youngneil1 wrote:Any ideas how to do the best/most interesting night illusion?
I'd say the best and simplest way to show this is to vary the range of vision for the player's party. During the day, vision is clear as long as there are no obstructions; during the evening vision range starts to shorten (to, say, 10 tiles) around the party; as the night falls it shortens even more (to, say, 5 tiles) and so on. This requires no extra maps for differing levels of light/times of day and would still get the message across quite clearly. In addition, this same mechanism can be used in dark dungeons and other places where the range of vision is hampered by darkness, fog, magical mist, etc.
Of course, with illumination the whole
Line of Sight issue comes to the fore. I'm not sure how LOS is going to be handled in IB, but what I read from the task list gives me hope. It reads as if a form of active LOS is going to be implemented. With active LOS, I mean the engine calculates LOS for each and every tile moved and for every entity (NPC, monster, etc.) separately, so that e.g. if a creature moves behind a corner it can no longer be seen as LOS to it has been broken, etc. Most roguelikes have pretty good LOS systems in place, I would recommend Jeremy take a look at them if in need of inspiration.
As to the time of day and how it could be shown, in addition to differing levels of illumination and vision range, I 'd say a simple solution would be the best here (to reduce the work load on Jeremy). I'd suggest a small "time of day indicator" in the UI, like something as simple as in Ultima 5 with a sun and moon icons moving on a short bar at the top. It can be made prettier if wanted (e.g. a sundial like thingy), but bear in mind it needs to be customizable as a sci-fi game would look pretty silly with an ancient sundial on the UI, for instance.