In-game Time in AC

I was wondering, how will in-game time go on? Will it be a slider? How many in-game hours/days will pass each second?

I doubt that the ratio will be:
1 second(irl): 1 second (i-g)

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Good question, I’d like to know too. I suppose the day/nioght cycle will pass within a fration of a rl hour.

Unless the day-night cycle has tangible gameplay impacts, they might not even need any representation or clock in game. I feel it might even add to the feel if you have to “eyeball” the time until the next night somewhat.

For season on the other hand some sort of warning or calendar display would be really nice.

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Yes. The usual problem with a clock on day-night cycles is the fact that the actions the animations take do not represent the actual time passing.

E.g. : In Cities:Skylines a car takes at least one day to pass an intersection.

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Yes, I think there is a general trade off between realism and game design here.

It really depends on what you want to represent better. Either have a 1:1 ratio and make the game really stretched out. Or speed up animations as well as game time which would make people look like Sonic the Hedgehog. I’m afraid there really is no good solution to this problem.

This is a quote from the dev team in the topic about how aging work. We do not have the irl duration of an in-game day but I think it could give a good idea about Time in AC

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It depends on the type of game and the timing of the gameplay.
If the cycle of seasons is indispensable (winter / summer), generally the speed of 100% corresponds to 1 second = 1 day.
This is the case of most city builders that are played over several years in game.

Most city builder allows you to adjust this speed, see to put the game in pause while allowing to give instructions.

It should be noted that the day-night cycle (purely aesthetic) can be independent of the game’s calendar.

In AC the night day cycle is not aesthetic, people stop working and sleep at night, temperatures get colder at night, there will be night wild life, etc…
Days are meaningful entities, so we don´t fly over them in a second, not even in full speed.
Our solution is to make less days per year, like a day represent a generic day of a group of 15 to 30 days,the same way a year will probably represent a generic year of a group of years.
We need to advance our game play to really feel the best tuning for this.

To try to do it like one day is one day when we have to cover thousands years would not be the best idea.

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If that is the case, then the player should have some kind of clock to prepare his actions.

There is a “clock”, but you can also see the sun going down.
Days are shorter in winter too.

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This sounds great! :grinning:

Will there also be an indication of how much time is left until winter or when seasons change? Like the “clock” you mentioned, or a timer? Or do you feel the shorter days and changing weather are enough to let the player know what is coming?

Yet completely subject to change and redesign this is the current clock:

Top needles show the current season and day time, outer and inner rings.
Current temperature is also displayed, red dot and top number in degrees, 10 degrees in this case.
Time speed controls are also there as well as the years played ( 1 year in this case ).

In this current state it is mostly a debug and control tool, like the rest of the interface.

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i like a more sundial visualization if possible, but maybe some ppl won’t know how a sundial works… I really like the idea of learning how the sun plays a role in understanding time but maybe i am just really excited for this game lol

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This?

Of course, numerals would be added.

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Yeah, the 6 days seasons would be nice. That means one day in game would take 1,6 hours in real life. Still makes me think it is quite fast. I would enjoy 1 day being like 2,5-3 hour in real life. The game would be quite long, but that is one of the reasons I am supporting this project :slight_smile:

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Probably a bit too much

YES!!! Love it!!!

And logically, you couldn’t use it at night?

Moon dials;)

At night focus on moon phases and how that tells the time of month

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And wouldn’t time telling, temperature, seasons be an accumulative knowledge built over time as we didn’t just automatically know how time was kept… just a thought

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