So this has been a long time coming. I feel comfortable at this point offering a preview. I've let this system run for over 3-4 hours in one shot and it functioned flawlessly.

I had my son test it in one of his levels using a zone-wide trigger zone and it worked great with gameplay/etc. There's a minor framerate hit but it's actually very efficient code (moreso than I expected).

As of current it supports:
Over 14 preset times of day and weather events (pitch black, silent hill style fog, 12 daytime modes) and will transition/interpolate seamlessly between them. It will also interpolate from ANY EXISTING VALUES(that I know of, and believe me this has been rigorously tested).

Most of this is controlled via global variables. Transition time, Delay between interpolations, number of states, etc. It's extremely customize-able and can pretty much make things however you want from wherever you are.

Error checking is pretty extensive. And I don't mean that lightly. Prior to my error checking code (which is probably 20% of the total 390 lines of code!) there were enormous issues with math due to the way Lua handles decimal places.


Additional features to be added:
Control of algo-steps weather decals, function calling from an object being activated, better blue hour coloring (I'm still not satisfied with some of it, particularly the lead two states), more efficient state switching - current method is ugly code and I don't like it. etc.

Without any further delay, here's the very poor quality preview video



Please give it a thumbs up if you like it and as always I welcome your comments.

And fixed. Will reserve this slot for future info.

Very cool. Thumbs up here and of course one on YouTube.

Looking good.

Very cool

It's great to see the new LUA commands being put to work, and has the potential to knock one of the voting board items off the charts If there was one feature that you wanted in GameGuru to support your Day Night system, what would it be?

Will make for better looking game play all round,very nice work Bolt Action Gaming.

Dave

@Jerry, Myke, Teabone, Granada - thanks! I poured a lot of hours into this system and I'm happy to see it's finally gotten to a point where I could post this video.

@Lee That's a big question Lee. With the shader (found here: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/216862#msg2564866) I'm using for fog I can literally use any sky I want and it will overlay onto it. The sun isn't a problem if you disable light rays, but is if you do enable. Bloom and lens flare take a little tuning to get into the sweet spot.

Honestly I'd say the more controls you give access too, the better. Better sun controls (disable/enable, position, etc) or even just the ability to change the skybox on the fly. Lua opens it up a lot and while some of the nuances were hard to work around it still makes it viable for an amateur like me to put something like this together. So really, just expand the toolbox.


Going forward:
I have to cement my ideas for implementation of weather. The integration of that may take some time and I think I will start by building it as a separate system which I can then hopefully graft onto this one.

I need to clean up the colors a bit. Midday is a touch too blue. Blue hour/Twilight needs better coloring.

I want to implement a better way to call the weather. As it is, all I have is a trigger zone as an option. It works, but it just seems tremendously unclean. I'd rather have it be something that in code someone can call a function and boom, it drops begins the changes.

I think those three things will keep me busy for a while.

Tonight implemented simple weather controls. Currently it's set to a probability system but I'd rather have it be a triggerable event. I just need to find a good way to phase in the weather instead of it's 'on/off' method. That one will take some time to figure out.

Very cool,just gets better and better .

Dave

nice, however i'm noticing shadow direction never changes if i'm not mistaken. that's a good edition

I can't change shadow dir as the sun pos is static

This is great stuff ... maybe what I've been waiting 3 years for might one day be possible lol



requires sun light that moves unfortunately and particles and the ability to change the skybox layers in game. one day..

Well Teabone with the shader update I'm using the fog will act as a sort of alpha mask over the sky. So no matter what sky you use, you can overlay the fog values with it which causes the sky to change color. It's not the same as interpolating skyboxes but it's pretty flipping good compared to previous attempts.

So right now here's where things stand:
1) I'm redoing algostep's rainbox/snowbox/marsboxes. I'm also working with the effect_animate64 shader to get better results out of it.
2) I made a cool film grain effect totally by accident. I will probably just release that as a freebie for people to use if they want.
3) I've got control of weather start/stop based around trigger zones. So currently with my system you place one large trigger zone for TOD/weather's core, then you use individual zones to start/stop specific weather effects or set the weather state (if you want to control it). So you can have it be indoors, nighttime, or outdoors, midday, raining.. etc. It's not perfect, obviously, but it is pretty effective so far.

Unfortunately I am on call this week and it will *SEVERELY* hamper my ability to do anything with this. I'm hoping to have this available for sale within a month.

my 2 cents. TOD is usually done (I'd assume) with dynamic moving sunlight. That's how I do it in 3ds max anyways

While I can totally appreciate that, unfortunately Game-Guru does not have any dynamic sun control. Otherwise I'd be using it

When it is, I'll integrate it. It shouldn't be too hard to add. But for the time being, it's totally static and I can't do a thing about that.

Mostly what I want here is a core framework which will allow me to change the time of day realistically using color palettes and weather templates. The interpolation system I have works pretty well and I can throw just about anything at it and have it stick. So I'm happy with that aspect of it, given the technical limitations.

Can you expand on this some more?

"there were enormous issues with math due to the way Lua handles decimal places."

As you are probably aware I have been doing a all sorts of crazy stuff with maths and haven't had any issues so I'm wondering what you mean by this.

btw, Lua only has one numerical type so it's really hard to get things wrong unless you are interfacing with C++ routines, I've already got Lee to change some of the interfaces to retain the floating point values maybe there are some others he still needs to fix?

@Lee, a Lua command to move the sun please.

I'm aware of your work- mostly the issue I was running into was probably a result of my math causing it to go into scientific notation and consequently out of bounds. At the time it seemed like Lua's use of floating point math was wonky.

So wow, Lee gave us a great big gift basket of stuff.

I'm going to implement a few extra controls based on the new Lua commands and then prepare this thing for launch.

My biggest issue right now that I am not satisfied with is I don't have a good way to deal with the weather systems. I've monkeyed with the shaders, created a custom decal, etc, and just can't get it the way I want.

Unfortunately this is becoming a time sink and will need revisited in a future version.
Currently what I have supports:

Random weather if selected via variable
Random Time of day if selected via variable
----
A set time of day (you walk into a zone and it sets it to that time of day, single use)
A set weather (you walk into a zone and weather is enabled)
All weather turning off indoors via trigger zone
----
A progressive day/night cycle based on both step interval speed and delay between cycles. Totally within the control specified by the user. This is the on you see shown in the video. You can add random or set weather to it as well via trigger zones or variables.



What needs added before release:
1) one final tuning run on the blue zone which I have a good fix on making how I want
2) new lua implementation of sun surface/lens flare (disabling for night specifically).
3) modified versions of algosteps decals need a last tune. I don't like his originals that much because the decals are too thick or not transparent enough. If anyone wants to step up and provide nicer looking visual elements for those Rain/Snow/Dust boxes I'm sure I can provide you a free of charge copy of my final product.
4) a final test run, really comprehensively. I'm sure bugfixes will inevitably be necessary after users get their mitts on it but overall it should be a good clean setup.

Current cost for this package will be 15$ and I'm not sure I'll be doing it via the store since there are some complex elements which need to be done manually (like you pretty much need the updated sky shader if you want a good result from here: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/216862#msg2564866).

Thanks for the support and interest. Please keep an eye out as this will likely be released in the next week or so.