Standard Night Time

My suggestion, which I plan on making a proposal is for standard night time. The cyle of day and night on public sims is a little tedious and pointless. Currently many people have scripts that auto search for the sun and turn lights on and off accordingly. If people knew that on this sim night begins at 8PM SL Time and ended at 6AM SL Time, then objects could be scripted better. I think this would also add an element of realism to the sims.


Thoughts?

What about private sims where the sun can be fixed?

In real life street lights aren't on a timer, they have a photo-electric cell on top, and turn on automaticly when the level of light drops.

detecting sun down is easy just run a timer that polls llGetSunDirection and when the z componant of the vector drops below zero, then it's time to turn on the lights.

But if you really want to make it dependant on sim time use llGetTimeOfDay()

Eboni, the only trouble with this is that a goodly portion of players have "local lighting" off and so auto-lights don't illuminate for many. It is not clear to me whether you are seeking ambience or illumination.

For ambiance, follow the sun is not particularly inefficient (when done correctly) and is the only thing that will work properly in all sims. For lighting there is always Preferences>Graphics "Nighttime Brightness" and "Gamma".

I wouldn't waste my time on feature suggestions unless you are fond of futility (see signature below).

On my sim I have the sun set, because I like bright daylight in SL.

That is not the point though...


The point is currently the public sims cycle day and night about 4 times (please correct me if I am wrong) during a 24 hour time period. I am suggesting that public sims have daylight during normal earth daylight hours and night during normal night time hours. Example Day 6AM-8PM, Night 8PM-6AM. Let it be set and let it be standard. Different sims can operate on different time zones but let there be larger blocks of day and night and not these constant pointless rotations.

If the length of a SL day were changed to 24 hours, a lot of people would log in after work to find their home was dark for their entire block of available SL time every day. It'd suck for a lot of people, many of whom would sadly (at a financial loss, at the loss of cherished builds and neighborhoods) dump their now-devalued dark-during-primetime land in order to move to sims with more compatible daylight hours.

That aside, in a world where for many a few hours is like a day and a month is like 6 months (online-world time, sorta like dog years), it's entirely appropriate for a day to be 4 RL hours long.

I like the 4-hour day. Sunsets and sunrises are wonderful, and I'd rather have more than one of each every day.

Hmm....


I had not thought about it devaluing the land. I also force daylight in SL, because night is so poorly lit and rendedered in the game. In my opinion the cycling devalues the land. When you build on the mainland you have to take night and day into consideration when building and think about how your build, stores mainly, will look at night to people who have their settings at who knows what.

I guess private islands are the solution.

I like the way night is rendered in SL . . . the moonlight is great. And I like watching the moon rise, too. I rarely have trouble with it being too dark, because I have tweaked my nighttime brightness setting in Preferences.

I do agree that the day/night cycle does require consideration when building. But that's something I enjoy . . . a lot. My builds tend to take advantage of the changing quality of light and shadow, their appearance changing through the day and night. I have a frozen pond that reflects sunsets and sunrises, etc. Sure, I do take the time to self-light vendors in my shop, but we're about to get a spiffy new self-lighting function anyhow.

Anyone who doesn't like the cycle can do as you have, though . . . move the sun with their mouse, or move to a private island where the sun's stuck in place. There's no need to take away sunsets from those of us who like them.

"Full Bright" in 1.7 and likely onwards is one of those obvious features I really smile at coming true. It's the sort of thing that fills a need that might not be the most vocally asked about, but it does chafe and irritate over time. Glad you mentioned it, Kim.

You know what I believe a greater long-term solution is? It's not really a solution at all but continuing to walk in the park. Simply put, not just islands, but more full-scale continents—each one at least a dozen regions or more and expanding—with their own "natural" timecycles sans intevention via the Debug menu. This includes, but isn't limited to, odd factors for the daynight cycle, "normal" 24-hour rotations as was suggested earlier in this thread, and extensible from that, customizable skyboxes and different suns+moons that'll make a HUGE difference in terms of tone and atmosphere simply by swapping out the "standard" set of graphics for a greater variety of choices.

If we can shape our digital nature like we can control our prims, that, in some remarkable way, points towards SL avatars moving to the power of a Type 1 civilization as proposed by Michio Kaku. Read more here:

http://www.physicsforums.com/archive/t-5570

I digress! Continuing on...

The infrastructure of having more holistic choices for sun & moon may be such that Linden Lab idoesn't do it, similar to how Atoll up north often doesn't count for tropical beachfront land for those who want to live on some—but Resident-run private islands, by their very definition and custom texturing, do!

So there's very much a splinter of the eye here.