An accelerated Day/Night cycle

[1clash1 58]

I love playing during the night in games and even more so in DayZ as it presents many challenges and frankly lighting at night looks beautiful, and will look even better with the SA's improved lighting system taken from Arma 3. At night, you have problem of trying to navigate your way through your environment without being seen and using lights intelligently, an extra interesting challenge. At the moment due to the length of night and day you essentially have to choose whether to play night *or* day unless your play session is going to last a considerably long time. This removes night as a challenge that arises while you play and instead it becomes a choice before you log in.

A solution to this would be to have an accelerated day/night cycle, not unlike that of the Wasteland mod. I'm unsure as to an exact length, that can be discussed, some Wasteland servers use approximately 2 hours of night to 4/5 hours of day.

This would cause night to be a challenge that can arise during your play time, a challenge that you can survive through. Imagine playing through the evening, heading to a safer location, managing to survive through the night to see the sun rise in the morning. That would be an epic feeling. It would add more variety to gameplay.

I feel it's a good compromise for people who play at certain times of the day that mean they can only play at night for example and is a better option then 24/7 daylight servers which remove night completely.

In response to the issue of realism, I think that this faster day/night cycle is preferable to 24/7 daylight servers which are much less realistic. It also means that you character will actually experience the night.

Edited February 6, 2013 by ComradeClash

[estx1992 32]

I would disagree with you for the sole purpose of "Realism" and how I like long day and night cycles for the atmospheric feeling.

But due to the SA's release coming up, with better lighting, I have to agree with you. Just to hold me over until the SA. A faster night cycle would be nice, but only because of the shitty lighting at night on the Arma II engine.

[mr_chabowski@live.co.uk 2416]

In response to the issue of realism, I think that this faster day/night cycle is preferable to 24/7 daylight servers which are much more unrealistic. It also means that you character will actually experience the night.

I understand what you're saying. Nobody actually plays the game 24 hours a day.

Personally I like the fact that when I see the sun starting to rise, I know I've still got another hour or so before I lose my cover entirely.

Same vice-versa. When the sun is setting, there's a good while to go before it's pitch black, and it gives plenty time to get back to base and swap out for "nocturnal" gear.

(No sense in having a scoped rifle if I can't see shit)

[1clash1 58]

I understand what you're saying. Nobody actually plays the game 24 hours a day.

Personally I like the fact that when I see the sun starting to rise, I know I've still got another hour or so before I lose my cover entirely.

Same vice-versa. When the sun is setting, there's a good while to go before it's pitch black, and it gives plenty time to get back to base and swap out for "nocturnal" gear.

(No sense in having a scoped rifle if I can't see shit)

Thanks for pointing out that mistake! Can't believe I missed it.

I see what you mean, but I like the idea that night is something you have to account for and occurs during your play session, rather than a choice you make before entering a server as usually your choice is essentially day or night for your whole play time.

[intensity 157]

I understand what you're saying. Nobody actually plays the game 24 hours a day.

Personally I like the fact that when I see the sun starting to rise, I know I've still got another hour or so before I lose my cover entirely.

Same vice-versa. When the sun is setting, there's a good while to go before it's pitch black, and it gives plenty time to get back to base and swap out for "nocturnal" gear.

(No sense in having a scoped rifle if I can't see shit)

I agree with this completely.

I usually only equip my NVGs and Ghillie only when it becomes night time (common sense really).

The server I've been on is the same in game time as my time zone. I like seeing that while it's getting dark in game, it is IRL as well. Kind of nice.

[scoffield77@gmail.com 192]

I disagree, and agree. as for the Mod it should have shorter day/night cycle... but for the Standalone, there will be a new lighting engine, more mechanics to make the night more tolerable ... For stand alone, i want it 24 hours.

[haywardgb 129]

No matter what setting I put my server on (full day or normal cycles), one half of the group will always complain more than the other. So now I just leave it on normal day/night cycles, but have put the timezone back 8 hours to give everyone a chance to experience daylight before the night kicks in. Personally, I prefer the night time, especially with sidechat turned off.. Crawling around Cherno for an hour and suddenly bumping into a random player can really get the heart pumping lol..

Edited February 15, 2013 by nomadichayward

[guyver1 70]

having the ability to essentially 'avoid' night time is wrong imho.

All players should have to experience night play.

no one plays for 24 hours as stated previously.

The whole 'essence' of DayZ is survival, if you're choosing to avoid surviving certain elements, then you're not really playing the whole experience.

The night time is supposed to be difficult, its supposed to be tense, frustrating, foreboding etc..

I would give my thumbs up to a shorter day/night cycle with the night being shorter than the day.

I'm from the UK, I play on mydayz which is a German private hive which is GMT -5, I work full time so don't get to play until say 9pm, and I usually play for about 4 hours a time, so for me, personally, 3 hours of daylight and 1 hour or night would seem like a reasonable split between day/night.

[meanboss 9]

I love it, but id hate something like minecraft speed.

