Day and Night mode in a webgame

[mdshare]

Since long I've been thinking on having a day/night in games

Yet we strugle with the different timezones of players. So if it would be day in europe it could still be night for US players ingame.

Now what if we would make the game days shorter

eg 24h game time would be 16h real time, so in a way day/night would happen for different timezones as it would move up each real day with 8h so one day you would play during night at a game, next day could be day time

adding a night/day ingame could give also more room for the game development as day/night bonusses, different skills, and so on

so lets discuss this and work it better out

[UltimaRatio]

Actually, I have the same idea in my game, well, almost the same. There's a day and there's a night. There are also seasons(long winter, long summer(still working on the concept :P )). And all of these things, affect the speed of a transitions between locations, loot, the NPCs that are on the outskirts of the settlement/fortress, profession drop, etc.(thinking about having weather, but that's a whole other story)

As for your question. Timezones and not only timezones, are a pretty big thing in this idea. It's pretty easy to fix in JS and make it for an individual player; but if a player lets say fights another one, then, their bonuses will not match. So that gets crossed out. You could clearly use server time, but that's a little uncomfortable for players from other timezone. Actually, not as uncomfortable, as frustrating. Because they might never get a chance to play during night or day.

Shortening a day cycle within the game is a pretty good idea, how did I not think of that? But then, some of the realism sort of falls out(or maybe it doesn't). If it is a fantasy game, then you could write a legend about the world. And say that because of the speed of the planet's rotation caused by blah blah blah(or it has 3 or 4 suns), the days are shorter, or something like that :D

[mdshare]

Well to give everyone a fair chance ingame I think shortening the days would be the way to go.

 

Offcourse if using server time there could be a US, EU, AU server but that would lock players out ...

But EU players would always play at night on the AU server for example ... and I doubt it's good to split up a new game to soon to different timezone servers.

[a_bertrand]

We had that in our game for some time... but beside being a pure visual effect it wasn't changing anything else. Also as it was slowing down and even created some incompatibilities we removed it at the end.

[reek13]

dont really understand what your talking about but have a idea , i think its a alright idea i once was talking to someone about that