Day/Night Changes In Game
Posted: 09 Mar 2019 05:23
When I was a kid one of the more impressive aspect of A-Train (Imported through Maxis in the US) was the cycle between day and night, with lights in buildings and train windows, and dawn and dusk transitions. Having a Macintosh LCII back then, this was quite impressive.
There has been for some time a night GRF set for TTD and now OpenTTD. But the game stays in night time, which is not really much better for long term play.
OpenTTD's day length patch gives me an idea, a button to toggle between "Regular time scale" and "Realistic time scale". To elaborate, the manual to Railroad Tycoon explained that the months it took for trains to travel between towns only a couple hundred miles away (Much as they do in TT onward) is balanced by the exaggerated revenue (Also in TT and newer) and the effect is one animated train doing the work of many unseen identical trains. One three car passenger train taking a year to travel between New York and Chicago, is a visual representation of hundreds of trains, and costs and revenues are scaled to reflect this.
This to me has always been an acceptable way to balance game play with realism. But it does not lend itself well to micromanaging and finely tuning schedules. And there's no good way to emulate seasons or days.
The idea I have had is a button that, when pressed, changes the date at the bottom of the screen to hours and perhaps minutes (Or perhaps 5-10 minute blocks, I.e. 12:00 then 12:05, then 12:10 and so on) and adjusts other time related things as well, such as vehicle timetables, and also adjusts the vehicle operating expenses and revenues. A locomotive that costs $10,000 per year to run would still cost that much in one year, just the amount spent per game "tick" might differ if one "Tick" represented one game day, or 10 minutes out of a day.
The effect would also be that in normal TT game time day and night transitions and changes would be disabled, the game would stay in daytime, or nighttime if the user preferred (A preference setting could handle this) but when running in "Scale" time, day night changes and transitions would be possible.
I do not know enough about GRFs to know if they could automatically handle day night changes, A-Train did so by a simple pallate swap, and I do not know if a solution like that would work, but I do think it would be possible for GRF artists to have action colors (Like the dark blue in original TT graphics) that would react to pallate swaps. Perhaps a line of code in a GRF like 'nightchangeenabledgrf' that if it is present, tells OpenTTD that day night transitions will work, and if some GRF sets do not have that, a message advising the player that some sets are not known to be compatible with night transitions and may look odd. Some abandoned GRF sets, given the right license, could probably be picked up and given minor changes to windows and other parts to make them compatible, though I am not sure if it really would be that simple or not. Pallate swaps may not even be possible for all I know.
A button on the toolbar would serve as the control. This way, if I wanted to closely watch a new train or bus service run in a more realistic timetabled setting I could, but then toggle back to original speeds as a sort of "Fast forward" for a while.
I don't know how feasible any of this really is, but I would love to see this implemented, especially with day/night transitions.
There has been for some time a night GRF set for TTD and now OpenTTD. But the game stays in night time, which is not really much better for long term play.
OpenTTD's day length patch gives me an idea, a button to toggle between "Regular time scale" and "Realistic time scale". To elaborate, the manual to Railroad Tycoon explained that the months it took for trains to travel between towns only a couple hundred miles away (Much as they do in TT onward) is balanced by the exaggerated revenue (Also in TT and newer) and the effect is one animated train doing the work of many unseen identical trains. One three car passenger train taking a year to travel between New York and Chicago, is a visual representation of hundreds of trains, and costs and revenues are scaled to reflect this.
This to me has always been an acceptable way to balance game play with realism. But it does not lend itself well to micromanaging and finely tuning schedules. And there's no good way to emulate seasons or days.
The idea I have had is a button that, when pressed, changes the date at the bottom of the screen to hours and perhaps minutes (Or perhaps 5-10 minute blocks, I.e. 12:00 then 12:05, then 12:10 and so on) and adjusts other time related things as well, such as vehicle timetables, and also adjusts the vehicle operating expenses and revenues. A locomotive that costs $10,000 per year to run would still cost that much in one year, just the amount spent per game "tick" might differ if one "Tick" represented one game day, or 10 minutes out of a day.
The effect would also be that in normal TT game time day and night transitions and changes would be disabled, the game would stay in daytime, or nighttime if the user preferred (A preference setting could handle this) but when running in "Scale" time, day night changes and transitions would be possible.
I do not know enough about GRFs to know if they could automatically handle day night changes, A-Train did so by a simple pallate swap, and I do not know if a solution like that would work, but I do think it would be possible for GRF artists to have action colors (Like the dark blue in original TT graphics) that would react to pallate swaps. Perhaps a line of code in a GRF like 'nightchangeenabledgrf' that if it is present, tells OpenTTD that day night transitions will work, and if some GRF sets do not have that, a message advising the player that some sets are not known to be compatible with night transitions and may look odd. Some abandoned GRF sets, given the right license, could probably be picked up and given minor changes to windows and other parts to make them compatible, though I am not sure if it really would be that simple or not. Pallate swaps may not even be possible for all I know.
A button on the toolbar would serve as the control. This way, if I wanted to closely watch a new train or bus service run in a more realistic timetabled setting I could, but then toggle back to original speeds as a sort of "Fast forward" for a while.
I don't know how feasible any of this really is, but I would love to see this implemented, especially with day/night transitions.