day and night cycle

Viewing filters like that have problems in that there is never a reson to play the game without them, essentialy instead of a cool feature you just make the game look terrible all the time. People point out AVP but i know a far better (and older) game, Heavy gear 1. It had a low light vision mode which was team coloured wireframes, for the longest time i didn't even know the game HAD textures.

But the direction they are going is that all units should be readable all the time. It's not going to be a situation where you can't see the guys because of the dark, the game will be made so you can see the guys, and if they can't make this darkness work i imagine they will ditch it rather than layer fixes over the top.

That's kind of what I'm getting at I suppose. I know I went on a bit, but I wanted to explain why headlamps are just plain wrong. The post goes a long way to showing the kind of systems that could be used in terms of sci fi theory & it just makes headlamps seem a bit silly.

By the time I got to the end of my post it was clear to me that visually it's just pointless beyond putting a couple of blinky lights here & there & making it "a bit darker" like in the March 22nd livestream. Basically for the reason that night vision or thermal optics are not in keeping with the art direction. I certainly wasn't suggesting anything like you describe akin to the overlay in heavy gear. The real issue is that in some cases there might be no natural light at all on the dark side of a planet. I don't care how you explain it away, fact is that no matter how dark it is I still need to be able to see & identify those units in order to play the game. Headlamps doesn't solve that problem.

I would be upset if they took the day/night feature out. It would just be wrong without it. However, I can't stress enough how much I really, really do not want headlamps.

These robots are rolling balls of fusion/fission powered death. They practically glow in the dark.

Well its about the depth of the darkness. It might end up just being a few shades greyer with some token flashy things.

As long as it's easy to distinguish night from day, I don't need(or want) it to be Pitch black for night, because that's just awkward for Gameplay, Gameplay > Realism.

Mike

+1
I don't care how you explain it away. Just make it playable and use artistic license to make it look like night time. Just remember to scrap the headlamps idea while you do it...

The more i think about it, headlamps are probably just going to become a cluster (word that rhymes with cluck). I imagine looking at a base and it is awesome but a mishmash of units and lights out in the feild is considerably less so.

Yeah, probably. If it's dark enough that all you can see is lights, then how will you distinguish what is what?

Would be neat to have coloured running lights on units that correspond to player colour choice though.

*Cough*

Let me use zurginator image and fix it a bit to show how that should work: