Day and night cycle length

uzurpator · **Posted:** Tue Sep 09, 2008 9:02 am

I've got a simple question for the three people who are still involved in this project

I am implementhing a wather changes and day'n'night cycle. Weather should, of course, take a full year to change from snow to full grass to snow again.

My question - how long should the day and night cycle take? I am shooting at 6 months per one full change, what is your opinion? Obviously the game cannot use realtime

Or - for coolness factor - maybe we should sample the current time and match the world presentation to the time on the computer the game is played on? Ie -> you play at 9:00 am, its morning in the TEland. You play 24:00, its night...

Discuss...

NukeBuster · **Posted:** Tue Sep 09, 2008 12:16 pm

I think the second option is the best way to go. And we could also make it configurable in the future to save the somewhat slower computers some of the storms.

If we keep the weather(graphics) totally client only then we shouldn't have a problem with overlapping timezones.

About how long the days last I'm not sure about that. Should be somewhat slower than ttd though. At least thats my opinion.

Arathorn · **Joined:** Sat Nov 30, 2002 5:10 pm **Posts:** 6932

Dys should definitely be slower then in TTD. Perhaps you could change the sun-cycle to complete once every few days (configurable) instead of in one day, to avoid having too much changes per minute.

charlieg · **Joined:** Wed Oct 08, 2003 2:07 pm **Posts:** 322

Uz, I recommend you concentrate on features that would allow others to contribute first rather than what is basically eye-candy.

To fully resurrect TE you need to turn it into a team effort. Some form of gameplay and/or way of adding graphics other than just terrain...

uzurpator · **Posted:** Wed Sep 10, 2008 2:45 pm

charlieq - if you want to help - fetch me some trees and bushes

Vegetation is next on my list.

Anyhow - you are right. Wth one exception - I want to learn something, in this case Cg, not only build a game. So this is slow. Noone is stopping anyone from fetching the source anyway.

BTW - my list goes like this:

1. terrain - about 90% done
2. vegetation
3. industries
4. towns
5. aircraft
6. ships
7. roads
8. railroads

I will abstain from making a gui for now, so expect some very rough controls.

Purno · **Posted:** Thu Sep 11, 2008 9:34 am

uzurpator wrote:

Or - for coolness factor - maybe we should sample the current time and match the world presentation to the time on the computer the game is played on? Ie -> you play at 9:00 am, its morning in the TEland. You play 24:00, its night...

Discuss...

Many players will, I think, play at the same time of the day every day, which means they'll see the same daylight or nightfall every time. I don't think this offers enough variation for players; Except for those geeks waking up in the middle of the night just to see TE in nighttime. :tongue:

athanasios · **Joined:** Thu Jun 23, 2005 12:09 am **Posts:** 3138

Or those waking up in the middle of the day to see TE in day time! :lol:

Purno · **Posted:** Fri Sep 12, 2008 5:50 am

Though, realtime cycle could mean you could also include busy rush hours and quiet nights. (Which could result in a realistic time table of busy passenger traffic in rush hours, and a lot of freight traffic at night). Just thinking out loud here.

ReedME · **Joined:** Mon Sep 15, 2008 1:29 am **Posts:** 1

I've been following this project for a while... Just on the matter of a GUI I have a fair amount of experience in graphical design and I know a few people who could be interested in helping out with this project. As for this feature the real time sounds good but you have to remember not many people would want a scenario that they have 10 years to complete but they have to do it in real time, which is why most sims have an accelerated time element.

Lilman424 · **Posted:** Mon Sep 15, 2008 5:33 am

For the day/night cycle: Having rush hours and whatnot would be interesting, but definitely on the difficult side of things (from the player's, and probably developer's point of view), and should be optional, if it's even worth the programming effort. Assuming it's purely graphical, and the day/night cycle do not affect gameplay, how difficult would it be to just make it configurable? Some people could choose to have the time of day line up with when they play ("Oops, it's getting light again, time to go to bed"), while others could set the interval of one day, at a minimum of one minute/day. While one m/d would be a pretty fast rotation of the cycle, it would be the fastest possible setting, not the default, which should probably be on the 5-15 minute scale.

PS: For those of you keeping track, yes, this is my first post since December 06.

Zuu · **Posted:** Thu Sep 25, 2008 12:21 pm

Also remember we must not need to follow the real life calender with about 30 days each month and 12 months a year.

We could have just "winter", "spring", "summer", "fall", and then 5 days of each perhaps as day 1, 2, 3,..., 19, 20 in each year.

This way the days can be quite slow, but still have some years progress.

cmoiromain · **Posted:** Sat Sep 27, 2008 9:20 pm

concerning the day/night, I guess having it only a graphical change in the game would be preferable. But then make it complete, that means trains turning their lights on, windows on the houses lighting up, streetlights... But if this is to be done, please have it done properly (I am thinking of RCT3, where the night is just a pain on an ATI graphic card)

looking forward to this game!

Hyronymus · **Posted:** Sat Sep 27, 2008 11:27 pm

cmoiromain wrote:

concerning the day/night, I guess having it only a graphical change in the game would be preferable. But then make it complete, that means trains turning their lights on, windows on the houses lighting up, streetlights... But if this is to be done, please have it done properly (I am thinking of RCT3, where the night is just a pain on an ATI graphic card)

looking forward to this game!

