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Then couldnt you just have.... alternating servers? Naa, probably too many servers that way. (Ie: Amia A (day) Open/ Amia A (Night) Closed)

But I would like to know if this would be technically feasible. I would think it would. Just the sameish lighting effects as Darkhold and such. The only problem would be lag, and I'm not sure if that would be a problem.

I think the idea of alternate day/night resets is an awesome idea. Not sure exactly how feasible it would be from a programming aspect, but it would definitely open up some real good RP. Bad guys could do their sneaking about at night, drow and other light sensitive races could be out and about doing their things. Good idea.

Mahtan Tasadur wrote:

Oh yeah forgot about that. I was thinking like Khem since its on the other side of the continent <.< Forgot Brog and the other close islands are on B too.

How do you explain away Khem then?

Personally I like the idea, and you could explain away the islands by saying tit takes all day/night to get there.
At the moment my svirf puts her helm on and off like she's doing a weird dance for the day/night cycles ... I would love to see them stretched. Even if there's no way to halt the clock, can you just make it dark and put te effects and everyone ignores the compass time like usual?

I believe Disco is looking into the day/night cycle thing, actually, without promise of course. It could destroy the world to tamper with it.'

And yeah, I also support it wholeheartedly. Now, I pretty much shun outdoor RP because of the flashing Sun.

It appears we all concur and it all falls down to Disco's shoulders once again.

Disco! Do this!

I see one problem and one problem only with a Night/Day Alternating Reset server.

Time Schedules. Some people might not be able to get on very often, and if their evil characters would be more apt to coming out at night, but they cant get off work in time for -that- certain reset, then we run into the loss of characters, maybe. Though, I find thats not usually the case, and people can stay for more than one reset at a given day of play, I think this might be the second biggest problem to deal with. (Second to only the actual programming of the Night/Day fix.)

The day/night cycle if it was extended, would be a godsend for Underdark players who should be rights, only surface at night. I don't want Vampire characters in the swarms (but one or two for whole server would be fine). Make it the same as Lichdom RP, you'd have to do a lot to earn it.

But Night being extended would really work for UD characters who could then only pop up to the surface at night.

Remember though that some of the places you can go are geographically distant from others, therefore it could be night in some places but daytime in others.

Vampire players if they like night prowling creatures should make a Underdark Drow character.

They drink enough blood down there they rival vampires anyway.

Mr. Hackums wrote:

I see one problem and one problem only with a Night/Day Alternating Reset server.

Time Schedules. Some people might not be able to get on very often, and if their evil characters would be more apt to coming out at night, but they cant get off work in time for -that- certain reset, then we run into the loss of characters, maybe. Though, I find thats not usually the case, and people can stay for more than one reset at a given day of play, I think this might be the second biggest problem to deal with. (Second to only the actual programming of the Night/Day fix.)

Understandable concern... but if that's the case, they can just carry on as the have for the entire time Amia has existed. And due to the time of resets, a person who plays from, let's say, 6pm - 9pm GMT most days might land on daytime resets for a few days, then nighttime resets for a few days. So, they would still get a chance to play around in the dark.

On a sidenote, if you can make this happen Disco.... I will gladly carry your half-poultry love child.

So, we're planning on extending the day night cycle in some way... Why not add some edurance counter into it while at it forcing people to sleep at logical intervals, because right now most people just ignore the cycle, especially those by reason effected by it. I know my fighters never sleep and my magical characters only once every four days or so.

Why not add toilets, food rations and water too and call ourselves Arelith? :wink:

Word. If we're even considering this for a change, we should really be careful not to request too much for our DM's to get their minds around. Its confusing for me already.

Lets just stick for seeing through making resets Night/Day.

xordae wrote:

Why not add toilets, food rations and water too and call ourselves Arelith? :wink:

Exactly.

Why are changing anything? I don't really mind the fast day/night cycle. I don't love it but would prefer it to a whole reset worth of night or day. World of Warcraft does it as real time and the lack of variety got boring.

I support extending the Day/Night cycle if it is feasible without rebuilding Amia from the ground up.

