new Random Start Time

[tonnic]

Is there a way that I can edit the file somewhere to have the start time random?   People sometimes like playing day/night and I have my server reboot often.. If I'm not on the server when it restarts, then I can't change the time...  is there a more elegant solution by adding a 'random' start time?

[MDCCLXXVI]

From experience, players like nighttime I&A for about 30 minutes and then the server starts to empty out

 

There is indeed a more elegant solution, but consider the above.

 

 

Not much of a talker, so if you provide link to .pbo I'll implement it for you and leave some notes on how it was done, how to use it, and how to remove it if necessary.

[Jester]

be careful of having your server reboot to often. People who are playing on a server do not take kindly to being in the middle of an AO and all the sudden the server restarts. Especially if this happens more then once a day.

 

Just giving you a heads up that you could potentially be eliminating your playerbase by having scheduled restarts that people do not know about.

[kamaradski]

I would rather look at accelerated time instead of a random start-time.

 

It should be possible to speed-up the game-time so the day last about 2 hours, and the dawn&dust period to cover a total of 1 hour (30min to go dar, and 30min to get light again) while skipping the actual night itself.

 

Unfortunately i didnt yet have the time to experiment with this myself, but the scripting-tools are there, just have a look on the wiki searching for "time" related functions.

 

PS: Jester is right about your server reboots, i recommend you look at what statistically is your lowest player numbers, and reboot once a day max, in the middle of your slack-period.

[tonnic]

I would rather look at accelerated time instead of a random start-time.

 

It should be possible to speed-up the game-time so the day last about 2 hours, and the dawn&dust period to cover a total of 1 hour (30min to go dar, and 30min to get light again) while skipping the actual night itself.

 

Unfortunately i didnt yet have the time to experiment with this myself, but the scripting-tools are there, just have a look on the wiki searching for "time" related functions.

 

PS: Jester is right about your server reboots, i recommend you look at what statistically is your lowest player numbers, and reboot once a day max, in the middle of your slack-period.

 

 

If you know how to do this, that would be awesome,....maybe not every 2 hours, but every 4 hours or so?.    In regards to the server restarts, I do put up 30 min, 15 min, 10 min, 5 min, 2 min, 1 min, 30 sec, 15 sec, 10 sec, 9 sec, 8 sec, 7 sec, 6 sec, 5 sec, 4 sec, 3 sec, 2 sec, and 1 sec warnings on the server .

 

I had it restart 4 times a day just to ensure server performance, but I just changed it to 1 time at night (5am pst) and I'll keep an eye on performance.    Anyways, how would someone get the day cycle to go much faster?

[kamaradski]

Unfortunately i have no ready-made solution for this, as i never got round to play with this.

In single player i would use setAccTime, but this will probably not work in multiplayer

So instead you should probably look into using skipTime and\or setDate. With a eventHandler you could probably create a server script that does something like this:

- wait 10min 
- setDate (date + 10min)
- repeat

 

If you run such a script on the server itself, it will skip 10min every 10 minutes, thus cutting the gametime in half. You might have some slight syncing issues as it can take up to 30sec before every client has received the new time.

 

Again i have no clue if this will work, as it never got past the idea state. But one day i will find the time to experiment this this. (unless you figured it out already, and i can leech it from you )