No matter how you do it, it'll be a pain. And I seriously wonder if it's worth puting all the effort in. Just like with SimCity 4: it's a feature but you'll switch it off to avoid major annoyance.

And although I'm not involved in the development of TE anymore I would still like to read on progress more often or at least on a frequent note.

neroden · **Joined:** Sun May 29, 2005 10:30 am **Posts:** 13

*This should be configurable*.

After messing around with simutrans for quite a while, I realized that it's actually very important to have the "time dilation factor" be absolutely clear to the user.

Call it "days_per_year" or "time_dilation_factor" or something.

You're going to use it for determining how fast trains "really" go. It's reasonable for this to match the "day" length, but unreasonable for it to match the "year" length.

It's a very important number, and you are probably going to want to be able to tweak it later.

lonwolf89 · **Posted:** Sun Oct 25, 2009 10:24 pm

Well, another idea about day/night cycle:

Seems that so far the actual game time that passes differs from the game time required by vehicles to move. Accelerating time should also accelerate other game core functions : goods at stations, speed of vehicles, etc. But for this to take effect, a 1:X (real time:game time) standard has to be set.

[a bit off-topic]
About illumination (cities, vehicles), since i don't know anyone that is good at .cg programming, loading lights+ using dynamic lighting and normal maps on our terrain will squeeze the gpu untill it's bleeding if no occlusion is implemented and you're zooming out to see a large area of the terrain. A solution would be using less lights and only if you're close enough but that would look wierd, and still require a end-system to play it with max details.
[/a bit off-topic end]

So if you plan to use illumination, you might want to watch for resource intensive materials - if you go for nice effects, at least go until the end.

So, still searching for some people that know cg and occlusion algh at a per-polygon-frustum-dependent occlusion. :mrgreen:

Please raise a hand if you know something about one of these 2 topics. Because if you want to add neat graphics also, these 2 shouldn't be skipped.

Expresso · **Posted:** Tue Oct 27, 2009 6:40 pm

How about letting the user decide how long a day/night cycle takes? Letting the user disable day/night changes altogether would be a good idea too. Perhaps the user could lock the day/night mechanism to a specific time (for example sunset or dawn). How about stepping through specific times of the day?

If the user wishes to look into a stroboscope, so be it.
If the user wishes to never see night or day, so be it.

Allowing users to configure this, would also mean that users with low end systems could disable this altogether for a slight performance increase.

CommanderZ · **Posted:** Tue Oct 27, 2009 8:44 pm

Expresso wrote:

How about letting the user decide how long a day/night cycle takes? Letting the user disable day/night changes altogether would be a good idea too. Perhaps the user could lock the day/night mechanism to a specific time (for example sunset or dawn). How about stepping through specific times of the day?

If the user wishes to look into a stroboscope, so be it.
If the user wishes to never see night or day, so be it.

Allowing users to configure this, would also mean that users with low end systems could disable this altogether for a slight performance increase.

Day/night cycle is imo eyecandy only function in this type of game, so user should be able to fully configure it.

matsv2011 · **Posted:** Thu Jul 22, 2010 5:11 pm

"Day/night cycle is imo eyecandy"
I kind of disagree. Sure it looks nice, but it can have function to. And all really great game it have.

What i was thinking of is something like GTA III (and following game). A normal clock is Hour:Minutes:Seconds. In locomotion and transport tycoon there is only date.

In GTA on the other hand there is Seconds (real and game) and there is game hours, thats real minutes.

To my point.
The RE 4/4 II with three carages accelerate 0-100km/h in real life in 2 minutes, that is pretty fast. In the game (just tryed) it accelerate in almost exactly 2 seconds (from the trains reaction time). So in the game one real second is actually one real minute, just like GTA. Than, is thats the case, 60 game minutes, is 1 game hour. And 24 game hour is 1 game cycle.

Then we could get rid of the silly "The trans average speed was 238km/h and the travel time was 13 days"... In real distance that´s 74256, that's almost two laps around the equator. In my example cold say 10hours and 24 minutes, than the distance is around 2500km.

A Second advantage is that it make it possible to real timetables. They could be automatically generated (or manual or both). If you have a given stretch of rail and and 3 sets of locomotive, you could for example run a time table traffic of a train every second hour, making single track more effective.

A additional advantage is that is possible to have real people making there daily commute. Switching trains, busses and trolleys. As well as business and leisure travelers making longer journeys. In the evenings the rail can free up for gods transport.

Sum it up.
From dusk do dawn there is 12 minutes of game play.

Game Real time
1minute 1second (as GTA)
1hour=60minute 1minutes (as GTA)
1day cycle=24 hour 24minutes (as GTA)

The day cycle can sync up with moth or year, buts is not really necessary. Month and seasons can progress totally independent of day of time. I think maby one day/nigh cycle per season can be nice, that make the game run 5 times slower than locomotion on normal speed. Making one day/night cycle per year make it 25% slower than locomotion.

In my opinion the years run trow to fast in locomotion.

I would really love a fast commuter train pushing throw heavy snow in the dark arctic winter night with dim black background and the closest couple of 100meters lit up bye the powerful light of the train

oberhümer · **Posted:** Thu Jul 22, 2010 9:29 pm

This project is pretty much dead... nothing but ideas. Don't expect too much(or anything), no matter how good the idea may be.

Transport Tycoon Forums

Day and night cycle length

Who is online