Any reason to not have a day/night cycle

[homsikpanda]

Uh, dude... It's not like your name is a stamp of quality around here these days either... Just so you know.

 

+1

 

 

also you should consider posting this suggestion in the suggestion box, it'll get more notice by the devs =/

[Hockaday]

Day and night cycles in this game don't make sense. At all. Yes, I love them...yes, I'd love to see them...but they don't make any sense with the design choice.

 

Remember, this is basically a playable movie, or you're an actor in a play. They want to give the feel of each place the way it's supposed to be seen at that time. To do this, they had to remove cycles.

 

Edit: This has been a request by part of the community since beta. You're not the first.

Edited September 18, 2013 by Hockaday

[mmjarec]

Day and night cycles in this game don't make sense. At all. Yes, I love them...yes, I'd love to see them...but they don't make any sense with the design choice.

 

Remember, this is basically a playable movie, or you're an actor in a play. They want to give the feel of each place the way it's supposed to be seen at that time. To do this, they had to remove cycles.

 

Edit: This has been a request by part of the community since beta. You're not the first.

 

If ts like a movie they should have went with non cartoon engine. They want me to see it was at a certain time ? Well inless you live in another dimension time moves forward and cycles are part of reality and immersion

 

So its supposed to be the same time, all the time. Thats great if the whole story arc takes place within 24 hours otherwise it makes no sense

 

It really loses that epic feel if you spend so much time developing a characte that exists in a snapshot of a day. I though mmos were to experience PERSISTANCE. You cant really develop any kind of character empathy if you are just part of a static world. Movies cover hours and days and last i checked had night scenes.

[swissflamdrag]

Anyone who actually knows how time consuming creating a video game is, knows that the slowest process is the art. That being said, OP's complete disregard in terms of how much work it would be just shows how he doesn't understand this, but he has "facts" on his side.

 

Congrats OP, you have one of the thickest skulls I have ever seen on the internet. I see a lot of people on these forums trying to give you an opposing viewpoint but you, without fail refuse to accept anyone else's ideas but your own. It's almost as if you aren't comfortable with being wrong.

 

Take a comp sci class in high school, one of your final projects will be to design solitaire or something similar. You will find even in a group, and with such a small game, it takes weeks.

 

Believe it or not the people at Bioware Austin are professionals, they do this **** to put food on the table. While I enjoy threads on how to improve aspects of the game, I actually try to give reasonable ways to get to those goals. OP and many others on these forums give the desired end result with no roadmap to get there. That is the difference between good and bad feedback.

[AlienEyeTX]

Why couldnt they just lightly soften the brightness to indicate night time. I mean its been done in mmos for almost 15 years. Its slightly offputting to have such a completely static game world everywhere.

 

Sure every planet can maintain its theme and add a little darkness or for dromund slightly brighter. Nothing drastic to where you cant see at night. Is the game engine too bad to impliment it. Im sure it could be done by adding a few less things to the cartel that is added every month

 

It seems so dead and sterile. It would give way to more atmpshere. Sure you could argue a few planets might not ever have a night cycle but theoretics can only be used as a lame excuse for not doing something cool. Ie you couldnt logically conclude every planet doesnt rotate therefor there is no night. There arent enough excuses to apply to where you can argue that every planet wouldnt have a night cycle

 

Each planet could have its own hue of twilight etc etc. the engine already looks old and horrible enough and this would go a long way at least to slighlty change my constant perception that im playing such a crappy outdated engine

 

The only excuse not to would be the engine is too big of a pile to impliment it

 

I don't think day/night cycles are useful unless it triggers specific spawns or activities or whatnot. Otherwise, it doesn't really matter. I didn't even notice it in this game until I saw a thread about it here on the forums!

[jedip_enguin]

BW's reasons for not including a day/night cycle have been outlined numerous times.

 

But you already know that.

Edited September 18, 2013 by jedip_enguin

[mmjarec]

Anyone who actually knows how time consuming creating a video game is, knows that the slowest process is the art. That being said, OP's complete disregard in terms of how much work it would be just shows how he doesn't understand this, but he has "facts" on his side.

 

Congrats OP, you have one of the thickest skulls I have ever seen on the internet. I see a lot of people on these forums trying to give you an opposing viewpoint but you, without fail refuse to accept anyone else's ideas but your own. It's almost as if you aren't comfortable with being wrong.

 

Take a comp sci class in high school, one of your final projects will be to design solitaire or something similar. You will find even in a group, and with such a small game, it takes weeks.

 

Believe it or not the people at Bioware Austin are professionals, they do this **** to put food on the table. While I enjoy threads on how to improve aspects of the game, I actually try to give reasonable ways to get to those goals. OP and many others on these forums give the desired end result with no roadmap to get there. That is the difference between good and bad feedback.