I will be -angry- if I have to deal with 20 friendly vampires a day. There will be no mercy. Drannok will rapidly end up a White Necromancer and have an Undeath to Death trigger finger.

24 hours game time = 4-6 hours real time

That's a pretty nice scale if you ask me. 2 hours of light and 2 hours of dark is enough to satisfy most kinds of RP while still letting people with less playing time experience both. I've long hoped to see night OPs from drow and the other sneaky folk, and priests who can properly pray at dawn without spasming.

Players could make it a culture that the thieves come out at night while the shiny armored guardsmen predominantly make their rounds in daylight. Just thinking of the possibilities for immersion here is making my toes curl.

mine too, mine too. This could open SO much up to our Roleplay. Right now I'm hearing lots of discontent, and I'm not going to get into the issues and reasons because there are just simply too many. Too many stupid ones too. So instead of crying and wailing, lets fix up some really nice roleplay to get everyone back into loving Amia again.

Uber Night OPs and daylight rituals would be incredible. I so dearly miss campfire RP...

Drannok wrote:

I will be -angry- if I have to deal with 20 friendly vampires a day. There will be no mercy. Drannok will rapidly end up a White Necromancer and have an Undeath to Death trigger finger.

Now thats the way to do it! ;P

WoW had a real-time day night cycle. I know that won't work here, with differing timezones and so on, but the idea of around 2-3 hours day/night turnaround does seem like a very cool idea. Twenty minutes simply isn't long enough for dark deeds in the night.

xordae wrote:

Why not add toilets, food rations and water too and call ourselves Arelith? :wink:

Is that a joke, or do characters on Arelith really have to urinate/defecate at regular intervals?

They don't -have- to, but it decreases your ability to fight.... Srsly.

StandingBehindYou wrote:

Is that a joke, or do characters on Arelith really have to urinate/defecate at regular intervals?

Nah the toilets part was a joke to add more weight to the package. His point is valid though, if you're into heavier RP settings which closely resemble real life and by-the-book FR RP, Arelith is the server to go to.

Amia is a Jack-of-all-trades server: It's not heavy Role Play, its not completely Action. That's what draws players to it (atleast in my opinion) because it takes the best of both server types.

Silvarus wrote:

Drannok wrote:

I will be -angry- if I have to deal with 20 friendly vampires a day. There will be no mercy. Drannok will rapidly end up a White Necromancer and have an Undeath to Death trigger finger.

Now thats the way to do it! ;P

Grab Control Undead and watch everything die.

Why do we have to change anything?

I mean - seriously... there's so much else we suspend in the cry for "good RP", why can't you do what the drow have been doing all this time?

*//hey, it's nighttime, cool?*

//Sure, NP*

I guess I just feel like some of these issues with RP depend on how much you depend on the environment ... yet clearly the environment is not realistic in regards to time.

And what about resting?

There's a =real= RP / time issue...so it's night time.. my character rests, but that's a couple minutes representing a minimum of 8 hours of rest / memorization.

But.. wait.. the game engine's showing it's still nighttime.. I guess it's the next day's night now? What about those that didn't rest?

See what I mean? It's half a dozen either way you do it.

So I'd vote on the "aint broke, don't fix it."

Because it's not broke, or it's broke any way you look at it due to all the different factors, I'd rather Disco and our awesome developers and DM's fixed the other stuff that actually =needs= fixing.

Regards,

Sure you can determine between you and your pals what time it is and act accordingly. But that's different. As it is now, day and night fly by so quickly that no one bothers to accept this cycle into their RP. You'll occasionally hear a "Good morning" or "Good evening", which is in fact only good through half of the RP before the opposite would be appropriate again.

What I mean by immersion is that.. if it's night and day for a few hours each, then people will have to start dealing with it in their RP, and that goes for a global scale. Night and day will start to make sense globally, whereas people saying amongst themselves "//while we RP this, it's night" is insular and kind of broken as soon as an outsider comes along. If what you suggest is being done right now in lack of a better day/night cycle, I haven't really noticed it happening often.

