The Mana World Forums

A day night system would be great, as it would add more realism to the game environment. It will also allow different gameplay, as players may want to assasinate other characters during the night, or possibly just go hunting for some nocturnal animals (there may be a few special monsters which can be seen only at night, like a werewolf, etc.)

Another thing is that it is quite feasible, and will not take up any more memory than usual. By prefiltering tiles before entering the game, and at certain intervals during the game a mammoth of a PC will not be needed to play. While this will add [very] slightly to loading time, and slow the game at the intervals where it re-filters the tiles, it is not such a big issue. Pajarico wrote above if we had 100 tiles, we would require 300 tiles in memory which are prefiltered for night, day and transition. At _most_, 200 tiles will be required in memory, the unfiltered tiles (daytime) and the tiles that the game is currently using (which will change depending on what time it is in-game). By filtering the tiles at certain intervals we are able to have a much smoother transition from day to night and vice versa, instead of a single state in the transition from night to day. Also, having 200 tiles instead of 100 tiles in memory wont effect most computers much (unless the computer is quite minimal, which would probably run TMW terribly anyway).

Features like this are great imo, as we would be able to create a whole new world at night time

Creating day/night effects does not require 3x of every sprite -_-, all u gotta do is put a dark layer over everything, like in RO, they use a spr file thats a shade of blackish color, and stretches it over the screen... or in other cases, if u zoom out enough, its a square box of darkness...

Bear wrote:Creating day/night effects does not require 3x of every sprite -_-, all u gotta do is put a dark layer over everything, like in RO, they use a spr file thats a shade of blackish color, and stretches it over the screen... or in other cases, if u zoom out enough, its a square box of darkness...

See, there's some issues with that. I looked around a bit, and looking at RO screenshots, I can tell you three things: first, a lot of what lets them get away with that is the fact that their backgrounds are 3D rendered, not sprites, which allows for dynamic lighting effects. Second, they did custom-build sprites for darkened areas, because, third, the regular sprites look goofy when things are darkened. It just doesn't look good, and it would look worse in a fully sprite-based game; it would wind up looking not like nighttime, but like daytime seen through a piece of semitransparent plastic. If you want it to look anything close to realistic, there's a difference, and it's a big one.

Bear: rendering a alpha translucent rectangle over the screen in 2d has serious performance problems (although in OpenGL version it would be fine).

Talaroc: instead of just a simple filter a filter could be defined which would keep the sprites looking decent (we would have to try a few things) -- like having a filter which will darken/lighten exponentially over the range of colors. For example, already dark colors would hardly change, while more vibrant colors will be darkened more (i dont know how well the exponential filter will work, but there should be an filter we could define to make things still look nice, possibly even giving dark colors a blue'ish tint, etc).