[POLL] How did you feel about the length of the day/night cycle in Pre-Alpha Release 1?

Interesting, I keep forgetting this is kind of an MMO and not Ultima.

I would have said it was too long. A full day/night cycle is an hour, which seems pretty quick for an MMO, but in a game where you have to do time-specific things a lot and talk to NPCs only available at certain times, and in a persistent online game you can't really go to sleep to advance time... I've said this all before though.

I guess for an MMO it is pretty short

 

You will get into problems here since you have (or at least should have) a RL.
That means if i'm back from work, doing the housjobs etc it will be kind of impossible to me (and many others) to login at different times...

 

The night is completely intolerable. I couldn't see anything at all and just went afk.

 

I think the time was doable (and frustrating if you were trying to catch a sunrise ), but I would definitely increase the duration for 15-30 minutes at least.

Night was too bright, but we had not real torches or anything so I hope that will be adjusted.

 

I liked it the way it is currently coded.

 

I think it is too short

 

Personally, I like a 4 hour day/night cycle.

 

For a Demo like Release 1 I think the timing was fine... for the final game, I hope the cycle is longer.

Suggestions:

- About 2 - 4 hour cycle sounds about right. Consider that the people who will be playing SotA will be playing at fairly good chunks of time per sitting.
- Day and night lengths should shift depending on seasons. While it will probably be difficult to replicate planet tilt exactly (meaning further north gets a wider range of day/night variation), it could go along the lines of Winter = 33% day, 66% night; Spring/Fall = 50% day/night; Summer = 66% day, 33% night.

I'm also guessing that the day/night cycle will be "suspended" in the Overworld Map view when traveling from scene to scene and that entering each scene will set the ingame time at a certain beginning point (say... 8am) and go from there.

I'm not sure about moon phases as noted earlier in the thread given the current physical state of the "moon" at this point. However the direction the mooon (and debris) faces compared to its path across the sky still bugs me.

 

Given what we were doing in this Pre-Alpha Release 1, it was about right. There wasn't much to do as we're really just testing out core systems, so the passage of time was ok. But I think once there's actually more content and with other players, time will even feel much shorter. So I would expect for the later releases it should be extended. Right now it is 30 minutes per day/night cycle, which is 1 real-time hour = 1 full day in New Britannia. I think it should be double that as that's not too long and would still give players around the world the opportunity to experience a full cycle during any typical game session.

I also agree that the cycles should be affected by the seasons, but we don't know how that's implemented or when it will be implemented. Plus they need to fix the skybox rotation as the motion of the broken moon doesn't appear correct.

As far as the darkness of the night, I think it was about right. Personally, it could be just a tad bit darker. But they will need to implement Gamma controls as some people said they could barely see anything while others said it was way too bright. Those controls will help normalize this effect.

Regarding the darkness of the night sky itself, given that this is a medieval setting, you're not going to get light pollution like we have now. Even bustling medieval cities aren't going to be as bad as any typical city in RL. So I would expect the night sky to be dark with deep blacks and really bright shiny sparking stars. The night sky as it is now is washed out, looks bluish and simply far too bright given the setting. The broken moon has no impact as it is also washed out. I would expect the yellows and orange to really pop and shine but it's like there's this constant haze or something that is just makes the night sky completely washed out.

Similarly, the daytime sky is hazy and I felt the blue sky should have popped more. Perhaps it's just the setting of Owl's Head but I doubt it.

 

Without having any reason why it matters, I didn't much care. However, if I had to go hunting for nightshade under a full moon while it's raining, I might want the cycle to be longer.

 

As long as there is stuff to do at night it's fine. Nobody wants to be stuck doing nothing!

 

My personal preference, for a variety of reasons, is 4:1 time... meaning you have four day/night cycles each day of six hours each, or roughly 3 hours of daytime and 3 hours of night time. This is short enough to allow all but the most rigidly scheduled short-period player ("I can only play from 5-6 each evening") a chance to experience differing times of day, but it is long enough to allow the planning and execution of events that are best set in one time or another; for instance, hold a masquerade ball just after sunset, you would have 3 hours of nighttime ambiance, which would be perfect for a nice event. Likewise, if you are going on a hunt for undead that only come out at night, you have three hours in which to hold your hunt, instead of having a bizarre on-again off-again thing going on.

There is more as well, but I'll stop there so as not to hit the TL;DR range

 

I also found the night to be too dark, on my desktop monitor it was fine, on my laptop it was not so good, I did not notice a gamma option. Did I miss it?

 

I hated dark nights in UO, especially if they hit you in a dungeon together with the never solved nightsight bug or after recalling to the wrong rune, and you had a combo of video card/monitor, which made the nights really pitch black besides the monster names jumping on you.

Also I assume, day/night cycle will have more sense ingame later:
daytime: markets and shops are open, while certain monsters hide in their lairs.
night: the shops are closed (besides some black markets), and above monsters strive through the realm or even hount the villages/towns.

 

i tottally agree, 30 mins is way to short to be able to do said task before worrying about the sun going down

 

I also agree that the night was too short. And also too bright. It always looked like it was about a half hour before sunrise or half hour after sunset. Would be nice to see it get even darker around midnight. On the other hand, I liked the effect of the mist/fog.

 

I was happy with the time., although anythiong up to an hour would be ok. Going beyond that would put the balance between accessibility and realism to far off being accessible.

I generally envision being able to play one to two hours a few times a week and I don;t really want to have to schedule my playtime around the game's systems. To log in and find it's [night/day] and I can't do [Insert time specific activity] unless I wait over an hour for it to become available. At one hour intervals I'm sure I can find something to do without much fuss whereas with 2 or more I'll just log off and do something else. A reciepie which if repeated may leave me free to be drawn away by another game and forgetting to log in.

As for the Darkness, I liked how 'dark' it was in the town. It was atmospheric and din;t cause any problems getting around which I think is suitable for safe zones. take into account light pollution and what not

Wilderness and subterranean would do well with a more encroaching darkness though. Use of torches and other paraphernalia.

*EDIT*
I forgot to point out, some people have mentioned a 'wait' or 'sleep' system. Since the game is primarily focused on Online this won't be achievable as the world will be persistent so we can't have times un-synced amongst players. So if you have the long days/nights you have to wait for the time you need in real time. No 'resting until ....'

Also for the 1:1 time crowd, if you've played Animal Crossing you know the issues with this system where something are only available at very specific times which leads to either really poor life balance or just some wonky behaviour in players.

 

EverQuest has a 72-minute day/night cycle, which I find to be a bit short. Basically, you have a three-minute hour, which makes it almost impossible to hit something at a specific hour of the day. There are lots of times where it would be cool to do something "during the midnight hour" (or some such), and this is just not viable with so short a timespan.

I'd want about a 12-minute "hour", which means a 288-minute day. That is more than your suggestion, but much closer to optimum for this type of game.

 

I also felt the cycle to be a bit too short.
The darkness of night was ok for me. There could be a short much darker time around Midnight, nyt if the whole night-time would be much darker I think it might become tedious to play.

 

As i must confess that i did not like the shattered moon at all on the night sky, i hope it will be smaller in the future.
I thought it was a graphic error the first time i looked at it on the screenshot at tentonhammer. Just saying the truth how it was for me.

I hope we will have a moon cycle so we have some nights without it (50%) making it special occasion if it shows up.

Some might wan't to roleplay turning into a gargoyle at full moon, or some herbs might only be magical at full moon.