Hmmm yeah it takes a lot less work to make a hint than the actual thing

Nah, Rufus can do it with his eyes closed

Not as much as you might think. Actually coding the system won't be as demanding as making sure everything works properly, everybody is happy with it and making use of it.

Sure you could just dim the screen at set intervals for everyone and make outside pk at night, but that would look half assed.

Making baddies attack towns at night, having windows light up(to simulate lights from inside),having different events at night and day, and changing the music to fit the theme of night would take a consistent effort.

Nah, Rufus can do that in 2 seconds

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/58874942/Ph...%2026%20PM.png

Actually finally got around to testing my idea, and even though it runs fine on my PC it lags pretty bad on my iPad; this could be because of the higher resolution but I dunno. I'm a bit disappointed, I knew it probably wouldn't run as well as the PC but I was hoping that dropping the quality of the effect(which I did, quite a bit) would help, but it didn't. I think it has to do with slow RAM or something in the iPod/iPad, as the GFX chip shouldn't have a problem rendering the effect, so I'm gonna chalk it up to the RAM not being able to write the drawingpanel fast enough.

Is there any possible alternative or solution?

For what I wanted? Nope.

That looks really nice, almost as good as I pictured it in my head.

As for the lag on iPad, I'm pretty sure Graal is more cpu intensive than gpu intensive, in terms of scripts-I don't think Graal takes advantage of the GPU for scripted effects. Is it the shading of the tiles that lags it, or the lantern light effect? Just shading the screen with teh dark blue is a really nice feel, perhaps you could get away with that.

also maybe jsut have the normal lantern effect, but change the player sync distance at night.

Then it would have to be done differently. Are there alternative methods of giving off the illusion of nighttime?

It's not a loop problem, as there is no looping being done(other than for players, which in this case is only 3). It's a problem with drawingpanel.

And design-wise I wouldn't have used player lightsources because of the sheer amount of players on iClassic. I'd only have used NPCs as light sources, for things such as lamps and torches in levels.

maybe use images to draw over the tiles that display at night to simulate a light effect for non moving things like lanterns? it would require the graphics team to make images for specific areas, but the result would be the same and not use as much processing power.

I just read this thread, but I like pretty much everything that has been said. With the guards not out, Pyrats should roam york, Baddies should roam other places, bats should come out on overworld, Different bugs should be present such as more lightning bugs and things such as spiders/scorpians and less day bugs. Lanterns would be so cool bug i understand the problems associated. Mabye more of a threat to dying, since its night. Mabye at late night if you die you go to the closest spawn point? (EXA: unstuck me, hotels/inns, tower spawns)

One thing to add that I thought sounded insanely fun. If at night, when you die you respawn at respawn points. Then there could be another guild activity in which they have leaderboards for guild night kills ratio. It could be called "Night-kill" scores. Or mabye its based on K/D. Or somthing. Many cool guild things could be added along with nighttime PK-world zone.

So you're essentially suggesting a leaderboard for guilds' collective kills(that rhymes!) during the night? That's a great idea! I agree with you on every other point as well, except for those damn bats. I hate those things.

There really are no alternatives. The method I used was pretty much conceptualized by me and is a hackish way to even achieve it. The fact I could even pull it off in Graal would probably surprise a few developers.

The only other "alternative" would be to only have a circle around the player themselves, which is fairly easy to do. However that wasn't what I had in mind and fits in place with the "moderate" setting.