Savriss wrote:Blue Bishop, you're right that day and night would probably be too short in the current system of time. This, in turn, makes me curious about why 3 hours was chosen as the length of a time period.
Is this cast in stone?
Would it make much difference if they were changed to 2 hour periods and rescue was slated for 20 days, seeing that both produce the same number of actual turns (240).
Depending on how the coding is done, this would either make rewards and penalties to time more powerful or, if it's been done by 'time segments' awarded, produce no change in the number of turns.
Nuku's selected the three-hour turn back when the game was first created, I think in part because it allowed the 30 days of game time to be broken down nicely into a reasonable amount of gameplay. As well, three hours makes sense for traveling across the city from one area to another, especially given the obstructions of circumventing monster groups, blocked streets, etc. Nuku's attempt at transferring the single player game onto the server for multiplayer had one-hour turns, but that project didn't get very far, so we can't know for certain how that would have turned out in the long run.
As for altering the turn length in the current game, I suspect that would be very messy to deal with. Aside from the more obvious cases of certain things being affected by the time of day (Down Under Pub's business hours, Alex's brunches, etc...), there's a lot of subtler stuff slipped into the dialog where NPC's tell you to come back in a day or are only looking for sex once a day, for example. We already have some things which check the time of day using the 'daytimer' definition, but several other timed things don't use that and would need to be tracked down and altered manually.
That being said, I'm all for more things making use of the day/night check, even if it's just in a cosmetic manner, though implementing vision/lighting penalties to combat would be tricky. For simplicity sake, we have to assume if the lighting's bad, then both the attacker and defender are equally penalized, the former in their ability to hit and the latter in their ability to dodge. That being said, the Snow Bat has a nighttime bonus in effect. While they are set to be nocturnal, it is possible to unlock the Snow Bat creature during the day and have him appear at that time. While the Fruit Bat is also nocturnal, their description (should someone make an event which specifically prompts one to appear) includes them wearing sunglasses during the day. The description for the rooms at the mall vary depending on day and night or if the power's back on. When entering the washroom area at the mall for the first time, you should get a short scene where a Wolverine Guard hands you a lantern to use down there.
Weather, while interesting, would throw off the thirst mechanic pretty quick. For simplicity and story sake, the game takes place during a fairly constant heat wave. While an event or two have been written in which it rains, the author'd never checked if this were okay, as they throw a wrench into stuff. What stops an industrious player from collecting huge amounts of rainwater, especially if they've got access to Dr. Matt's microwave to neutralize it? Should I ever get around to making a new version of the game from scratch, weather's something to consider, but making use of it during the current game would destroy the thirst mechanic.