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

Page 1: Introduction

Gather 'round, boys and girls. This tutorial will show you how to put complete day/night cycles that repeat throughout the game. It's a very long tutorial because it's an involved process with many potential pitfalls and I want to help you get it right. Lighting changes are created by using triggers. (There are two types: a start transitions trigger and the triggers that actually change the lighting values.) But there are other things to consider if you want the map to be enjoyably playable when it is at it's darkest. I'll discuss those points in this tutorial, too. For an example of a map containing day/night cycles where the changes are nearly imperceptible and the timing of the cycles "feels right", download my Wildefire's Amusement Park from the Wildefire Maps Page here on RADen.

I'm not trying to brag, but whenever I play this map, my sense of the passage of time in the real world becomes quite distorted. It's because the lighting cycles impose their own sense of time on me while playing. This adds to immersion while experiencing the little world represented on your map -- a good thing! I'll tell you how to achieve it so that people playing your map won't go, "This doesn't look right!" or "All I can see is the ore." You don't want people to mentally back off from their enjoyment of your map because of something clumsy that you did. (That's just a little of my mapmaking philosophy thrown in here.) 

I'm going to assume that you know the basics of creating a trigger. If not, check out the excellent trigger tutorials here on RADen. Warning: You'll be spending quality time in the Trigger Editor. You'll be making many triggers if you want this to look right. Wildefire's Amusement Park contains 36 triggers for the lighting transitions alone.

Ambient Lighting Settings

Before creating any triggers, make your lighting settings in Edit --> Lighting. If you need more information about how to set up good basic lighting, check out Cannis's excellent <a href="">Lighting Tutorial</a> here on the Den. If your map has cliffs, as most good maps do, set Level to approximately 0.014000 on a temperate map. (I'll talk about snow maps below.) The above setting is what I used on WFAP -- a temperate map. This will keep your cliff tops from looking ugly (gray/black triangles, etc.) at the darkest lighting. It will also minimize the "banded" effect on cliff ramps throughout the cycle. We'll discuss Ion Storm lighting later. It's tricky to get it to look right at all points in the cycle whenever someone raises a Weather Storm.

I've found that you must set the level much lower on snow maps. Unfortunately, you must set it to such a small value (almost zero) that the map looks "flat", almost as if it were painted on the screen. To eliminate cliff wedges and ramp "banding" at all points of the cycle, I had to set it to 0.002000. Even that low, I saw a small amount of banding on ramps at one point in the lighting cycle.

Having set your lighting, note the Ambient setting. When the game starts, the map will be at this amount of Ambient lighting. It doesn't have to be high noon (1.00000), but whatever time of day or night it is, you'll need to keep this in mind when you start creating your triggers. WF's Amusement Park starts at early afternoon (0.900000) and cycles all the way around through night to high noon (1.00000) and back to early afternoon again (0.90000). The complete cycle then endlessly repeats itself.

RA2 doesn't give you a full sense of earth's rotation because shadows don't change direction according to whether it's early morning or late afternoon. Nor does the predominant color of the light (reddish for morning or bluish for dusk) change. I grumbled about those things when working on WFAP, then accepted it and moved on.

Despite this, you can increase one of the RGB values a bit above the default if you are striving for a particular effect. For example, I am currently working on a moody snow map where I increased the blue a bit. It looks good throughout the cycle. Just remember that you can't change RGB values on the fly using triggers.

Let's get to the heart of the matter -- the triggers.

To Lighting Transition Triggers here »

Download this entire tutorial in a zip file here!