 

For good coders it wouldnt be hard they dont have to replace every polygon

[AlexDougherty]

Why couldnt they just lightly soften the brightness to indicate night time. I mean its been done in mmos for almost 15 years. Its slightly offputting to have such a completely static game world everywhere.

 

The only excuse not to would be the engine is too big of a pile to impliment it

 

Several reason not to do it!!

 

Firstly Timezones, every server is set in a different continent, but is open to everybody, ie Americans can play on a European server, and vice-versa. If you implement day and night, the people are going to complain it doesn't match their day-night cycle, or that it makes them seem more like an outsider ie an australian playing on a us server would be out of synch with the day/night cycle, and thus feel a bit alienated.

 

Secondly, adding extra code, this could be better spent on fixing the bugs.

 

Thirdly, takes up some processing power, which would increase lag and other such problems.

 

There, several reasons (three does count as several, doesn't it?)

[ImpactHound]

Take a comp sci class in high school, one of your final projects will be to design solitaire or something similar. You will find even in a group, and with such a small game, it takes weeks.

 

With untalented forced grouping and a public school cirriculum, probably. A project like that is meant to coordinate on a project more than the actual result. If challenged, most serious programmers could throw together a working solitaire in a couple days.

 

In amateur game dev, it's reasonable to be able to solo-code from scratch Pong in 1 day, Snake in 1 week, and Tetris in 1 month.

[swissflamdrag]

That's what I was going for yes.

Probably should have been clearer.

[Andryah]

day/night cycles have been a staple of MMOs for a very long time. it is a relatively basic feature among most MMOs.

 

True. And.. IMO relatively useless as a feature as well. It really is not relevant to the game style.. just that some people claim to want it. It is however something to complain about.

 

rejecting day/night cycles completely because it wouldn't make sense in one specific examples doesn't really make sense.

 

Which brings us to the real issue..... day/night cycles would only further gimp Sins making them even less playable. Hey... somebody had to go there... and you know it.

[mmjarec]

Several reason not to do it!!

 

Firstly Timezones, every server is set in a different continent, but is open to everybody, ie Americans can play on a European server, and vice-versa. If you implement day and night, the people are going to complain it doesn't match their day-night cycle, or that it makes them seem more like an outsider ie an australian playing on a us server would be out of synch with the day/night cycle, and thus feel a bit alienated.

 

Secondly, adding extra code, this could be better spent on fixing the bugs.

 

Thirdly, takes up some processing power, which would increase lag and other such problems.

 

There, several reasons (three does count as several, doesn't it?)

 

Timzeones could be offset to occur at different times or fast pace to make sure everyone experienxes a few

 

You dont know it would lag unless you code for them. They have made no such statements. If it was fine 15 years ago why couldnt bioware do it today?

 

As for the bugs i havent seen them fix any worthwhile ones in forever and if they have dfferent teams im sure they could have one team for content one for bugs. They dont have on team for everything

[ELRunninW]

Lets admit that a lot of things in the game are not very realistic, can we agree on that? Than why do you bother asking for night and day cycle?

 

Primary reason not to have it, as mentioned above, are time zone differences. Second there is as many people who would support this suggestion, (it is not yours, it has been suggested long time ago,) as there are opponents.

 

Right now everyone gets the same experience and all quests are equally available and unaffected by time of the day, lets keep it that way.

 

I do not understand why the fact that npcs spawn within few minutes from being killed is not bothering you.

Edited September 18, 2013 by ELRunninW

[mmjarec]

Lets admit that a lot of things in the game are not very realistic, can we agree on that? Than why do you bother asking for night and day cycle?

 

Primary reason not to have it, as mentioned above, are time zone differences. Second there is as many people who would support this suggestion, (it is not yours, it has been suggested long time ago,) as there are opponents.

 

Right now everyone gets the same experience and all quests are equally available and unaffected by time of the day, lets keep it that way.

 

I do not understand why the fact that npcs spawn within few minutes from being killed is not bothering you.

Like i said i gave multiple examples of how to overcome your issues. Its not for realism as much immersion. Its called persistent online world and one major thing that prvents feelings of persistence is lack of day night cycles

 

Why would you be against something that only improves your experience. They have seperat dev teams ifs not like tjey would cancel fixing bugs to do it. Its not like tjey are fixing major bugs anyhow

[ImpactHound]

Lets admit that a lot of things in the game are not very realistic, can we agree on that? Than why do you bother asking for night and day cycle?

 

Primary reason not to have it, as mentioned above, are time zone differences. Second there is as many people who would support this suggestion, (it is not yours, it has been suggested long time ago,) as there are opponents.

 

Right now everyone gets the same experience and all quests are equally available and unaffected by time of the day, lets keep it that way.

 

I do not understand why the fact that npcs spawn within few minutes from being killed is not bothering you.

