Passing the Night

CJones shared this feedback ago

Not Enough Votes

Being forced to play for hours in near-total darkness, with no way to skip it, is not fun at all for me. Trying to focus on dark areas of the screen with high-contrast visuals can cause eye strain, migraines, and accessibility problems for many players, including me. Beds already exist as props, so why not let players sleep to pass the time?

If this is a future-proofing for servers issue, you could just require a majority poll to pass a proposed amount of time that triggers by clicking a bed (a pretty common solution in mp with day night cycles). Or if you are going to make different systems instanced in MP, you could make time local to a system's instance and have the poll local as well. I don't know how you guys are doing MP.

Or if you don't want to mess with the day-night cycle because it is some sort of planetary simulation issue, then just allow players a slider to adjust the minimum illumination level night time reaches.

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Replies (3)

Deon Beauchamp ●

A night vision system would be a good thing to have.

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CJones ●

I guess whether that would be a solution for me it would depend on what it looked like. If it looks like green washed out NODs with flat saturation and giant flares and junk whenever you look at the moon or a spotlight, I don't know if that would be fun to look at for an hour straight either honestly. lol. But generally, I think it is a good idea to have night vision in addition to some other setting/server-side accessibility options like I was suggesting. Just as an immersion "engineering" option. :)

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moorbloom ●

The sun orbits the system, so when it is night for you, it is daytime on the other side of the planet.

I do think it would be nice if sleeping in a bed could speed up the rotation and let you pass the night in single-player. However, it would probably never work well in co-op or multiplayer, since players on the other side of the planet may not want daytime to end early just so someone else can skip the night.

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CJones ●

In mp, it would probably depend on the server culture. For a public style open server, you're right, it probably would not work, for the same reasons it doesn't work in public servers in games like Zomboid. For a private server with a group of friends, on the other hand, it is pretty easy to coordinate and would still work as a solution. And so, same as in Zomboid, resting could easily be a server side bool that allows/disallows sleeping as an option. That way requests can be turned off so they don't get spammed in public servers.

But honestly, it's probably the best solution to have multiple solutions to the same problem, so folks can pick some, all, or none of them as best fits their playstyle and desires, and also so there is still an option available all the time, regardless of the mode or server settings. I'm sure a lot of people like the immersion of unskippable nights because they make spotlights more useful and stuff as well, so for those folk you could have night vision too.

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moorbloom ●

Another solution might be to increase the usefulness of lighting, if they could improve light spread and distance + better utilize rtgi/light bounces, then less lights would be needed to light up a useful area. Or solution similar to Minecraft setting night darkness to be a bit brighter.

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Marcus Parriott ●

i like the idea of using beds. could be a reason to have a bed at a base... it gets dark, you "use the bed" you get a little animation of you ploping in, getting comfortable, rolling over then hopping out with a stretch and ding! daylight, and suit energy replenished.

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