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Day/Night transitions?


ironheart

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Just a question. I was playing KOTOR the other day and it occurred to me that on every planet you go to it's day time all the time no matter how long you spend running around on it and i was just wondering if it's possible to change that? Is the sky box(I think that's what it's called?) something that's set in stone or would it be possible to make, I dunno, a script or something to make it change periodically? Or would that be crazy ridiculous impossible? Never modded much before but I'd like to start and if this is possible it's something I want to take a stab at.

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Hey,

 

If you want the planet to show night in certain scenes of the game and change to day time later- this could be accomplished by creating 2 exact Modules except the skybox would be changed to show the new time of day. This would work for modules which do not reflect the sun intensity like on Onderon.

 

Light maps could be give more yellow light to show day time and change the light map hue to a blue for night.

 

I have not tested this out, but hypothetically this should work- don't know how real it will look while walking around in the module.

 

To trigger the night or day module version you could use a bed/rest/sleep or you can decide to have some food in a cantina. After you select to take a nap, a script will fire to replace the day module with night module.

 

Logan

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Hey,

 

If you want the planet to show night in certain scenes of the game and change to day time later- this could be accomplished by creating 2 exact Modules except the skybox would be changed to show the new time of day. This would work for modules which do not reflect the sun intensity like on Onderon.

 

Light maps could be give more yellow light to show day time and change the light map hue to a blue for night.

 

I have not tested this out, but hypothetically this should work- don't know how real it will look while walking around in the module.

 

To trigger the night or day module version you could use a bed/rest/sleep or you can decide to have some food in a cantina. After you select to take a nap, a script will fire to replace the day module with night module.

 

Logan

 

The only issue with the two different modules is that certain variables wouldn't work any more. It would be a massive effort to create two totally separate versions of the same module, where changes in one effected the other in exactly the same way.

 

You'd probably be better just emptying out the night module of quests and creating a totally new set of side-quests for it. It wouldn't be that hard, since you could move the majority of people out since they would all be sleeping.

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Hey,

 

The only issue with the two different modules is that certain variables wouldn't work any more. It would be a massive effort to create two totally separate versions of the same module, where changes in one effected the other in exactly the same way.

 

This can be solved easily by using global data pads which the triggers or NPC will check if the PC has in his/her inventory.

 

I agree that this would still take some work especially if you have different NPCs at night and day time. I would only see this useful if your WIP is an entire planet alone which would them make sense to put a lot of work time into the mod.

 

Logan

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The truth is, Kotor isn't really made to support day-to-night transitions like the ones you speak of, most of the day/night transition fields in the .are files of your modules are just null leftover structs from NWN which used a skybox that did its own transitions. To do a true day to night transition, you would need multiple models of the same module (which would cost you megabytes, given how big the module you are preforming this on is) and you would have to essentially "warp" the player to the next module once a certain amount of time has passed. It's doable, and not incredibly hard to script... but the product just wouldn't be worth it, it certainly wouldn't be stable. Imagine you are running from one npc to the next during a side quest, when you get warped to then night module suddenly.

 

Not trying to kill your passion or anything, just saying that its a lot of work for something that wouldn't be all that spectacular in practice.

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