ID:153668
 Jun 1 2003, 10:01 am
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I don't have a lot of experience working with day and night systems, but before I delve into it, I want to know what most people think of games with systems like this? Morte and HRH are the only games I can think of at the moment that include day and night systems. Is that something you enjoy having in games (RPGs), or do you prefer that they just be light everywhere, or only have darkness in certain areas such as caves, or what?
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EoE has Day/Night, alot of the players loved having it in.
Until I get time to get back on tracks with the project and get everything tidied up and bug free, then it will be saying like it is. Although I will have to get the timing right within the procedure for my Day/Night cycle. --Lee | |
Mellifluous wrote:
EoE has Day/Night, alot of the players loved having it in. If u need a professional Bug Finder that would be me. U dont need to pay me all I need is to be apart of the staff with a custom Icon. | |
I like having it in, though of course the system for doing day/night I used was laggy.
I put a darkness system into a map on FA just to test it out, it isn't really worth the lag unless you have a less laggy system (Mine was something that simply changes all Darkness objects in the world to a darker/lighter form.). | |
One less laggy system might be adding a png to client.screen that is black at 75% (or some other percentage) transparancy.
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Jon88 wrote:
One less laggy system might be adding a png to client.screen that is black at 75% (or some other percentage) transparancy. Wouldn't work. BYOND doesn't draw PNGs directly -- it converts them into DMIs internally, and DMIs don't have an alpha channel. | |
Foomer wrote:
I don't have a lot of experience working with day and night systems, but before I delve into it, I want to know what most people think of games with systems like this? Morte and HRH are the only games I can think of at the moment that include day and night systems. Is that something you enjoy having in games (RPGs), or do you prefer that they just be light everywhere, or only have darkness in certain areas such as caves, or what? If it adds something interesting to the game and is worth the implementation time do it! Well that was a pretty generic statment that applies to anything :). But what type of game are you planning to use this in? If it's an RPG it can be good for atmosphere and add some tactics to various types of classes mainly thieves. In a hack and slash game it's mainly just a graphical effect unless of course you do things like make it harder to hit enemies. That would be annoying and people would just end up leaving thier computer for awhile waiting for day before fighting again. So whether or not day/night cycles are cool depends on if it does something for the gameplay that makes it interesting without just being annoying. | |
Well, the extent of interestingness (besides swinging at monsters with a torch because you don't have a free hand to hold a weapon in) would probably be that some equipment works better at night than during the day. I can't think of any particular use for thieves, and I'm not even sure (doubting, in fact) that the game will have any thieving skills.
What kind of things would make gameplay more interesting at night? | |
Foomer wrote:
What kind of things would make gameplay more interesting at night? Being able to sneak through the shadows to get a surprise attack bonus (and get close without enemies noticing), and having some enemies do the same to you. =) I'm sure you already know about this, but I'll point it out already - sd_DynamicAreaLighting has support for day/night cycles. But of course, you might prefer to use your RGB-based system. =) | |
Foomer wrote:
Well, the extent of interestingness (besides swinging at monsters with a torch because you don't have a free hand to hold a weapon in) would probably be that some equipment works better at night than during the day. I can't think of any particular use for thieves, and I'm not even sure (doubting, in fact) that the game will have any thieving skills. If you need to swap a torch with a weapon you probably want to make it automatic or have a verb to swap automatically to the last weapon or shield you used. IF you don't that could get seriously annoying. What kind of things would make gameplay more interesting at night? Well you could have the AI take advantage of it and jump out at the players quickly. It would give a nice creepy feel to the game. You could make certain magic more powerful depending on light levels, just make sure the player has some kind of back up to rely on incase it's a bad time for them. Also you could have certain monsters not as alert at night giving the player to sneek up on them. But in general low lighting is good to be used to add a creepiness factor to a game. | |
Crispy wrote:
I'm sure you already know about this, but I'll point it out already - sd_DynamicAreaLighting has support for day/night cycles. But of course, you might prefer to use your RGB-based system. =) I can't use Shadowdarke's Dynamic Lightning because he uses areas in a way that conflicts with how I plan on using them. | |