 

Day/Night cycles and respawning NPCs are both staples in MMOs. If people accept one, they wouldn't usually be adverse to the other. Calling respawns into question is a flimsy arguement.

 

The cycle isn't any more necessary than chat bubbles(which I'd also like) or a number of other features other than immersion. I don't question parallaxing backgrounds, they help fill in the false distance. Similarly cycles are something nice we'd like, but nobody's going crazy over it compared to say, assassin fixes or dye prices. Again, the contrary arguments against it are surprising to me in that they're so passionate as if they would be a bad thing. I don't have a hard time playing WoW at night; I actually prefer it for the lighting effects and lower contrast on my eyes.

 

In a related note, nobody argued or got mad on the WoW forums when they added weather effects in 2005ish, and people did get mad when they brightened the night-time ambience in Cataclysm(which is still an issue).

[Malastare]

If challenged, most serious programmers could throw together a working solitaire in a couple days.

 

...as a web app, perhaps.

 

...or using a fairly advanced game engine, likely with pre-existing card support.

 

Again, coding is not what you think it is. Yes, in the days of COBOL or Atari you could code up some simplistic games in a couple days (I've done text-mode Pong in a couple days). Try any of that in modern C on Win64 and you'll find that things aren't so simple. Without help from a game engine, it would take a couple days just to set up the rendering properly, even if you're just using the Win32/WFC widgets (Does WFC still exist?). Trying to do the same thing with D3D and optimize it to work with both major video card vendors? You're on drugs if you think that's a one day task.

 

The game logic itself is pretty simple. That would only take a day to do... if you already had finished your object/data model and charted out the API. Of course, you'd need to spend a week testing/debugging it, because a one-day cowboy-coded implementation is exactly the sort of thing that creates the bugs people here love to complain about. I guess there is some irony in the fact that they seem to think that style of coding is the best way to fix it, but I've long since realized that the majority of people here who talk about development don't actually have an appropriate amount of experience in the field.

 

That "amateur game dev" is as similar to AAA game development as building model rockets is to launching satellites. I've seen two week implementations of Tetris. They were utter crap and loaded with bugs that no modern customer would stand for. I've taken part in coding competitions between some of the top CS universities where the goal was to implement just a small part of a competitive game. Teams of four worked for twenty hours just to get basic functionality working. The competition was fun because it was virtually impossible to complete the task with any level of quality.

 

Do you think that a day/night cycle would be done by painting darker gray pixels over everything? This is a modern 3D game with loads of render optimizations. Even doing something as simple as fiddling with the ambient light intensity won't work the way you want it to. It's easy to change it, but that's an amateur-level fix. To change it and make it look good, and work well with pixel shaders and textures and various drivers... that's takes a bit more effort.

[ImpactHound]

...as a web app, perhaps.

 

...or using a fairly advanced game engine, likely with pre-existing card support.

 

Again, coding is not what you think it is.

 

Your post went downhill quickly. Not only did I grow up around programming, I do it in my career and you're cherrypicking examples to try and twist wording to benefit you. Why would you ever NOT do Solitaire as an app or in as simple a language as possible? Why bother putting it into a "fairly advanced game engine" like Hero? Jesus what a dumb argument.

 

I get cycles are missing from the game. I also get that it's a staple feature in many other games and they deliberately chose not to implement it for multiple reasons. I still would like to see it someday. I'm not demanding it.

 

The rest of your post was a condescending string of anecdotes to try and prop up BioWare, they don't need it, I wasn't attacking their great programmers. I wasn't comparing "amateur game dev" to bioWare, it was a direct response to Swiss' statement about taking starter classes in programming.

Edited September 18, 2013 by ImpactHound

[mikebevo]

As for the bugs i havent seen them fix any worthwhile ones in forever and if they have dfferent teams im sure they could have one team for content one for bugs. They dont have on team for everything

They fixed the Mira headband on last patch. So there.

 

 

I could careless how hard it is or isn't to do. I am against it. Every game I play that has day and night cycle I get stuck in the middle of nowhere and have to wait for daylight to finish a quest. In Fallout:NV (etc) I can just hit wait, but that would not work in a MMO.

[ImpactHound]

Every game I play that has day and night cycle I get stuck in the middle of nowhere and have to wait for daylight to finish a quest.

 

What MMO prevents you from turning in a quest at night?

[Malastare]

Your post went downhill quickly. Not only did I grow up around programming, I do it in my career...

 

I do it as my career. Again: I code in five major languages on multiple 100k line projects with simultaneous customer counts that far exceed SWTOR.

 

Growing up with a parent who knew COBOL is not particularly relevant, as COBOLs development style is archaic compared to modern development.

 

Why would you ever NOT do Solitaire as an app or in as simple a language as possible?

