Night and Day?

[The Pfeiffenator]

I see how the game has shadows, but i would like to know if there will be a realistic night and day system as in changing shadows according to the time of day (which is shown in clock type indicator on the screen or something similar to that). If yes (which I totally doubt) will the field of view be changed according to night and day. And expanding on that, you could have night based ambushes or some kind of other night based attacks. Also some units could have certain skills (which could be obtained in a research building) that other units lack that helps them during the night. You could also make this an option.

This would make gameplay more interesting to me and also other players.

[MrBlack103]

If the sun is shining in the eyes of some units, it could give them an acccuracy disadvantage or something.

[Aeros]

Do you think that would be fun though, mrblack?

Our lighting system supports a day to night cycle, how that will make it into gameplay depends on how anoying the lighting cycle will be (after the first couple of times you see it you really won't be that stoked about it) - at the very least it could be an option the host sets before a game starts, to enable or even weather conditions.

[MattSherman]

I could confrim that the sound department is creating ambiences for both day and night respectively :-)

[The Pfeiffenator]

Well... I was wondering if the lighting was realistic like crysis (the sun rises and the shadows change respectively compared to the suns location in the sky).

[Aeros]

Would be a long stretch to compare us to crysis but yeah we have cast shadows and self-shadowing which adjust based on lighting position. What we don't have is normal mapping to make certain details in textures stand out based on lighting moving, since that would never really be noticed in our game. And we do compromise for that by burning in shadows into our textures to essentially get the same effect, it just doesn't move with the light source since in our tests its almost not noticable, not to mention we aren't an FPS environment with loads of lights changing.

[Apomonomenos]

Sounds like Warcraft 3 & EE2's weather & night affects.

In Warcraft 3:

• The night decreases Unit LoS
  
• in Day time the Unit's LoS is increased
  
• I'm not sure which is normal, but I heard that dawn made it Normal.
  

In EE2:

• certan seasons made rain, increasing Farming but decreasing movement.
  
• On other months, it would be very sunny. Unit LoS and movment speed increases but Farming decreases.
  
• Winter is the worst, since it lowers both.