Beta test version of Andor's Trail v0.7.6!

[rijackson741]

Perhaps, but what we can do in this respect with the current game engine is very limited. We can change day to night, or vice versa night to day, based on an event, and realistically only in one step. Every step change in darkness requires a new version of the map you are on, so doing a gradual day-night change for the whole world would require an absurd number of new maps. I understand what you want, and why you want it, but it's not practical. IMO, new content, within the constraints of the current game engine, is more important than major changes to the game engine.

[sdevaney]

Perhaps, but what we can do in this respect with the current game engine is very limited. We can change day to night, or vice versa night to day, based on an event, and realistically only in one step. Every step change in darkness requires a new version of the map you are on, so doing a gradual day-night change for the whole world would require an absurd number of new maps. I understand what you want, and why you want it, but it's not practical. IMO, new content, within the constraints of the current game engine, is more important than major changes to the game engine.

Agreed, and that's exactly the beauty of open-source and the reasoning behind having this community IMHO. Maybe someone sees this and decides to take on the challenge of adding a more robust option for this sort of thing in the engine.

[extrashady]

I totally understand the challenges of this at an engine level based on all your existing content not being made with this feature in mind, but as a gameplay mechanic albeit requiring the copying and darkening of a tileset, it was just a nice little surprise. I could tell I was sandboxed because I couldn't exit the town or enter any establishments, but it just felt kind of neat.

Additional content is definitely priority and I don't want to be the guy that says "hey you know what we can just copy the town and do a pallette swap to add an hour of gameplay", but maybe it might add some additional content to make some night missions in certain towns with a little less effort. Anyway I'm just spitballing here. You're clearly releasing new content and have direction. Good work all around.

[Jip]

Perhaps, but what we can do in this respect with the current game engine is very limited. We can change day to night, or vice versa night to day, based on an event, and realistically only in one step. Every step change in darkness requires a new version of the map you are on, so doing a gradual day-night change for the whole world would require an absurd number of new maps. I understand what you want, and why you want it, but it's not practical. IMO, new content, within the constraints of the current game engine, is more important than major changes to the game engine.

Sorry I haven't looked into the source code but normally you could do stuff like this with shaders.

[Nut]

Yes, it is possible to darken a map with some kind of shader indeed, but only explicitly and each single map. It is already done e.g. in Guynmart dungeon.
But night/day has other problems.
Some indoor or underground maps should be unchanged though. And even when you get the light dimmed, what then? Some monsters might be more uproad in the night, but not every monsters. Everything has to be set explicitly in every map, and checked for consistency. And if there are night/day intervals, it should also have consequences to diverse quests.
I think all this would be _very_ much work, with limited benefit overall. Such things should have been added at the design time of the game. I wouldn't spend the time and effort to realize it now.
Although it is nice to have it here - I like that part too

[Zukero]

Sorry I haven't looked into the source code but normally you could do stuff like this with shaders.

The game does not use opengl, or graphics acceleration at all, which makes it very easy on the battery. It also means it's hard to do animation, and no shaders in the GLSL sense.

[extrashady]

Are you using the android.graphics library? I'm not sure what the performance implications would be but could you use a LightingColorFilter as part of your Paint when you drawBitmap()? Multiply everything by 0.5 or just take in a variable and let the map creator set how dark a room should be? Keeps everything away from the rabbit hole that is OpenGL/Vulkan shaders.

I was just thinking that might be an easier option for a hardcoded nighttime scene that recoloring an entire tileset.

[Zukero]

We're actually using ColorMatrixColorFilter when using the high quality filters. It caused performance issues on some devices, so the low quality filters are simply transparent overlays.
Each map uses one of the predefined filters (several shades of darkening, B&W, inverted colors, or none), and we can use scripts to change the active filter on a given map.