Mod feasibility: Seasons

[tedescooo]

I had the idea of modding the game to load a different Theme every 'x' amount of days/weeks/months to simulate seasons.

What I found so far:
- It is possible to change the current Theme using the API.

//Thread: Any
string currentTheme { get; set; }

- You apparently need to reload the game for it to take effect.

Forces a new theme to be applied to the save. Will only be active when reloading.
Options are: "Sunny", "North", "Tropical".

Can any dev please confirm that it is not possible to force the game to reload the theme without need to reload?

Thanks

 

[canadianxbacon]

I was thinking of this myself. but one problem is that days go by so fast. playing for 30 min could make 2 years go by if playing at 3x speed. but it would be cool if during the winter snow covered everything, during the month of xmas there were xmas lights up on all the houses, stuff like that. i was also thinking of the simulation side of it. like during the spring electricity usage went down because people aren't heating/ cooling their homes as much, during xmas season you got a slight boost of income from all the shopping, during summer a lot more tourist would visit. or maybe during the winter if its the tropical theme.

 

[Baleur]

Then cant u just run it from the windows clock? Every 60min of real-time passed in the windows clock, could be a season change.
I mean even the most basic scripts are capable of either checking the computer clock, or at the very simplest, just run a countdown before executing the next command.

I dont know why Colossal Order are so narrowminded to think it has to be tied to the actual gameplay speed (which obviously ruins it when speeding up gametime). When i heard their reasoning that "It would look weird if you run at 3x speed and days zoom by really fast", as for why they didnt do it, i just couldnt believe my ears.
Its like saying they wouldnt do city growth because it would look boring to wait 1 real-time year to watch a building get finished.
That kind of argument makes no sense. If that is the issue, why not simply bypass it alltogether in favor of a simple solution?
"I dont like bananas so i wont make a salad, even though i want a salad." Then simply dont mix in bananas!

Why not just keep it simple and problem free? Run a seperate timer that counts down real seconds independent of the gamespeed, or just check the windows clock.
Such simple basic 101 programming, why complicate things by tieing it to the ingame gameplay ticks?

 

[JRSly]

Then cant u just run it from the windows clock? Every 60min of real-time passed in the windows clock, could be a season change.
I mean even the most basic scripts are capable of either checking the computer clock, or at the very simplest, just run a countdown before executing the next command.

I dont know why Colossal Order are so narrowminded to think it has to be tied to the actual gameplay speed (which obviously ruins it when speeding up gametime). When i heard their reasoning that "It would look weird if you run at 3x speed and days zoom by really fast", as for why they didnt do it, i just couldnt believe my ears.
Its like saying they wouldnt do city growth because it would look boring to wait 1 real-time year to watch a building get finished.
That kind of argument makes no sense. If that is the issue, why not simply bypass it alltogether in favor of a simple solution?
"I dont like bananas so i wont make a salad, even though i want a salad." Then simply dont mix in bananas!

Why not just keep it simple and problem free? Run a seperate timer that counts down real seconds independent of the gamespeed, or just check the windows clock.
Such simple basic 101 programming, why complicate things by tieing it to the ingame gameplay ticks?

Well, seasons are a bit different than a day/night cycle. We'd presumably want the seasons to match somewhat with the in-game calendar.

 

[Zed68]

one day at slow game speed is about 18 seconds... 18*365=6570 seconds for a year... 109 minutes and 30 seconds. Seems quite ok.

 

[canadianxbacon]

thats slow game speed. im sure a big portion of players will be running it at at lease 2x speed.

 

[cRAGGLE]

seasons or just weather.. I guess they're the same thing kinda

 

[JRSly]

one day at slow game speed is about 18 seconds... 18*365=6570 seconds for a year... 109 minutes and 30 seconds. Seems quite ok.

If the speed is never changed, but in reality, players will almost certainly be bouncing around game speeds and not be on the same track as the computer clock.

 

[Zed68]

If the speed is never changed, but in reality, players will almost certainly be bouncing around game speeds and not be on the same track as the computer clock.

Why do you refer to the computer clock ?? I was talking about how long a year was depending to game speed, there's no need to stick to an external clock.

 

[JRSly]

Why do you refer to the computer clock ?? I was talking about how long a year was depending to game speed, there's no need to stick to an external clock.

You brought up using an external timer to run the seasons to. The point is that unless you kept the game running at the same pace, you'd eventually unsync from the Windows clock or whatever independent timer and once that timer "dinged" for autumn to start, the game calendar might say June or February.

If you were implying that based on your math, that even at the fastest speed, the seasons wouldn't blip by in a flash and be a problem, that's fine, that makes sense, but your whole first post was about not relying on the game counter and setting up an independent cycle for the seasons to coordinate with.

 

[Zed68]

You brought up using an external timer to run the seasons to. The point is that unless you kept the game running at the same pace, you'd eventually unsync from the Windows clock or whatever independent timer and once that timer "dinged" for autumn to start, the game calendar might say June or February.

If you were implying that based on your math, that even at the fastest speed, the seasons wouldn't blip by in a flash and be a problem, that's fine, that makes sense, but your whole first post was about not relying on the game counter and setting up an independent cycle for the seasons to coordinate with.

how do you want to determine if time will pasts too fast ingame or not without comparing to real life time ??????? :sleep: