Creating Complete, Repeating Day/Night Cycles
by Wildefire [RADEN staff]

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Weather Storm Lighting

Because your map is constantly cycle through lighting changes, you can't just set the Ion Storm settings in FA2 to a lower Ambient than the Ambient you set for your normal lighting. Otherwise, you may have the map getting lighter during a weather storm. ;-) Remember that players may raise storms at any point in the cycle. On WFAP, I set it for a bit darker than the darkest night setting. (Storms are brief. So if it's a bit too dark for some players, it's not for too long a time.) I also increased the blue a bit. You may want to increase the red for storms on your own map. Feel free to experiment.

Ensuring Playability When Your Map is at It's Darkest

Introduction: I hate to say this, but I find too many night maps too dark to enjoy playing. While I was making WFAP, I initially had my monitor brightness maxed out from having played a bit of a dark game (Clive Barker's Undying). Some of my beta testers told me that the map was too dark at its darkest point. (This probably saved my eyesight because my eyes watered much less when I turned down my monitor to work on the next beta version.) WFAP's darkest Ambient setting is 40 (action 73 parameter). I recently tried to play a map with an Ambient of 10. Needless to say, I didn't play it very long.

You can use a lower Ambient setting for the map's darkest point on snow maps. This is apparently due to the white background. At an Ambient value of 35, I was still able to clearly see everything on the map. The snow gives a sort of moonlit effect, btw.

Remember that:

1) Many players do not like to play night maps. I'm included, except that I did a number of things in WFAP to compensate. I'll discuss compensations below.

2) It's not fair to expect gamers who play your map to turn their monitors up to eyeball-bleeding levels of brightness. RA2 does not have a gamma setting, so you shouldn't expect them to increase their desktop gamma either. (This point about gamma is courtesy of Cannis.)

3) There are so many different types of monitors out there that you cannot possibly get your lighting to be perfect for all monitors. After increasing WFAP's darkest point, a beta tester told me that it didn't get quite dark enough. ;-) But, it's better to err on the side of lighter rather than darker. People can always turn their monitors down a bit if they want to. But many can't increase the brightness enough to compensate for a map that's too dark.

4) Why go through all of the trouble of detailing your map (varying terrain types, buildings, etc.) if it's impossible for players to see anything on it?

Compensation Techniques

Some of these require modding the map. I won't give precise details about exactly how to do it because this isn't an INI editing tutorial. It's long enough already. But I will give you enough information to point you in the right direction. You can also open WFAP in WordPad to closely examine the mods.

Invisible Light Posts: These don't usually require modding unless you want to increase the light radius (visibility) in order to use fewer posts. Just be careful placing them on the map. Some of them, especially those changing RGB values, can really lag the map. If you place them in bases, note that you cannot build on top of them despite their invisibility. If your starting points are near the edges of the map, experiment with placing them off the map edge. (You can give them a greater light radius by increasing their visibility. If you place one or two where players are likely to build (like on my Haunted Forest dusk map), put a tree in front of the light post. This gives the player a visible "reason" not to try placing a building there. Experiment and playtest.

Light-emitting Structures: You can mod structures like CYs that normally don't give off light to do so. Look at rules.ini entries for invisible light posts to see the lines you need to add to a structure for it to give off light. You'll probably have to do a lot of tweaking of various values to get it right. Be careful not to mod too many structures to give off light or you'll end up with overly bright washouts when the map is at its maximum brightness. Warning: This will require a tremendous amount of tweaking to get it right. This was one of the most fiendish parts of creating WFAP.

Increasing Unit, Infantry, and Aircraft Glow: The [General] section in rules.ini contains entries for unit glow, infantry glow, and aircraft glow. Increasing these values from their defaults will make all units more visible in the dark. Please, people, do this! One of the things I hate about night maps is not being able to find even my own units in the dark.

Final Words

You can breath a sigh of relief because we're getting to the end of this. If you want to create day/night cycles on your map, you need to be committed to doing it right. Done wrong, it detracts from your map instead of enhancing it. Older gamers will remember when 3D games started becoming popular and we were flooded with games having colored lighting that had absolutely no reason for being in some areas. It was as if the developers said, "Hey, isn't our colored lighting cool?" Well, no it wasn't. It looked dumb too often because it was simply a sleazy way of showing gamers that the developers were aware of the technology. Day/night cycles are like that. If you're going to use it on your map, don't take shortcuts. Don't cut corners by using only two or three triggers to change the lighting for the entire cycle. The results are very bad. Don't cut corners by not compensating for darkness or many of your players will be very unhappy with your map.

Have fun!

Credits:

Deezire: whose FA2 Companion got us started on creating lighting transitions and whose input helped us figure out the parameters for action 73

CaptDoom6: who worked jointly with me on WW's Official FA2 forum in a long thread where we exchanged the results of our efforts to figure out the basics of creating lighting transitions.

Cannis and RVMech: who read drafts of this tutorial and provided valuable feedback.

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Download this entire tutorial in a zip file here!