night and day

[AnonDuck]

I like the idea. It's not very hard to implement.. but..

According to the other thread, several people who helped create the look&feel of TMW say a simple "mood" graphics overlay is NOT up to TMW's art quality standards. This is not an opinion to be taken lightly, these people were instrumental in creating much of TMW's art!

So the REAL question here is: Should the advice of these talented artists be completely ignored? Do we want TMW to have more features at lower quality, or higher quality with less features?

Is there anyone currently in charge of art quality-control? Could use a newer expert opinion here.

[wushin]

Finished art requires a dead artist. TMW is not about being the prettiest girl on the block, but the one you like to go out with because she is fun.

[o11c]

IIRC eAthena already had such feature. Unless o11c removed another "unneeded thing" . And I can propose, say, skeletons/fallens/etc, etc to be far stronger at the night if its not too hard to implement. Could make gameplay more diverse. So as for me I really like idea of day/night cycle. Seen this in other games and think it improves gameplay.

The only thing that was present was a hard-coded timer that sent the client a textual message saying "it is now night" and "it is now day". This can be done easily enough with scripted timers (like was used for Easter), though a new packet will need to be added for to inform the client properly.

There is no evidence that the day/night cycle was used to affect spawn rates.

[Hello=)]

There is no evidence that the day/night cycle was used to affect spawn rates.

IIRC there was something about changing gamma (in client) or something like this to reflect time change, but since TMW clients were not aware of such things and haven't supported it anyway, day cycle has never been used. Not sure if it has been fully implemented by server, as TMW clients do not support it anyway so nobody ever used feature. But in eA it has been in place. Maybe half-implemented. But after all server only have to inform client it needs to change coloring and anything else is up to client. Sure, time change can introduce other goodies like spawn rates change or maybe monsters stats change. But these are some extra features not directly related to times of day on their own .

[oddshocks]

Simply applying a dark overlay to the entire view during the evening would probably be the easiest way to implement this. But as someone mentioned, adding something like that with confidence would require someone to check the effect on every map to ensure that no content was rendered difficult or impossible to see, and that nothing looks strange.

As far as the gameplay effect, increasing monster count/spawn is one idea, though I'm wary of just going "the Minecraft route" because we'd have to check and make sure nothing becomes ridiculously imbalanced as a result. I think a cooler route would be the "Pokemon" route, where certain monsters, NPCs, drops, or whatever were only available during a certain time of day.

I would avoid making dark magic more powerful during the night and light magic more powerful during the day. This would cause a strange dynamic to occur in the realm of PvP and whatnot.

If this was implemented, we'd also have to decide if one day/night cycle happens per real-life day, or if there are X cycles per real-life day (which might be more fair for folks who can't log on during real-life-day or real-life-night).

So in conclusion, there is much to be discussed, but it's not worth discussing unless we can come up with a reasonable plan to implement this mechanic both server- and client-side.

[4144]

Now ManaPlus support map "mask".
This is mask what allow show or hide any layers normal and/or ambient based on map mask.
For now tmw server not support this. It supported by evol only but unused in evol.

[o11c]

It shouldn't be hard to implement map mask in tmwa server.

I'm still not convinced it's a *good* idea, but I will make it possible to test at least.

[Fother]

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/fin ... for-2d-art

[Crush]

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/fin ... for-2d-art

It's an interesting technology, but it isn't a drop-in you can just add and magically you have real-time lighting on all sprites.

To get it to work you need to draw depth-maps for all graphics, which would be about as much work as creating a night-version from scratch (in some cases less work, in some cases much more). Also, it won't work well with graphics which are already shaded, so most graphics would need to be considerably modified.

It would be more interesting for a green-field project without existing graphics where you can design everything from-scratch for this engine.

And besides, it's not open source.

[Fother]

Captain Obvious {slow claps}

[Crush]

Captain Obvious {slow claps}

Not obvious to everyone when you just dump a link without any further comment. I had to explain frequently enough that you can't just have a tool to auto-shade sprites with the click of a button. Non-technical people rarely grasp the technical complications.

[Fother]

You summarized the video in case it's content wasn't obvious.
I've missed you Crush.

[Chay]

as a simpler version iirc manaplus now supports layover masks so day/night might only require one layover for each map. This needs to be implemented in tmwa however.

[nelson6e65]

Captain Obvious {slow claps}

Not obvious to everyone when you just dump a link without any further comment. I had to explain frequently enough that you can't just have a tool to auto-shade sprites with the click of a button. Non-technical people rarely grasp the technical complications.

Thank you for the explanation.

[Zopar]

I just have some thoughts on this that are unclear like wouldn't it be easier and/or perhaps better to have just one map that was dark all the time instead of the whole game? What about folks that live in time zones and can only play when game is dark?