Viewing some early renders and admiring the pretty shadows made me wonder... Where will the light source be? Will the system's light properly come from the sun and hence even feature a soft day-night cycle, or will everything get some sort of fake lighting for shadows?
Ideally I'd like a day night cycle that effects gameplay somehow. But even if it's just decorative, a day night cycle would look nice.
I am expecting PA to have an... "inverted spotlight" as a global light for each body/planet, for gameplay reasons. I think having one half of the "map" (i.e. the planet) constantly in darkness might be annoying and in order to make it pretty, you'd need may be a lot of different light sources, which would also be taxing on performance.
Those are few reasons why I have doubts regarding the sun being the primary source of light, but really it's hard to, erm, imagine how else they would handle shadowing on spherical objects. Maybe player camera will be source of light...? IDK and would like to know.
My guess is they all hold lampposts :mrgreen: On a more serious note, I like some realism if it doesn't interfere with the game itself. It would be awesome to have some sort of day and night cycle where the impact is more visual like the environment being a bit darker and the robots having all sorts of lights.
I like the idea of the day/night cycle with unit/building lights. It reminds me of Earth 2150. Good for sneak attacks and secret fire bases if we can have the ability to toggle unit lights. I have faith the team(especially with the stylized and visually distinctive look) could balance the look of a night side with the readability of units and overall gameplay.
It might be pretty cool if the dark side of the planet switches to a sort of night-vision mode. I see no reason for these bots to carry lights, there's better options. But if the dark side of the planet features a sort of night-vision mode with only green lines of the units and their team color visible, along with some light effects for explosions and such, that might be really cool. But very stressing on their unit designs... to keep them recognisable under those conditions.
I for one would like day-night cycles. If it is usable, will have to be seen. Assuming, that there will be alternative displays (e.g. something more schematic) the reduced light might not be a problem. Even with one main light source aka sun, the averted side of a planet doesn't need to be pitch black due to reflective secondary lights (e.g. moons). I suppose full ray tracing of the sun light might be a bit impractical, but you could easily calculate for a viewpoint, which planets/asteroids/moons in your back contribute to your light level. (and throwing in some small background illumination might not hurt either) Putting lights on each building/unit might work for visual effect/style, but you wouldn't to put lights on them in the necessary scale to illuminate your playing field. (would be like painting a big sign on you commander please shot me - just aim for the light )
i would like to see day/night cycles as well, that just adds so much to the inversion. I think the Earth 2150 approach was pretty reasonable as well, i liked the way the lc had to build enough batteries to not run out of energy over night. That's something to consider for PA as well gameplay wise. I think maybe make solar panels not the basic generator type like in TA but instead make it an advanced (still T1) one that is much more effective but requires you to also build energy storage so you don't run out over night. From the pure representation standpoint i'd say make a daylight phase with shadows and for the night just make the brightest full moon night you can imagine (basically just no shadows and give everything a blue tint). I think that would be easy, satisfying and not at all detrimental to gameplay...
I agree. At this time the day/night cycle seems to be just for looks. Perhaps some solar benefits to some units/structures could be considered. Cheap solar panels would be interesting early in the game. perhaps also some units could have a speed or power bonus in the sun.