Green Lime wrote:
If u need a professional Bug Finder that would be me. U dont need to pay me all I need is to be apart of the staff with a custom Icon. Well, I will consider this, but, I will discuss this more over an IM, if possible. Also, by being apart of the staff, I will decide on other options that I amy or may not allow you to view. As for now, I will keep in mind of your offer, yet I will not promise you anything because I yet need to find the time and motivation to get back on to the project. I have a hell of a lot of things to do to the game, although, some wont be done quite yet... I may even take down the current version of EoE, spice it up a little and get it bug-free, or at least to some extent, and then allow people to carry on playing the game. -- With more things involved. Not to mention, besides the game, I will have other pressing matters to attend to. -- These matters will be based on EoE though, if you can contact me via an IM any time soon, I shall go through with some things with you. --Lee PS; Choice of contacting me goes as follows; E-Mail; [email protected] MSN; [email protected] AIM; Lebaria YIM; leewhittaker25 ICQ; 107458747 Hint; MSN / AIM are my most used IMs, I hardly use ICQ much because most of the people I tend to talk to on there are either not online or busy... | |
One ploy I'm using in my Morrowind plugin is to make a dungeon that's nearly pitch black, with goblins that have invisibility effects on them -- once the enemies are *right* on top of you, they take off their invisibility spells, light up torches, and attack.
The sudden burst of light and monster growl, paired with the very faint shimmering in the background (invisibility isn't perfect invisibility in the Morrowind engine), would give anyone the heebie jeebies. | |
If someone is using sucky hardware and is trying to play Morrowind, let me come over to their house and punch them in the nose. =)
Morrowind is hard on my computer, and I have a 1.4 GHz Athlon 1600+ processor. Only 32MB of video RAM, though. (Say, maybe that's why the game likes to use the swapfile. I might have to reduce the size of the interior and exterior buffers...) | |
One ploy I'm using in my Morrowind plugin is to make a dungeon that's nearly pitch black, with goblins that have invisibility effects on them -- once the enemies are *right* on top of you, they take off their invisibility spells, light up torches, and attack. Heh I just bought Morrowind and its expansion. It's a pretty fun game too bad I haven't had much time latly to play it :P. Anyway the current dungeons are bad enough since the game likes to have next to no contrast in colors making them annoying to travel in. I also don't like the really close render distance even when it's set to real far. But other than that the game looks awsome. I have it at 1600x1200 resolution with all the settings up on my 2.66Ghz computer with a ATI Radeon 9800 and it's framerate hasn't dipped yet :). But anyway enough getting off topic bragging about my new computer :). | |
Foomer wrote:
What kind of things would make gameplay more interesting at night? Some of these have likely been mentioned... Certain items that can only be found at night (such as rare flower blooms, required for making a special potion, or the sterotypical 'Druid's mistletoe'). Particular spells or rituals that must be performed under cover of darkness. Maybe some spells (or all magic) depend not only on darkness, but the phase of the moon or moons. If you are using NPC's, have them go to bed at night. Its a much different world when the bank and weapon shops are closed, or the local hospital is "emergencies only". Lycanthropes are people too! Astrologers - Character abilities, or just general luck could be affected by the stars. "Would Thursday be a good day for me to go hunting goblins?" Simply keeping your sense of direction in a thick woods in the middle of the night should be difficult. (Or sailing, if you use boats. So navigating by the stars becomes a usefull skill.) | |
It could be good if done right, which would include: using a program like photoshop to decrease the brightness on all the turfs, instead of a black checkerboard overlay on everything, where you have to click inbetween the pixels to actually do something.
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Like Raven would say "Its not Morte anymore" *shrugs* all the same too me Im just glad you stated that game since its the best best best RPG game ever to come to byond. Petz-x Coming in 2nd of course. Adding day and night could add a broader amount of choices that you could do such as. When night comes bats and phantoms come out but when its day its dogs and goblins. Among other things like shop keepers are sleeping and stores arnt open that often at night.
Adding Day/Night makes the RPG more realistic which is almost always good when dealing with RP methods. How ever if its a RPG were its day time all the time and never turns night u might want that? *shrugs*
Either way your chat kicks.