5+ish hours of day sounds good

-that said, there is a little something special when the game gets dark when it gets dark IRL (talk about !creepy! immersion [oculus rift anyone?])

Edited February 15, 2013 by meanboss

[dallas 5195]

I think it's a mistake to dumb down the realistic game world, since it's a lot easier to find a watch than a compass. I rely heavily on the sun to navigate with. With a five hour day, the sun will race across the sky in two and a half hour, making it completely unreliable to use for navigation. Before you've moved 200 meters, you've got to make corrections again.

[guyver1 70]

I think it's a mistake to dumb down the realistic game world, since it's a lot easier to find a watch than a compass. I rely heavily on the sun to navigate with. With a five hour day, the sun will race across the sky in two and a half hour, making it completely unreliable to use for navigation. Before you've moved 200 meters, you've got to make corrections again.

I agree, navigation would be screwed.

But how do you resolve the issue of people deliberately avoiding the night and, in your own words, "dumbing down the realistic game world"??

Because lets be honest here, deliberately avoiding playing at night is 'dumbing down' your experience...

[mr_chabowski@live.co.uk 2416]

The best you can do is encourage folks to experience the night-life.

Trying to force players to stick to a server in the dark if they REALLY don't want to, is a no-go.

There's always going to be servers set for different time-zones. There has to be, because of, well, time-zones.

[OrLoK 16182]

Hello there

I too would like to see a mix, but as Dallas pointed out navigation would be nerfed.

if I *had* to choose between the two, I would choose accelerated cycles due to the fact that more people experience day only/night only compared to the amount that "real world" nav.

If there was more emphasis on "Nav" then my attitude would switch.

It's a tricky one and no mistake.

Rgds

LoK

[dallas 5195]

I agree, navigation would be screwed.

But how do you resolve the issue of people deliberately avoiding the night and, in your own words, "dumbing down the realistic game world"??

Because lets be honest here, deliberately avoiding playing at night is 'dumbing down' your experience...

To quote Newt: They mostly come out at night... mostly...

Some servers will move the day light hours to the peak hours and others will not. Servers will have peak hours and it make sense that player populations are more active in the day time. I think it's realistic that more common folks will hunker down during the night, while fewer are night hawks.

[indalcecio 23]

As with many things I think simply having it be an option for the server would be an adequate solution.

Personally I like playing day and night, depending on my mood. I actually prefer the night to be pitch black, too. My reasoning for that is that otherwise people can just turn up the gamma and brightness and turn it into a slightly dim black and white day...which means if I DON'T do that, I'm at a disadvantage. Playing on a pitch black server that doesn't have many or any hackers (can be hard to find but there are some that are really diligent with banning hackers), it actually seems a bit safer, since NVGs are fairly rare without people duping them.

Which actually brings up another slightly off-topic point I like to make: whatever feature, item or setting makes the game "harder", that also makes it harder for other people, too, which can sometimes work to your advantage.

EDIT: One more thing...if you want to go with realism, I'm not sure what the default ratio is now in-game, but in real life, depending on geographical location and time of year, generally speaking actual night time when the sun is totally down, is usually shorter than the day, and even when it's 50/50 (or 12/12), shortly before and shortly after the sun comes up, it's far from totally dark.

Oh, and I wish gamma and brightness were server defined, too.

Edited February 15, 2013 by BenitoProfane

[sinkatze 52]

I love playing at night and most of the time I play its night time. I would have a day cycle last say 12 hrs instead of 24 hrs. I know its realism and so, but you don't die of hunger in one day either right?

It just adapts your playstyle a bit to the time someone would play, maybe with 12 hrs day cycles you will enjoy both night and day, without making the cycles go to fast either.

[Positronica 30]

An accelerated night/day cycle should definitely be an option. The argument that a 24 hour cycle is more "real" is a completely pointless argument, because virtually no-one in the game actually plays through and experiences the 24 hour cycle... and it doesn't matter how real a game feature is if players never actually experience it. For the standalone, Rocket should do some data analysis on some current popular servers, and try to figure out how long the average daily session is for a DayZ player. The default in-game night/day cycle should then be set to cycle through during whatever that time period is. This would create a situation where the average player would be able to experience one full day in game, and all the survival elements associated with it, during one real world day's playing session.

[enforcer1975 1111]

I think it's a mistake to dumb down the realistic game world, since it's a lot easier to find a watch than a compass. I rely heavily on the sun to navigate with. With a five hour day, the sun will race across the sky in two and a half hour, making it completely unreliable to use for navigation. Before you've moved 200 meters, you've got to make corrections again.

Imo a bit exaggerated but still a valid concern up to a certain degree. With the knowledge of the day cycle beeing faster and the environment beeing only 15km wide ( actually ony 12-13km since quite a lot of space on the southern and eastern edge is just sea ) it should be easy to compensate and would also make the feeding cycle more realistic since we have to eat too often for a 24h day cycle.