Resting has already been accepted as a quick sit-down in most circumstances where you don't have 8 IG hours to waste, such as hunting. Immersion may be scraped there, but it's not broken.

I agree with X. A balance is needed between mechanically enforcing the premises for the IC reality and leaving these premises up for the individual players to decide for themselves. Obviously, if using free imagination and text was a full good solution to us, we would be a 100% text based RP community, which we are not; we obviously enjoy the fact that an enginge determines a few common premises for everybody's RP.

And I, for one, support leaving night and day to the engine.

Mr. Hackums wrote:

I see one problem and one problem only with a Night/Day Alternating Reset server.

Time Schedules.

I think whole resets of one mode is a bad idea for this reason. We can solve this problem with a night/day cycle of about 60-90 minutes IRL (30 min day/30 min night for example). That way it's possible to catch the night-time, if that is what you prefer. I love the general idea.

But day & night is already 24 minutes each and it's not much to work with or even notice. RP is lengthy sometimes. If we're already changing the cycle, let's make it a couple of hours each! *crosses fingers*

Hm, I thought it was like.. 8 minutes. Might just feel like that, I guess.

I think the main reason why the day night cycle is ignored is because the npc's don't react to it. Farmers are about whether it's day or night and same for all things. Now if villagers and city folk where to disappear indoors at night and maybe other monsters would come out at night

This is probably going to be a hell of a lot of work, but it would say NIGHT much clearer then a darker screen, I just up the brightness of my monitor if it bothers me *grins*

Bear in mind, to increase the length of the day/night cycle, you have to increase the number of real-life minutes per game 'hour'. So any day length will be a multiple of 24 (48 minutes, 72, 96, 120, and so on). This affects any spells which use hours/caster level as duration, unless the spell scripts themselves are changed. Can you imagine what it would be like, if stat buffs from a level 4 caster would last until reset or until you get dispelled or the caster rests?

That's probably a very valid concern, but I will admit to liking the idea of setting all the hour/level to 1 turn/level.

Selmak wrote:

Can you imagine what it would be like, if stat buffs from a level 4 caster would last until reset or until you get dispelled or the caster rests? ;)

Heavenly?

Kjetta wrote:

That's probably a very valid concern, but I will admit to liking the idea of setting all the hour/level to 1 turn/level.

In theory, one could add a function to one of of the includes that all spell scripts use so that you can change the timing for any spells just by setting a module switch. That is, rather than relying on the hard-coded functions to return the usual value given a particular input, you write new functions that could set the duration to be (just for example) seven turns per three caster levels, except when it's night-time or when your hair is on fire. (Okay I made that last one up) So basically it creates a new hook for scripting that didn't exactly exist before.

In practise, making all 400 of those spell scripts use the soft-coded timing rather than the hard-coded timing is a bit time-consuming. I mean once it's done you'd never have to touch it again but still, ouch.

Selmak wrote:

Can you imagine what it would be like, if stat buffs from a level 4 caster would last until reset or until you get dispelled or the caster rests?

Can you imagine what it would be like if they could only rest once every 24 hours

(1/day)

belgianbonzai wrote:

Selmak wrote:

Can you imagine what it would be like, if stat buffs from a level 4 caster would last until reset or until you get dispelled or the caster rests?

Can you imagine what it would be like if they could only rest once every 24 hours

(1/day)

Once every 8 hours, technically. But I was on a server that more or less tried to do that. And lo and behold ... THERE WE NO CASTERS OF ANY KIND!

Drannok wrote:

Once every 8 hours, technically. But I was on a server that more or less tried to do that. And lo and behold ... THERE WE NO CASTERS OF ANY KIND!

Lovely

Do it already

To keep it fair, you should only be able to rest once in a 24 hour period. Spell casters should only be able to get new spells after same said period, with the proper rest of course. This would bring a whole new aspect to wiz/sorc unleashing fireballs like a Tommi gun, making them more apt to save their spells for when they Really need them instead of dropping them like a drunk eats beer-nuts.
Although i can see some neat RP benefits, I think there would be to many pain-in-the-arse issues to implement something like this. I have done plenty of campfire RP where we simply ignore the quick day/night cycle, it's really quite simple. The whole time cycle is ludicrous in Amia anyway with never ageing human characters and children of all races growing up to maturity in what feels to be a blink of an eye. It seems everyone just bends and warps time to fit there own wants anyway. I say just leave it alone. Especially since it won't bring in vampires as an optional player race anyhoo, thank the gods.

