Menu
What's New
By:
Filters

Day & Night

Would you like to see Day/Night cycles on Calypso

  • Total voters
    442
where is the light and shadow rendered serverside Smoe ?
 
As long as my computer graphics knowlege goes the game rendering is usualy done on your graphics card in your computer :p if EU would do some rendering serverside they would at most do a render of 1 bitmap and send it out to all clients at the same time ... im sure they wouldnt do the drawing for everyone in seperate over the network coz it wouldnt make any sense :p

All the game engine would need is to know what gametime it is :p and then use that info for drawing shadows light etc...

and the ervers sends that out already (press C for clock) so no addtional SERVER lag introduced ....

the only lag might come from you OLD graphics card ... but turning of dynamic shadows would fix it ... night and day alone wouldnt introduce any slowdown imho ...
 
untitled_685599.JPG


Just thought I'd post this from the Official Entropia Sight ;)

MA has some idea of this as we can see... Just hope it comes in my life time :D
 
yeah i know aboutthat but its only a pre-rendered image not meaning they will ever implement dynamic day night cycles ... Memorial island already looks like its evening .. so does other places ingame ...

I think it would be nice to have a DYNAMIC effect to see day and night interchang when staying in one location :)
 
About rendering:
There is nearly no difference if you want to see the sun moving (with moving shadows) or static sun but changing light.

The shadows inside the buildings are best example: they are rednered before the object is put "live". so if you switch on a light, the shadows stay the same, just lighten up (a shadow mask over the normal texture).

This is why we don't see any shadows when adding objects to our rooms.

So the whole concept of the rendering engine is different from what we would need to make daylight. Or alternativly MA would switch BANG from day to night, and then all players would have to load a new map at this second.

So with the current game engine, this is not possible. At least not in a SENSEFUL way.

On the other hand, MA does often stupid things, like adding a physic engine to a MMORPG... so I wouldn't be surprised if they would try to hack this into it too and would screw up the game even more, lol :D.
 
still i doubt it is ever done on server side.. server miht store position and rotation of the objects .. but most definitly will not calculate the shadows !

if its a static taxture applied the texture itself is calculated on your computer ... and tru system might be silly/old not to do dynamic shadows or even recalculate the shadow static texture ehrn u put up new objects...

BUT its all done on your computer ...

and for day and night u dont need shadows... all u need is to change the colors things get rendered in ...

day normal colors / dawn dusk more redish colors / night gray bluish colors... and that would also be done on your computer by the game ... not by the servers :)
 
still i doubt it is ever done on server side.. server miht store position and rotation of the objects .. but most definitly will not calculate the shadows !
Click to expand...
Sry, as you know, my english is too bad.
Of course it is not rendered real time on the server.
The shadows are pre-rendered to the objects. So someone at MA creates an object, places it into the landscape and then the shadows are rendered. The object then is placed into the package that is installed on your machine.

When you start the game, your PC gets the position of the object from the server, and it is displayed by your computer. But: your computer will not calculate the shadows, they are fixed. They were calculated when a designer made the object.
 
yep :)

i also think the position of objects is stored on ur machine too in the terrain files :) or somewhere :)

If I were MA thats what i would do :) not to increase the necesary info that must be exchanged with the server...



i dont see how night and day could impose any addtional stress on the server in any way... Game Time is already interchanged with the server.. and no additional iformation is necessary to make day and night work :)

Ido
 
The problem is not serverload or something. The problem is, that your client software can't display anthing different than what was ppre rendered.

So if you add a red light to you appartment, then the game adds a red light mask to your textures. But this method is only possible for small areas, as your rooms/shops/malls are all seperated areas (you know the lag when entering/laving these areas).

If you would apply a whole new lighting map to an LA, it would make your game unplayable. The servers would just send the command: new daytime, but your machine cannot handle it, as this can't be done with usual game graphic cards in a resonable time.

This is the reason why most games dont have dynamic lighting.

This changes currently in the game industry, a good example for a WORKGIN daytime lighting change is the game S.T.A.L.K.E.R. . But Stalker is totally new, not a MMORPG and runs only on new machines... something we will have to wait for another 5-10 years if you see MAs developing times :D.
 
Does anyone know whether EU runs on an engine that defines light sources? Supposedly, it's the same engine as oblivion, but more antiquated :p Oblivion has some very nice scenery though, and I can imagine a spider animated in oblivion quality detail would be heart stopping :D
 
Smoerble said:
The problem is not serverload or something. The problem is, that your client software can't display anthing different than what was ppre rendered.

So if you add a red light to you appartment, then the game adds a red light mask to your textures. But this method is only possible for small areas, as your rooms/shops/malls are all seperated areas (you know the lag when entering/laving these areas).

If you would apply a whole new lighting map to an LA, it would make your game unplayable. The servers would just send the command: new daytime, but your machine cannot handle it, as this can't be done with usual game graphic cards in a resonable time.

This is the reason why most games dont have dynamic lighting.
Click to expand...

