Day/night cycle
LumpN
Join Date: 2002-10-30 Member: 1725Members, Subnautica Developer
Join Date: 2002-10-30 Member: 1725Members, Subnautica Developer
As some of you may have noticed we have been working on a day/night cycle for Subnautica. That feature found significant support on our feature voting board. A big part of the day/night cycle are visuals of course. If you have bought into Earliest Access and switched to the experimental branch on Steam you can get a sneak preview. There should be a visually pleasing early development build 10041 coming up soon. By the way, we are not making up those build numbers. They represent every single change ever made to the game. Some took a couple of minutes, some took a couple of days. This might give you an idea how much work it is to create a game like Subnautica. But back to the subject.
We were very impressed and happy when we came across this awesome fan-made video. I think it captures the beauty of the world our Level Designers have created very well. Playing around with ... err, I mean testing ... testing the most recent changes to the day/night system I was watching the lighting and colors change as the shadows grew longer. It looks amazing. See for yourself! Go to your most favorite (non-cave) place in the game. And use the "daynightspeed 10" cheat to get a timelapse-like impression of the game. Post screenshots here.
We were very impressed and happy when we came across this awesome fan-made video. I think it captures the beauty of the world our Level Designers have created very well. Playing around with ... err, I mean testing ... testing the most recent changes to the day/night system I was watching the lighting and colors change as the shadows grew longer. It looks amazing. See for yourself! Go to your most favorite (non-cave) place in the game. And use the "daynightspeed 10" cheat to get a timelapse-like impression of the game. Post screenshots here.
Comments
Night is still barely noticable underwater though. It feels as if I am a swimming lightbulb.
Also the godrays are still distracting during night (and during day in the way that they don't angle raltive to the sun position).
Thanks for providing the daynightspeed cheat
God rays will still likely be tuned more for night as well, but regarding the angle relative to the sun position during the day, the way refraction works underwater means the light always comes mostly top-down, so the angle of the sun in the sky wouldn't really effect the rays as much as you think it might.
As for the god rays -the current implementation appears to be a static angle of 55° from east to west (I assume those directions judging from the sun).
The result is you face the sun but the god rays are coming from behind you, as if there was a huge light or something.
How it should work is that it mainly travels with the primary light source.
Also two videos showing the effect.
Loving the improvements though.
What I'm talking about is probably volumetric lighting / crepuscular rays. It appears that in SN this is realized using a shader which has a static direction. So maybe it can be fixed rather easily. If not it's not a bad thing either I guess.
I assume the darkness already begins before the sun is beyond the horizon, but really don't know.
Colonisation of Alien planets would quite frankly be an 'aproximate fit' of earth like conditions...I think finding an exact match wold be very very rare.
That said I agree with the point of alien planets probably looking much different. But the overall mechanics are there and also I would not expect players to have fun playing a game with absurdly different athmosphere colors e.g. purple, grey or red.
While it would be fun for a while it'd take a toll on our psyche and sooner or later drive us away from being able to enjoy the experience overall. Also it'd take away from the vividness of colors in general.
I'd favor a dynamic ingame clock (different clock speeds) to advance or slow time. Secondary effect would be reducing or increasing the burden of survivalism with a second clock speed.
Why not put the option inside and see how many people actually use what kind of time speed and prefer day or night or equally both?
Day time looks nicer than night time. Especially in the start zone. That's why we made days longer than nights. True, it doesn't show of our cool new night lighting as much as possible but then again we have dark caves and deep areas that are dark all the time. So you still get plenty of night-ish lighting.
Oh and the fake reason for shorter nights is of course the tilted rotational axis of the planet allowing for things like midnight sun at the poles yadda yadda. Visit Sweden!