Mythruna

I don't think there is a topic on this already, so i thought i would ask how/if date and time will play into the game? the thing is that date and time can be nothing or it can be huge, its really up to the developer. I kinda figure that it will play into things like farming and npc activity, but will you have a well thought out calendar, holidays for different races or maybe a few for all races, and, the part i was thinking about, will your character or npc's age?

I think I read somewhere that eclipses will come into play, and they will have some effect. Not sure about aging though, could be really interesting, or cause alot of issues

eclipses would be cool. i still like the idea of actual holidays though, y'know? and i would only like aging if it went realistically slow. or even slower. and to a certain age.

I have thought about the calendar which is why we have seasons, months, moon-phases, etc..  Contrary to the other post, I haven't really planned to do eclipses but that doesn't mean I won't later.

I haven't really thought about holidays.  That's a level of advanced polish on the AI that I can't even really conceive of at this stage.

I sort of do want NPCs to age which is why my towns generate with people of all ages, families, etc..  If players age then they will only age while playing.  For multiplayer servers that means they age much slower.  For single player games, they age with the world... unless you play some other character in a particular world instance.

Time marches pretty fast in Mythruna while you are playing.  1 Mythruna day is 24 earth minutes... so there are 60 Mythruna days in an earth day.  Since a Mythruna year is 112 days... that's a year every 1.8 earth days of solid playing (or ever-marching server time).  Slowing down aging, especially on a server, may be a pretty compelling need.

At any rate, I'm not sure how well I'll be able to simulate evolving NPC relationships so for a long time NPCs won't age.  Otherwise, I risk having entire towns where everyone died of old age and not enough children were born to replace them.  I will create NPCs of all ages and we'll just pretend they are aging glacially slow until I have time to do more advanced stuff.

sorry for my misunderstanding :)

so are seasons far off in the future? or would you say they are within a few updates.  and if you are already going to have months, holidays would be quite immersive. man that would be amazing :) i think your idea for aging would work well. you would just have to make it so townsfolk have kids soon enough. are you going to have it so the mom and dad are close in age? and the kids are with like a 15 year span.

When I created leafy trees, the groundwork was already put in for seasonal leaf changes.  Winter is the tricky one there.  I'm always tempted to just add this in but even the best winter trees will look pretty ugly if the rest of the landscape doesn't properly deal with snow and weather.  It starts to snowball from there. (pun intended)

If the "winter look" lasts the full month of Bladeira, that's 28 Mythruna days... or 672 earth minutes... 11.2 earth hours.  That's a long time to leave a really bad impression if a season doesn't look right when someone logs into the public server.

The challenges aren't really technical.  It's just that the longer I wait the more complete it will be... with climates, weather/snow/rain, etc..

Still, some days I feel like at least adding the autumn leaves.  I think it would look really nice. :)

Maybe you should  :) but i would hope winter is more than just a month... how many monthes were you planning anyway?

There are four months.  One per season.  This is already in the game as you can see the dates tick by with the time in the debug info in the lower right.  Bladeira is the winter month.  Gwyrdelia is Spring, Boethuela is Summer, and Frowndelia is Fall.  Each month has exactly 28 days and the full moon occurs right at the month change (as I recall).

huh i never really noticed i guess. 4 seems small to me.. maybe just becuz im used to 12

I wanted a fast turn-over of the seasons so that new players are less likely to think the game looks only like whatever season it happened to be when they started.  Imagine logging into the server at winter time and thinking the graphics are all bleak and wilted.

So rather than the standard save games, Mythruna will have saved worlds and characters in those worlds? Sounds sweet.

Yes.  I know some people will hate it because there is no specific idea of a "saved game" unless you manually back-up your world instance periodically.  But it's a million times easier for me to implement this way and it makes it possible to have more than one character in a specific world instance (note: a world instance is different than a world seed).  It also means it's easy to switch a single player world over to a server world at any point in time.

It also nicely side-steps the issue of how HUGE a savegame file would be for any world of a reasonable age.

I made a post that I wanted to make mods and I would have that as a mod.

Yeah, Minecraft worlds get heavvy fairly quick :D

I saw a full moon when I was taking pictures of my observatory... The moon had a CREEPY face.

LOL.  The human mind is wonderful.

It really did. Check out the pictures in my gallery post. :)

You mean this one:
(http://i.imgur.com/FqMAH.png)

You see a face, I see a texture mirrored on an axis. :)

Have you considered adding a second moon?

Two moons would mean two light sources... which is a lot more complicated than it sounds.

still looks pretty cool though.

Maybe the second moon should just appear fixed in relation to the first, that way, a single object/texture/light source solves it? :D

I see a koala having a lobotomy.

The main light moves in the sky and transitions from sun to moon at the appropriate time of day.  Adding a second light source, moving or not... is kind of tricky.

Ah, most programmers love a challenge ^^