 

Solitaire is perfect as a web app... mostly because it means that you can skip all of the parts that are truly difficult. The browser becomes your game engine. However, that is also why the process is not analogous to PC game development. The "game" part is the easy part, rendering, resource management, synchronization, OS integration.... all those things they browser gives you for free, those are the parts that are difficult.

 

As for using "simple" languages, I don't know what you consider a simple language. I certainly consider COBOL simple, and the reason that you shouldn't use COBOL to create even simple games like solitaire is because the very prospect will leave your game developer gasping for air after minutes of hysterical laughter, or seeking a mental institution. COBOL is wholly unsuitable for game development in ways that are too boring to list here. Though the inability to render native graphics is a good place to start. In truth, there aren't all that many language options for serious game development, and I wouldn't classify any of them as simple.

 

The fact that you didn't understand that my mention of COBOL in a game development discussion was a joke was telling enough. So... No, you shouldn't ever develop games in COBOL. Not even simple games. Why use a more "complex" language like C/C++/ObjC? Speed. Efficiency. Access to native OS facilities. Sure, you can code up games in Javascript using a Canvas, but I wouldn't call Javascript a "simple" language (not like COBOL) and you still won't finish solitaire in two days.

 

Why bother putting it into a "fairly advanced game engine" like Hero?

 

I never suggested that. Your idea of what a game engine is seems a bit overblown. Hero and Frostbite are massive game engines and you'd be silly to even think that was what I was referring to. There are hundreds of game engines, including engines developed specifically for card games (solitaire, poker, blackjack, etc).

 

The rest of your post was a condescending string of anecdotes to try and prop up BioWare,

 

My post was not defending Bioware. It was intended to educate people on the abstract topic of development. I was dispelling the myth that games are easy to develop, as this misconception is repeatedly used by armchair-developers (an odd term... as I'm a professional developer and I do indeed sit in a chair with arms... anyway...) to either insult or complain about virtually any software studio that isn't doing what they want. This is absolutely not limited to Bioware or game studios or even software studios.

 

Yes, you can probably create a playable solitaire game in a couple days. No, it won't be in a language that any AAA game is written in. It will not have the features that any normal person would expect. It won't be properly tested. It won't be suitable for release by any professional standard.

 

If you have the experience with coding that you say you do, you'll understand why its harmful to let people believe these things are simple. If your experience is only second hand, then your ideas are understandable, but not correct.

[mikebevo]

What MMO prevents you from turning in a quest at night?

 

none that I know of and I never said they did...

 

Now if they are just going to do night and day cycles without having NPC cycle, then I am totally against it. So thanks, I think you even put me even further in the no way in hell side.

[ImpactHound]

I do it as my career.

 

You're going off on outrageous tangents again and twisting language to boost your points that weren't even brought up in the first place. Nobody's comparing who's company services more customers. Nobody was implying COBOL is a game language, you're grasping at straws to try and stretch dev time for a simple Solitaire, no one EVER mentioned triple AAA when I originally responded to a statement about high school programming classes. All I see(or anyone looking at your posts) is a e-peen waggling code monkey trying to butt in more personal experience than was needed on topics that weren't even discussed.

 

In fact, we're not even having a discussion, you're having a lecture. Feel free to sneak in " the last word," but when you're unwilling to exchange ideas or even talk about the same subject in the same context, it's not even terminating a discusion, it never started to begin with.

[ImpactHound]

none that I know of and I never said they did...

 

Now if they are just going to do night and day cycles without having NPC cycle, then I am totally against it. So thanks, I think you even put me even further in the no way in hell side.

 

it was implied when I quoted you saying "every game," but you've made your point.

[GalacticKegger]

They fixed the Mira headband on last patch. So there.

There are those who are here to flood as much space as they can grab with condescending discontent. Though before long it becomes intuitively obvious that (a) they could stand to OD on and implode from the same dope they're trying to sell, and (b) they won't change. The rest of us simply play the game and have fun doing it. Which makes us, well ... I'm sure they'll keep coming up with new and ever more creative slurs. Pubescent is as pubescent does. Edited September 18, 2013 by GalacticKegger

[mikebevo]

it was implied when I quoted you saying "every game," but you've made your point.

Sorry TOR is my only MMO, so I wasn't implying anything about MMO. I was more talking along the lines of Skyrim, Oblivion, Fallout NV, Fallout 3....

 

There are those who are here to flood as much space as they can grab with condescending discontent. Though before long it becomes intuitively obvious that (a) they could stand to OD on and implode from the same dope they're trying to sell, and (b) they won't change. The rest of us simply play the game and have fun doing it. Which makes us, well ... I'm sure they'll keep coming up with new pubescent names.

did you miss the part of my statement.

 

No Jokes - internet is serious business

 

@GalacticKegger - love you sig, find it funny since my legacy name is Shotfir;st

Edited September 18, 2013 by mikebevo