DAY/NIGHT CYCLE
Sharky36
Join Date: 2017-05-23 Member: 230706Members
Join Date: 2017-05-23 Member: 230706Members
First I want to say I really do love this game. It is the first game I have ever played that is almost completely underwater. I find the experience of swimming around the safe shallows so relaxing that its almost therapeutic. I would like however to be able to slow down time so it doesn't feel like the planet is spinning at light speed. Is there anyway that the team could put in some type of selection at the beginning of the game to change how fast the day/night cycle is?
Comments
If you're on PC, you can use console commands to slow the timescale, but be aware: all time-dependent processes will slow as well. So fabrication won't be a click-and-done thing anymore.
That's a big chunk of the problem with editing timescale or modding in longer days - short of finding and editing the specific value for ticks-per-day, the only way to go slows everything down.
I put a chair on the bridge just because it looks cool
Also on the subject of the passage of time, I was playing recently and had to surface quickly due to nearly asphyxiating - while the camera was pointed skyward I went to get a snack and was AFK. When I returned I stared at the skybox curiously; something was weird. It dawned on me that the cloud patterns in the sky were just rotating - you can see the same unchanging pattern whip around at lightning speed!
It's not as noticable at night since I guess they become translucent, but they never change... I guess the sun and moons animate differently as they seem unaffected, but I gotta say it's fairly immersion-breaking for me now. I know, cloud patterns are low-priority to fix, but on an aquatic planet with no weather to have 'fixed' cloud patterns is pretty weak. (And no, you can't say "But the islands have cloud concealment, the Precursors engineered everything!" Even a 100% artificially-engineered planet has to follow basic rules with how the ecosystem operates.)
Well, that and the stars shining through yon merry moon.
It's honestly hard not to feel like nightfall is triggered every time you leave a seabase or pick up a resource. The beds help, now, but I keep finding that they have a fixed amount of sleep time instead of just waking you at dawn, which is almost worse than not having anything at all. You go to bed to skip the night, wake up 40 seconds before sundown the next day... and are "not tired enough" to sleep again, so now you HAVE to sit through the far-too-pitch-black night where you can't really find or do much of anything? Frustrating.
Yeah, you have to time it so your character has a day/night routine for the bed to really work right.
Just because it's an alien planet doesn't mean it can spin as fast as they want it to. If a planet was spinning as fast as the day/night cycle in this game indicates, it would probably be shaped like a doughnut without a hole and have storms that make the most fearsome hurricanes in earths history look like a gentle summer breeze.
Doesn't slowing timescale slow down movement speed too?
Then it would be unusable for that purpose, as no one likes to take double time for swimming a certain distance. It would get boring.
We must differ from movement time and daytime, but usually games like this (including the other open world games) link those values. So running up to a tree 100m away should take only a few RT seconds and feels like the game had real time, while the daytime says you just needed a minute to reach a tree 100m away.
That isn't too bad in itself, because you have no problem with such a crazy daytime, but gets a problem when you try to slow daytime to real time. Then your 100m tree walk would need a real minute and give you a feel of bullet time. And this would feel totally wrong to you. And even worse it would be very boring do everything in bullet time for the whole game time.
So games movement must always feel real time, while the daytime can be speeded. Not the opposite. If there are no two different time handles, then there is no way to slow down time without getting bored with lame movement.
Or does the game have two handles for this or slowing down time doesn't effect movement? (Fallout 4 allows at least to speed up movement while slowing time, but falling time and physics stay slow).
As I don't think anyone wants to move like a snail just to have a long day in return, the game would need a time relation change setting that allows you to move in real time AND have a real time daytime! Otherwise we can forget it.
But also keep in mind that different planets have different gravitational acceleration.
Given the Earth (radius about 6371000m, acceleration of gravity at surface 9.81m/s^2), with a rotational period of 1.4 hours it would start to come apart.
I can't find information on how long the day/night cycle is. And time is accelerated in game. My current game is over 3 real-time days in length, but by the PDA dates I've been on Planet 4546B for over a year. I calculate that time is accelerated by 128 times or greater.
I get that it's a wilderness planet, meters beneath the ocean. But it's PITCH BLACK in the Dunes at Noon. Exposed to the surface. 200m up. Light penetrates that far in the real world. It's at least gloomy that far down, not utterly pitch black like a sack over your head. If darkness wasn't quite so over-the-top all the way around, I wouldn't care that it seems like nightfall is deliberately triggered by my making progress on something. I don't expect it to be bright in an alien coral reef at night, but MAN is it overdone in some places and some ways. You can't even walk around the floating island by moonlight because you can't see the trees or the ground, AT ALL, it's like you're floating in a void. And this is with bioluminescent trees!
Longer or shorter cycles, what I'm saying is darkness itself could be balanced a little bit too. Wouldn't hurt.