No. Bad. Really bad. Agreeing with this proves how blind you are when it comes to the style of a game. Maybe you haven't noticed but, all of the areas in night-time have special lighting to make the game as pretty as possible, lighting from sources that aren't in areas in day-time. Adding a day/night cycle would COMPLETELY ruin the atmosphere of these areas, therefore the game.
Adding a cycle for people just because they think it's "right" at the cost of people who DO recognize this game's beauty is really stupid. So stop agreeing to this.
Unless novels actually mention night and darkness and lack of light (atmospherically, not just time wise) I retract my whole post... but,
I interpreted TERA's "Day" and "Night" as mentioned in the Lore to be time-wise. Not day-night wise. There are places on earth (ie: Alaska) where it's "Day/Night" for several days, weeks, and months out of the year. Just because it's 7am and pitch black out doesn't mean it's not "morning" according to the clock. Using time it just an easy way for us to chronicalize events.
For there to be a "Day/Night" in sense of changing zones, something would have to be rotating... The Eyes would have to be spinning, the world would have to be spinning... but Arborea exists in a sort of void doesn't it? It's not actually like a planet(?).
And I don't know about the sun moving... cept for a video of being off map? I've never seen the sun move while standing around in Tulufan or Chebika. Unless the point is that the sun can move... but tho in any game with a cycle I've never seen the sun actually move. It just sort of happens.
Still, to add it to the game, when there is reasonable lore as to why, wouldn't just alter the lore it would change entire zones, and not just the looks of the zones, but the general ecosystem of the lore as well. Even if they were to do it only in certain zones.
Game was not designed with day/night cycle. Unreal engine can handle it perfectly, but at a cost. Older builds (like tera) would be about 50% loss of FPS, newer can do at 10-15% loss. And dynamic lighting does not looks as good as static we have now. Because calculating static light for one zone is about 1 day of calculations for top of line PC.
Are you ready to get twice as powerful PC to get some such silly thing like day/night cycle and with inferior lighting effects?
Why not when you already have a powerful comp to began with? ;p
Zelda 64 had day and night effects on the lil ol console, why not Tera? I'd love to have me some crazy zombies popping out the ground at night and/or aggro beefed up monsters roaming around. In general areas, not areas where it's suppose to be dark already.
Would have PVP/GVG a whole lot more interesting. Not only are you getting pounded by guilds, but by flesh-eating monsters too! Delicious!!!! It'd keep everyone on their toes and some...interesting monster interactions.
Town-monster invasions...ftw
Mmmm those were the good days'
I made several maps for UT2004, then UT3, then i worked on big UDK mod. So my post was not made out of thin air. Just search this same nick (nawrot) on udk/unreal forum if you do not believe.
WoW also had day/night, but its different game engine, TERA uses unreal engine, a bit newer build than UT3 did. That build had huge limitations of full scene dynamic lights and shadows.
While newest UDK build of engine is perfectly fine with dynamic light for whole scene, older builds of it halve FPS no matter what PC you have. It is not fault of PC but rather older version of engine that was unoptimized for dynamic lighting yet. For TERA to get day/night cycle it need migrate to newest build, that means making whole game code again.
Day night could be done in tera, by making everything darker and different color/saturation (postprocess effect), with some textures changed (like sky). But such effect would be very lame compared to quality of everything else, ie. it would stick out as ugly. Also all dynamic shadows in old unreal engine are stencil based, which means sharp ugly shadows on everything.
I think we have such lore and lack of cycle exactly because of UNREAL ENGINE limitations from time tera was made. They knew they cannot do good looking dynamic lighting so they added that reason into lore.
So in short: it is impossible to add nice day/night cycle without migrating whole game to new unreal engine build.
Not once have I seen the lore that states Arborea has no day and night cycle. Not. Once. The world had a sun until Karas blotted it out and only saw light once more when his son Balder tossed his eyes into the sky. Furthermore, the eyes clearly move when the setting changes from high noon to sunset.
Even if they didn't rotate around the planet, they would then likely blink (that'd make for an interesting sunset/sunrise.)
What? You really think the continents are sitting upon the backs of the Titans as they sleep facing each other, (according to the opening cinematic mural) rotating around a central point? Either the world is flat as though a blanket upon the Titans, or we've only seen half of it.
I always felt that a day/night cycle was a little silly; especially for role players. Why? Well think about it for a moment:
So we plan an event, say a wedding. Then we all go to role play this event. As most rp events ppl tend to chat for a while etc. Well, with a day night cycle a 2 hour event all of a sudden in "game time" is like 6 days?!
Yet everyone rp's it as if it was only "an evening" long event.
Also if Day/night cycled every say 30 earth mins, would that simply mean the planet turns reall really realllly fast ? Or are we all just moving very very slow like tree ppl from Lord of the rings?
It just raises lost of questions to overcome in a rp situation. I find with a day/night cycle; often rp'ers have to "ignor" one of the cycles or the other depending on the situation.
Anyhow...
hey I dont really agree with a day night cycle because of the way the game already works is beautiful and it would ruin some areas but this post is wierd why are you assuming it would be that kind of a cycle.. i mean WoW has a day night cycle that is the same as ours..... a 24 hour cycle.. why would you assume it would only last 30 mins???
Overall I wouldn't want to see this implemented as anything done to avoid comp-blowing lesser computers would just look cheesy.
However I would vote that I'd like to see Velika with a day and night as the ambiance there could handle it and it could work well with the story. Like it'd be nice to only be able to meet Elleon at night since he's hiding his presence, etc. In the other areas that are carefully constructed to have a certain feel, such as Pora Elinu, I wouldn't really want to see that changed.
I think a day/night cycle would be cool, I prefer the ambience of night and having the stars out when I'm playing. I also prefer it to be on a 24 hour cycle, so I know if I log in at night what I'll be getting.
Although, with the technical problems that have been mentioned, I would consider this on the "low priority" wishlist, sadly. =(