Time System

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Bear
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Time System

Post by Bear »

Since this was brought up in the Wiki, i thought it would be better that it was posted here so people can have a early start on thinking about it...

How long is a day in the Mana World, relative to a day in Earth time? Or does time pass in this world at all?

I personally would like to see Day/Night implimented, not pitch black night... but just a few shades darker. This also allows ur to switch monster sets... like Nocturnal monsters and so on..
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Magick
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Post by Magick »

Hmm...i think the day and night system should be diffrent in diffrent parts ot TMW. A few areas with the same timezone and if you go across the sea (assuming we have one) Make the day and night system a little diffrent.

This would give the option of diffrent time zones,diffrent monsters, and people going to a diffrent area for more timezones. Just an opitnion :D
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Post by ElvenProgrammer »

What if a day lasts 24 hours? :lol: I want to be night in TMW if I connect at night :lol: Oh and the time will be SMT (Shimris mean time) :lol:
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Talaroc
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Post by Talaroc »

*twitch...twitch*

Um...might I just say that implementing day and night in a sprite-based game means at least three times the sprites are necessary (day, night, transition, for everything).
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Post by ElvenProgrammer »

Yeah you're right but maybe who owns a powerful computer can enable blending routines without the need of additional sprites. :roll:
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Pajarico
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Post by Pajarico »

Elven Programmer wrote:Yeah you're right but maybe who owns a powerful computer can enable blending routines without the need of additional sprites. :roll:
Or maybe add a routine to do the job before starting the game.
We have the graphic sets and when we start the game for the first time it creates the rest of the tiles only by doing some gamma, bright, contrast... shiftings.

:wink:
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maci
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Post by maci »

would be a possibility .. bu what happens if i be n the game for lik 10 hours..
i have smae light all the day then
ElvenProgrammer wrote:Maci: don't be rude, we're here to help people ;)
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Post by Bjørn »

If and only if we actually do let time pass in the game, then...

- I think time in the game should be faster than real life time, this is simply because one will only play up to a few hours a day as opposed to real life which you play 24/7.

- I think the time in the game should not match the rhythm of real time. A player would want to see TMW at different times of the day, and I don't think we should force him to log on at certain times for this. Also, when it's night in TMW at the time that it's night in Italy... NZ people will have night in TMW during daytime, heh.

- Precalculating the blending is a good idea for the SDL graphics backend. Realtime blending would be better for the OpenGL one. Note that this doesn't mean that no change would be visible when using SDL, precalculating just means not to blend every frame, but instead one would pre-blend the graphics with longer intervals.

- Maybe night should be shorter than day. Especially when shops would close at night.

On the whole however, having day/night in the server and client and having scripts respond to that is still months away. Just like most of the things people talk about on this forum, heh.
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Post by Pajarico »

maci wrote:would be a possibility .. bu what happens if i be n the game for lik 10 hours..
i have smae light all the day then
If i did understand correctly, you don't. Let say that there are 100 tiles, so if we use three states per day the total would be 300 after the processing.
When you launch the game you start with those 300 tiles.

:wink:
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Post by ElvenProgrammer »

Bjørn wrote:- I think time in the game should be faster than real life time, this is simply because one will only play up to a few hours a day as opposed to real life which you play 24/7.

- I think the time in the game should not match the rhythm of real time. A player would want to see TMW at different times of the day, and I don't think we should force him to log on at certain times for this. Also, when it's night in TMW at the time that it's night in Italy... NZ people will have night in TMW during daytime, heh.
Heh I was joking... :lol:
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Post by Kyokai »

I don't think it would be too hard to run each of our sprites through a gimp darkening filter twice to come up with dusk and night sprites. Then again, SoM didn't really use time, nor did RO... it might be something that we can just live without. I'd like time, but I also consider the alternative, that not having time would not take a whole lot away from the game. Depending on how difficult it is to implement, time might not be worth the extra effort.
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Post by ElvenProgrammer »

Kyokai wrote:I don't think it would be too hard to run each of our sprites through a gimp darkening filter twice to come up with dusk and night sprites. Then again, SoM didn't really use time, nor did RO... it might be something that we can just live without. I'd like time, but I also consider the alternative, that not having time would not take a whole lot away from the game. Depending on how difficult it is to implement, time might not be worth the extra effort.
Seiken Densetsu III used time and recent RO clients have got the night feature as well 8)
Anyway I don't think this is necessary to me anyway...
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Post by Talaroc »

Running things through a darkening filter is all fine and dandy...for some things. However, being viewed in nighttime, particularly under moonlight, does change the appearance of many objects, particularly reflective and/or refractive ones. At the same time, a simple darkening filter wouldn't be enough, because (as with shadows) in real life, it isn't just darker; there's a color shift that occurs as well--objects seen at night or under shadow go blueish-grey. Things don't just get simply darker until the darkness is already really quite deep.

At the same time, the question arises of screen settings. I make my graphics on a Mac, using the Mac standard gamma. PC users, however, generally have a much higher gamma setting than I do, and a lot of PCs in my experience have dark screens anyway. So, making good nighttime graphics for the Mac crowd would result in extremely dark (bordering on black) nights for PC users, and calibrating the graphics for PC gamma would result in nighttime looking oddly bright for Mac users. Of course, if there is some way for the game to change the gamma setting of the screen when launched, this becomes a nonissue.
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Post by Pajarico »

At the same time, the question arises of screen settings. I make my graphics on a Mac, using the Mac standard gamma. PC users, however, generally have a much higher gamma setting than I do, and a lot of PCs in my experience have dark screens anyway. So, making good nighttime graphics for the Mac crowd would result in extremely dark (bordering on black) nights for PC users, and calibrating the graphics for PC gamma would result in nighttime looking oddly bright for Mac users. Of course, if there is some way for the game to change the gamma setting of the screen when launched, this becomes a nonissue.
What if we add a calibration chart or image? Many PS2 games do.
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Post by Talaroc »

That requires that the user calibrate their own monitor, right? I, personally, would rather have it be automatic, just for ease of use (and because I know from working in IIT that most people, when it comes to setting stuff up on their computers, are really, really stupid). But, if that's all we can do then it's better than nothing.
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