[CF-Devel] Night and Day in Crossfire

[Mark Wedel]

Joel South wrote:
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        Hello
     
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       I'd just like to share an idea. I think night and day would be an
     
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      interesting(and realistic) addition to crossfire. It should be
     
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      real time,being night or day depending on what time it is where the server
     
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      is located. I also think it is imperitive that maps have a
     
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      difference,outdoor and indoor. Since dungeons and caves are nearly always dark.
     
     
 I don't really like the idea of it being based on the time that the current
server machine is on.

 Crossfire moves much faster than real life.  Mapping crossfire time to real
time would be very limiting.

 I remember some of the ultima games, where certain events happened at certain
times.  I think that is a neat idea, but is only doable if the times are not
synced (othewise, if something needs to be done at say midnight), this could be
very hard if the server you are on is 3 hours earlier than you are (which means
you would need to be around at 3 am).

 My general thought would be to map crossfire time to real time would be 1 hour
real time = 1 day crossfire time.  This is purely arbitrary - realistically,
each tick would be given some time value - right now, there are about 8
ticks/second, so just from that, 1 hour real time would be 8 hours crossfire
time if you said each crossfire tick equals 1 second (but in terms of scale, I
think that might be wrong - I can't walk along an entire store front in real
life in 2 seconds).  

 But the time ratio really depends more on what is reasonable - if you want to
be able to do certain things at certain times, you want that ratio sufficient
that a person has a reasonable chance of doing, which probably amounts to a
ration of 1 crossfire day happening every few hours of real time.

 Beyond that point, for times to actually be meaningful, having more than just
darkness would probably be needed - shops should be closed late at night, but at
the same time, perhaps the taverns don't open until 4 pm or the like.

 This is definately a 2.0 (or later) feature.  Basically, a time element would
need to be added to objects that determines when it is active.  This can
actually make it interesting - perhaps the graveyards in the cemetary only
generated between midnight and 4 pm or the like.