Al-Qumiyya

Hi all. I'm big on using things like time of day and weather to buff up the atmosphere in games. Roleplay presents a unique opportunity for these factors to come into effect by influencing what our characters wear when it's hot out, raining, etc. and the kinds of activities that take place ingame when it's night time or in the middle of the day. In the future, when the server can support it, I can't wait to discuss non-player pedestrians/traffic (to keep the city feeling alive & prevent casual speeding) but that is for another time. For now, we'll stick to day/night cycles and the weather, which all look incredible in GTA V and should be taken full advantage of. I know a lot of people are probably mixed in opinion about this, and I'd like to start a discussion thread here as a platform to convince those of you who like the current timescale & weather setup that changing it can be for the better. Timescale, or the day and night cycle: GTA games are known for their very fast timescale, something like 1 ingame day per 48 minutes. That's a bit fast for an RP server. Many players can stay on for hours at a time without even thinking about it. They'd be roleplaying days of their characters' lives at a time, and you'd have to be moving quickly to keep up with the ingame clock (stranded at night because just 20 minutes ago it was midday, and then you get mugged and feel stupid). I don't think anyone wants it quite that fast. However, I do think there's merit in one thing it does: an oddly timed clock. The oddly timed clock makes it so that over a long-term period, each real-life timestamp corresponds to a different in-game timestamp. In other words, if you're logging onto the server as you get home from work at 6PM every evening, the time of day in-game is going to be a little different every time. The pace at which a full day and night cycle passes is its own problem, but a simple one. The default is obviously 1:1, referring to 1 in-game day to 1 real-life day. My suggestion would be to change it to 2:1 (two in-game days to 1 real-life day). This would allow people in different timezones especially to experience more times of day than just one all the time, unless they want to drastically alter their waking hours just to play at their desired time of day on the server. But it's not just a boon to them; it gives everyone a little more variety in setting to work with. Another good timescale that would work to start off with would be 3:1. 2:1 means twelve hours in real life for a full day & night to pass in the game, 3:1 means eight hours to 1 real life day. The meaning of this when put into practice is that if you were to stay on the server for about four hours (in the 3:1 timescale), you could experience sunrise to sunset. Or you could experience midday to midnight. The ideal change we make to this is that, if we do it on odd timing, it'll change a little bit every day, keeping it fresh for you no matter where on the globe you're living. There is a con to all this; some people say it's unrealistic for paperwork purposes. Example: Officer Davidson writes a police report about a mugging that took place during the evening on November 17th. The next day, Sergeant Miller writes a police report about the same suspect being apprehended in the middle of an armed robbery that took place around noon on November 17th. This suspect is then killed in prison on the morning of November 17th. It's like the suspect is a time traveler. How did this happen? Simple: There's more than one in-game day per real-life day, and people generally use the real-life day to identify when things happen on the server. But it doesn't need to be like this. You can fix a problem like that easily by not worrying too hard about the OOC date. The IC date is always, no matter what, going to be tied to what is actually taking place on the server chronologically. So, when Miller writes his report, all he has to do is clarify by saying it happened on the next day, and that when the suspect was killed, that took place on the following morning. Right now, I know that the time on the server isn't synchronised between all players, but I do hope that is eventually a feature. It would be nice if admins did not have to set the time of day to something of their choosing just for us to regularly see different lighting when GTA V has such good effects waiting to be used as atmospheric tools. 1:1 in-game time to real-life time restricts individual users who need to keep a schedule in real life, but want to experience different times of day in the game all the time. By speeding up the clock, we'll make the environment more dynamic, and give ourselves more to look at, too. I also wanted to mention weather. A noise machine to simulate realistic weather patterns with proper transitions would be really nice to see on the server. Other RP servers on GTA V don't seem to have the transitions working which function just fine in GTA:O and the singleplayer portion of the game; weather frequently seems to simply snap between rain and shine, usually depending on whatever real-life location it's synced to. I'm personally not a fan of any sync system that will cause problems like unrealistic weather transitions. I'm sure it could technically be fixed, but it's an unnecessary connection to make when we could just have a simple weather algorithm that works on its own. Thanks for reading. Let's discuss. Do you like the idea? Why or why not?