that you carry or equip to brighten the surrounding area should brighten the area within 5 meters of you, then everything would go back to normal night for about 2 meters, then everything beyond 7 meters should be almost pitch black... the only time you should see anything beyond 7 meters is when you see it's outline against the sky. This would be to show that your eyes are not adjusted to the nighttime and thus everything appears horribly dark beyond the meager light that you choose to cling to. When using a spell that enhances your ability to see at night, it should make everything clearly visible, but have everything appear in shades of almost black and white... like the color has been washed out of the world. Regular night (without the objects or spells helping with the light) should be affected by the moons... the phases of the moons, and where they are in the sky, plus the cloud cover, should affect how bright everything is. If there's 4 moons, and they've come to the point of time where they're all high in the sky and full... then it should be amazingly bright for it being night time... if there's no moon in the sky, then everything should be amazingly dark.
Races should also have a slight difference in how dark the darkness is... for example, most RPG's I've played say that Elves have a natural ability to see in the dark. So therefore they should see better at night than most. Since Wish was the first game I played where they had Imps as a prospective race (though they were never implemented) perhaps they could have had thermal sensors that would help them at night, where plants and cold blooded animals would take on shades of purple and blue, and warm blooded animals would take on shades of red orange and yellow. This wouldn't totally overpower the natural colors, it would only enhance the shapes with an added color to help distinguish them. Perhaps the colors would be like a light that slowly fades in and out... like a slow blink.

Another thing that'd be nice is a "watch" that you can turn on and off in the options... it'd be like a circle that shows about where we are in the time cycle... have a line with a sun on it to signify noon on one part of the circle, have a line with a moon on the other side to signify night, then put some notches to show the hours. This way we'd be able to predict the amount of time we have left before morning or night.

that's all I have for night/day right now... I don't want to bore anyone to death with explanations and opinions.

~Kerwik

PS~Have the Night-Sight spell be something that you have to cast again to turn off... so basically it'll last forever, but if you are in the sunlight with the spell cast, everything is practically blinding white, and you won't be able to see very much. This way if you're in a cave fighting things there, the spell won't ware off because the sun came up. ( I always hated that about UO )