Smoerble did u play any other MMORPG ? i.e. previously mentioned by me Lineage 2 (i think the game is at least 3 years old) ...

and u dont need dynamic lights to make day/night ... we dont have dynamic shadows so we dont need dynamic lights for this ... Night day is a simple color masking for rendering !!! takes a couple of multiplications to compute !!!

I know because i built a game engine which supported day/night and dynamic weather :p its all realatively simple ... u just mask all the rendering with i.e. red color to make it look like dawn or dusk ... and gray blue to make it look like night (im oversimplifying it now but its fairly like that)

Done day night ... now all u need to do is make ur Sun Sprite (sprite is a point with a texture on it - the blurry white dot we see on the sky that causes the lense flare effect when u look at it) to move across the sky and there u go night and day ... 5h of coding tops :D
 
almost 150 people voted :)

ask your friends to vote too :) when the poll reaches 200 i will point MA's attention to it :)
 
B ring
U p
M y
P ost


Vote people vote :) and point ur friends to this thread :)
 
I would love to see day and night cycles. I often herat thunder and wait for something to happen with no results. Seems like MA dropped the ball on this one. I don't excatly know how to use the vote stations.....so my vote is YES:rolleyes:





Tinker
 
vote terminals ingame have been swithced off for 3 years now :)

on forum select the option u want to vote to and press cast vote :)
 
Since the poll didnt reach the expected 200 votes i thought i would bump it ... i hope you guys dont mind that ...

Please vote and tell ur friends to vote too i belive this coule be a wonderfull addition to make our virtual world more real
 
Would be very nice.

Very important though that the cycle is fairly short, and 24 should not be dividable by it. Because if it is, then the cycle will always be the same at the same time of the earth day, and that wouldn't be fair to people that can only log in at specific times.
A cycle length of, say 5 hours, would make it drift relative to the earth day.

Shouldn't be to short either, so you have some time to enjoy the "moment". Think 5h is a pretty ideal length with equal time morning, midday, evning and night time.

Preferably with different mob activity at different times :)
 
I know the thread got a bit long to read so i'll just point out Calypso Revolution time is

4 Hours

:)
 
History can always be revised :D

Maybe entropian hours are longer then earth hours, we just divided the short rotational time of the planet into four "hours", being morning, day, evening and night, but the "hour" is really 1h15min in earth time, making the 4h entropian day equal 5 earth hours :)
 
hehe :D

introduction video compares Calypso vs Earth ...

Have you seen "Sayah Kings" video?
 
Ido said:
yep weather would be nice too ;) [...]

Ido
Click to expand...

...now that would b a nice addition, just imagine...rain & a little bit of thunder goin on & u got the hells bells right there...would b real sweet :D
 
Ido said:
hehe :D

introduction video compares Calypso vs Earth ...

Have you seen "Sayah Kings" video?
Click to expand...

Too long ago it seems :)
Checked it again now, and it does say 4h in that brief screen, but who knows, that might have just been a misprint, due to the early (and understandable) confusion over the longer calypso hour.

Aah.. can't wait for the day the universe is like in that docu :)

What are you doing here reading Marco? back to work!!
Unless you plan to post that is.. :)
 
I just think they can better spend their time programming other things.
 
A few more votes needed to reach 200 votes

Come and vote for this wonderful feature which can change the way we feel about our virtual world
 
Im sure MA are actually workin on it right now.
It sounds like the sort of thing that would take alot of time to code, so its not gona happen over night... - get it? :D:D
No, never mind.
 
put a global switch for lights on/off in pvp4 and see the fun :D


J.
 
dilly said:
Im sure MA are actually workin on it right now.
It sounds like the sort of thing that would take alot of time to code, so its not gona happen over night... - get it? :D:D
No, never mind.
Click to expand...

:laugh::laugh::laugh: yeah ofc i get it :D

The thing is it actualy would take at most a day to code...

BUT. somone mentioned here that the engine MA is using (GameBryo?) already has day and night implemented ... so it would be more like switching hte feature on :D and that would take at most 30 min of coding (for the person to find the place to switch the feature on in the engine configuration file) and then a day of testing maybe where 5 people would go around see how the world and items behave when the light color and angle changes ...

Voila ... im sure it can be done Over Night

all they need is a nudge from us asking them to actualy DO IT
 
You never know... Any VU now MA could surprise us with it. Like this VU they surprised us with a new part of Amethera,.
People have been going on about it since EU first came out, methinks its coming soon :)
 
yeah i know and its been quite a few years for mindark to turn that

bool daynightcycles = false;

into

bool daynightcycles = true;


Thats why i hope we can somehow persuade them with this thread into putting this little effort required into actualy doing something wonderfull and enjoyable ... it might be something positive, a change which wouldnt NERF the system for a change :D
 
I just love the idea of implementing day/night time in Entropia Universe!
I play Lineage every day and I have to say, that the day/night time has a huge impact to the gameplay (In a really good way ;)).
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top