Let's not invalidate non-buffers any more than they are invalidated already. Even with a changed day-night cycle, everyone has built his character around 16 minute rest intervals already and that is exactly where it should stay at.

xordae wrote:

Let's not invalidate non-buffers any more than they are invalidated already. Even with a changed day-night cycle, everyone has built his character around 16 minute rest intervals already and that is exactly where it should stay at.

Casters work exactly the same with any rate of restoration.

Indeed, after all fighters can use their fighting skill and powerful swords to unleash death like a Tommi gun, dropping monsters like a drunk eats beer-nuts. So the 15min rest period should remain to keep things equal.

The way I always get around it when someone throws RP flak at me for resting with Drannok is:

"Fine, he used Rope Trick and rested in a pocket plane where nothing can reach him anyways, because he would have that spell in the Forgotten Releams anyways and you insist on using those rules."

Even in PnP it's easy to get around the spells per day limits.

garzgoyle wrote:

To keep it fair, you should only be able to rest once in a 24 hour period. Spell casters should only be able to get new spells after same said period, with the proper rest of course. This would bring a whole new aspect to wiz/sorc unleashing fireballs like a Tommi gun, making them more apt to save their spells for when they Really need them instead of dropping them like a drunk eats beer-nuts.

Why don't we also include that elves need half the rest time of humans, stretch out the rest, make everyone suffer from fatigue (so your fighters can't go out smashing things all day), insert food and call it fair?

Sure, in PnP you can only rest once per day ... but in PnP you could walk for six hours without having to wait for six hours to pass. All that this does is completely remove casters as an option, unless the buffs are extended to match the times, then it just invalidates non-buffers.

Kjetta wrote:

That's probably a very valid concern, but I will admit to liking the idea of setting all the hour/level to 1 turn/level.

How about changing the 1 hour per level to 2 turns per level ... isn't that how they work at the moment anyway (I don't know how time works but I thought 20 rounds = 2 turns = 1 hour, or something like that)?

xordae wrote:

24 hours game time = 4-6 hours real time

That's a pretty nice scale if you ask me. 2 hours of light and 2 hours of dark is enough to satisfy most kinds of RP while still letting people with less playing time experience both. I've long hoped to see night OPs from drow and the other sneaky folk, and priests who can properly pray at dawn without spasming.

Players could make it a culture that the thieves come out at night while the shiny armored guardsmen predominantly make their rounds in daylight. Just thinking of the possibilities for immersion here is making my toes curl.

Yum yum yum. I've always craved a decent day/night cycle on Amia. It adds a whole lot of depth to the enviromental RP.

Yurell wrote:

Kjetta wrote:

That's probably a very valid concern, but I will admit to liking the idea of setting all the hour/level to 1 turn/level.

How about changing the 1 hour per level to 2 turns per level ... isn't that how they work at the moment anyway (I don't know how time works but I thought 20 rounds = 2 turns = 1 hour, or something like that)?

That's correct.

1 hour buff = 2 turns, atm. Aka, 2 minutes.

Perhaps we should make a post in the TtC forum to wave over the chicken's interest? You can link it to this topic to point out the deliberations preceding the suggestion. I would really, really love to see the extended Night/Day cycle kick in.

The rest, though, about resting once per 24 hours, changing buff durations, etc... Is a little bit of a leap too far, and I'd rather it remain in the dusty closet for the time being. One issue at a time people, and now we've a fine one to tackle.

I necroed an older topic in Things To Change that had the same subject here.

As well.. have a look at the comments from the Dev side. It doesn't look as easy as it's been made out here... but if there's any chance that it will be reconsidered, we should go for it.

It's not really easy, no.

Vampires.

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