day and night cycle

It would be a fun visual effect for sure. Kinda makes me wish that dubstep was the chosen music for PA

lol

anyway, Using day and night cycles strategically is interesting, but honestly I build radar. I mean, who doesn't? and if there is still fog of war, I can't really see much in the daytime, either. Day and night becomes just a fun visual feature at that point unless it directly affects the units and their attributes (speed, vision).

I am relatively new to the forum, if I have missed a thread about fog of war/radar in PA, I gladly will read up on it.

If you want to read a great concept on Fog of War, vision and radar, check out this post from exterminans.

It would even work with a day/night cycle if there ends up being one.

That looks even nicer than I imagined!

Spotify > Radio > Genre: Dubstep > ??? > profit

Needs:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWLg5KY-zPk

As i red the post i thought, the game has solar sytems, simulating planets and stuff, so why not day and night; not only simple timer, but having day on the side facing sun and night on the other?

I think that is where the idea about light at night comes from in the first place

Nope.

Oh, no.... Not Dubstep... Dubstep is OK in small doses, but not for a whole song. <.<

*And It doesn't quite go with Orchestral Sound tracks.*

Why yes, I would love some dubstep. Skrillex gets way too much hate, he's not bad, but I don't think mainstream "dubstep" would quite fit as default.

Nah, still would want it... But to each his own.

I'm guessing that they might be able to add a music player into the game, sorta' like in TA. Or have to music be modable.... Or just have an "off" setting so you can listen to your own.

It would be great. Just imagine marker lights on buildings blink and go red when out of energy.

So your enemy knows when you have stalled your Economy? That would be interesting...

That would be really cool. Imagine if certain units didn't show up on the mini map unless you actually had line of sight on them and that if they turned off their lights at night then you had to be practically next to them to see them. Night time sneak attacks anyone?

So we talked about this in the live stream. Basically day/night cycles as naturally happens with the orientation to the sun.

Will the robots even really need extra lights to be identified?

I mean, I extrapolated this from the Delta post:

(blue being player color, of course)

Hehehe... that's pretty mean looking.

will the units have flashlight that automaticly turn on at night?

Hell to the yeah it would.

A day and night cycle - what a fantastic idea, and I just know that explosions, lasers, bases and units are going to look absolutely epic at night (just like Sim City looks awesome at night)

Really hope you press ahead with this idea guys! Kudos!

EDIT: I just wanted to reformat this for clarity since I initially wrote it on my phone. Turned out to be some heavy editing in the end though.

I'd like to see a night vision effect (green scale) or a thermal (grey scale) where units stand out as you would expect to see them. This effect has been done really well in FPS games like COD & Battlefield. I just find it really hard to imagine that these so-called super advanced robots need headlamps. It's a bit low-tech & really would ruin the game for me.

Sure the could have running lights, but you should have them on all the time. They are pretty much mandatory & when it got dark they would really pop. But I'm thinking that these robots would have absolutely no need for headlamps due not least to the vast array of sensors currently available for targeting - not to mention what you could dream up in the future.

Plus all the data for enemy positions would be streamed (along with all the commands like movement co-ordinates etc.) from the commander who has access to & is responsible for processing all the sensory data from the radar, satellites & other intel gathering units. In other words what requirement do units in the field have for optics -particularly those in the humanly visible range of light- that would constitute the need for headlamps? The answer (no matter how pretty headlamps might be) is none.

For close range optical targeting something like thermal optics (to give a current example) is a much better option. It also gives us some interesting stealth options. Current tech allows for thermal camouflage - just search BAE Systems thermal camo on youtube. It seems to me that robots in the field would have no requirement to see colour. IFF tags identify friend from foe & monochrome is adequate to identify targets at the kind of ranges we are talking about. This would be the case 100% of the time, day or night. Unfortunately from an art direction POV it just wouldn't be viable or at best it would be pretty boring.

Personally, I understand the requirement for colour in the game generally. The game would be awfully bland if we didn't see colour at least at day time. From the player's POV (read commander) we can assume full colour visuals in daylight are viable - but at night time it just isn't possible if we are relying on natural light for our display.
The thing is that to the robots in the field, there is no difference between day & night. The data they receive is the same & the close range optics wouldn't change. So the difference is in what the commander sees, which is what we are interested in anyway.

We already know we can't rely on natural light. That's just lame anyway; we're talking about the future here after all. We also already know that we don't need to actually "see" what we are looking at anyway. So how do we represent terrain & units at night time in an aesthetically pleasing way? Perhaps a fog if war style thermal optic monochrome around the units, representing their field of vision is a possibility. As for the terrain, we can scan the terrain with any array of sensors you care to imagine & display it as a visual representation for the commander. Obviously, unless we have seen this terrain we technically can't give it colour, but if we have then we could technically superimpose a colour image over the data. Think Google maps.

With all that said, I think it's a bridge too far though IMO. Just make it a little darker than in the daylight to remind the player that it's night time & be done with it. You can explain the fact that you can see in the dark in a million different ways. The running lights will look cool on the units as they run around in the semi-darkness and I'll be a lot happier knowing that they don't have to have headlamps to see one another.