11 réponses à ce sujet

[Ambaryerno]

Does anyone know if it's possible to give the game a rotating day/night cycle, maybe with a way to track how many days have elapsed within internal game time?

I just find it hurts the immersion when some areas are ALWAYS daytime, and others are ALWAYS night.

[FalloutBoy]

Considering that the lighting is baked into lightmaps with a fixed sun position, no. Graphics engines have to be designed to support dynamic day/night cycles. You can't just mod it in.

[DarthParametric]

The best you could do is two different copies of the same level with different lighting.

[Ambaryerno]

Ok, so if I wanted to have Day, Dusk, Night and Dawn I'd need four copies of the same area, and there would need to be a script or plot of some sort to change between them. I assume, then, the game can't apply multiple lightmaps to one level?

[Qutayba]

You'd post them as multiple area layouts to get different lightmaps, but it wouldn't require that much effort to change lighting in the level editor (you might even save them as separate levels, but then if you make changes to models in one you'll need to remember to change them in the others). Day/night cycles are great for realism, but I find that setting lighting for a particular time of day allows you to shape the mood of an area much more strongly. I have a sunset and nighttime version of one of my areas to fit the mood of different points in the plot.

[EJ42]

How would you track the progression of time? What happens when you're traveling? What happens when you exit the game? What happens when you need it to be daytime? Do you have to leave the game running while you go out for pizza?

It's an interesting concept, but you would really need the day/night cycle to be controlled by plot points, like in the Redcliffe battle scene.

[Ambaryerno]

I'm not necessarily talking about adding a day/night cycle for the original campaign, but a random thought for custom content.

[EJ42]

Ambaryerno wrote...

I'm not necessarily talking about adding a day/night cycle for the original campaign, but a random thought for custom content.

Still valid points.  How do you control it?  What is the goal?  How do you balance the novelty with the need for effective gameplay?

EverQuest had a 72 minute day/night cycle, so you never really had to wait too long for something that could only be done at day or night while World of Warcraft opted for the realtime approach.  The realtime approach, however, significantly limited the "cool" things they could do because they couldn't alienate a large base of their customers who may never be able to play but in a single time window each day.

If you want to track it in realtime, then I suppose there are probably timers you can hook, like the ones that determine out-of-combat regeneration, but that would still beg the question of how you effectively manage it.  Travel is still a bit of an issue, although I suppose you could work out tables for how long it should take to get from point A to B, and adjust accordingly.

I kind of like how some of the Zelda games handled time, where the postman would go around his particular route each day.  It made the world feel more alive.  DA:O seems a bit more static.  Looking at the toolset, though, it seems like it wouldn't be all that difficult to add some more dynamic content to the game.  The point is, I suppose, that they still managed to tell a story very well with what they had time to work with.

I had actually considered a day/night cycle for the long-term project I'm working on, but I still have not answered all of those questions for myself.  I was thinking it could be handled as a sort of dialogue thing.  For example, one of your party members could keep track of the day/night timer, and mention that it's about dinnertime or something.  If you respond affirmatively, then you would cut to the evening cycle.  If you're alone, then you could muse to yourself about it getting time to eat dinner.  These are still just ideas I'm bouncing around.

[Ambaryerno]

If it were me, I'd definitely institute some sort of accelerated cycle rather than trying to run it in realtime. It's just not practical to try and do it realtime in a game like this.



There are certainly openings for a gameplay impact. For example if it's nighttime vendors will have closed up shop, shops themselves aren't open, etc. Traveling at night could mean a greater chance of encountering bandits, or possibly even have stronger monsters abroad at night so the encounters are tougher, but you might have better rewards.



As far as map travel, that's a relatively simple matter of determining the approximate distance being traveled, then give an average travel time based on terrain (IE, on relatively even ground with good roads a march of 20mi/day is reasonable). You can then add modifiers for an extended or forced march which can impact your fatigue levels during random encounters, etc. etc.



Quite a few possibilities there, actually....

[EJ42]

I still don't like the idea of the player going up against the clock. I'd rather have a clean transition where the player agrees that it's time to move on to the next cycle. This game just doesn't seem well designed to support realtime changes in the day cycle. It's best done, IMO, with cutscenes, similar to how some of the Zelda console games dealt with the day/night cycle.

[FalloutBoy]

If I were doing this, I would do it like in the game Dead Rising. Keep track of time internally. Whenever it becomes time for dusk, fade out, play a cutscene, load the night area, spawn the character at the same location where they were when you faded out, but with the new area ID.



I would only do it if the game were significantly different at night, and that this difference provided added fun (fun and realism are not the same thing).

[EJ42]

FalloutBoy wrote...

If I were doing this, I would do it like in the game Dead Rising. Keep track of time internally. Whenever it becomes time for dusk, fade out, play a cutscene, load the night area, spawn the character at the same location where they were when you faded out, but with the new area ID.

I would only do it if the game were significantly different at night, and that this difference provided added fun (fun and realism are not the same thing).

So, if the player is in the middle of a conversation or a boss fight during the transition, they just...what?

What if they player is about to enter a building that is closed at night just as the transition occurs?  What if they player is in a building that is not accessible during the transition?  What if the player is having a conversation with an NPC that disappears after the transition?

These are the sorts of problems that can crop up with the way Dragon Age's engine is designed.  For games like EverQuest and World of Warcraft, an NPC can be forced to stick around for an extended time even if it's near the end of it's scripted event, as long as a player is in the process of interacting with it.  That's a little tricky to code here.

It just seems more elegant to give the player a warning that the sun's on its way down, and let them decide what to do about it.