If you tuned into our latest development stream, you know that I’ve been working on implementing the day/night cycle while Tony is chugging away at improving the building engine and Stephanie polishes off the core crafting engine. If you missed the stream, you can check out the archive here.
In the stream we built a basic time-keeping mod and implemented a UI clock widget. Now I’m moving on to making the sun and moon move in the sky, starting with changing the light source so it gets dark at night and shadows reflect the correct time of day.
Here’s a raw, somewhat ugly, unfiltered look at my progress so far, running in our tiny test world.
- The clock widget works, and shows the time of day. It’s about 50% complete and needs a lot more work, but the basics are in.
- Our settler falls asleep at night time and wakes up in the day.
- The light accurately reflects the time of day…mostly. I still need to do a little more wiring here so it smoothly animates, but I can manipulate the sun and moon lights.
Work to be done
- Change the skybox as the time of day changes, so the sky isn’t always blue.
- Lots more smarts in the sleep behavior. Citizens should look for a bed when they’re sleepy, and if they find one run over to it and sleep in it. Right now they just conk out on the ground.
- Lots of polish. Tweak the colors of the sun/moon lights. Improve the clock graphics. Etc.