The Dink Network

Day and Night

July 12th, 2002
v1.00
Score : 3.5 tolerable
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Being a long time fan of Ultima series (not Ultima online), I always like to have all the natural phenomena in a game. I still remember that I can light up the road-lamps (or lanterns) in Ultima 7 when the night came. The flicking shadow on the road makes it look so real.

When I first started my dmod work (the Other World), I was thinking to at least create a world as real as Dink engine can have. I had snowing, lightning, raining, fog, winds, and of course, day and night. And later I learned that DN had an old file that is about having day and night in Dink. I said to myself: Let me see how he did it.

Well, in principle, he did it much simpler than what I have done, and he has a kind of cool "getting dark" in the process. However I must say I am kind of disappointed. At that time when I created my own day and night scripts, I was still a newbie trying to get a hand on DinkC language, yet I did the day and night effect much better (at least that's my opinion). I have the lantern effect, the time can be continued while inside a house (always bright), and shooting a fireball can light the night up a little, too...

Here you only need one script to control day and night, although it seems that you need to put the sprite manually on every screen that you want to have day and night. And because the global variable &time (although the author did not mention that you need to set up a global &time in main.c for this to work) has only 3 variations. So it can happen that the game would stay up all day or all night if you stay at one screen less than 80 seconds because the counting would be reset each time you enter a new screen. The graphics is also quite bad. I remembered that I have seen another similar file about day and night in redink1's weather files. The graphics there at least is much better than this one. I also remember that somebody said that you can use fadeup and fadedown to sort of create a situation that would look like a night. I didn't really make it work, but it sounds that that graphics could be much better. Back to this file, the author at least should use some more scattered pattern than equally spaced straight lines.

The readme file doesn't help much. It might not be so essential, but the depth-dot of the graphics should be given so that it would be a little easier to place the day or night sprite on the screen. And no words about the global variable setting would leave newbies lost without knowing why.

So basically this script works, but the duration of each day and night can vary a lot. If you do not stay in a screen more than 80 seconds, the day or night may never change. The graphics is bad, and the readme file does not give enough information to make the life easier for newbies. So overall, I can only give this file a not-so-good 3.5.