Platinum Arts Sandbox - Free 3D Game Maker Forum

Hi,
I'm currently trying to build a open world game, and I was wondering afew things.
My first thing is with the day and night cycle is it possible to create a working calendar to display the day and month like the calendar on most computers? Also is it possible to have in game NPCs update the calendar ( ex: being invited to a party two weeks from today.) and have it show up like the journal in the Tab menu in RPG?
My second question is, is it possible to have seasons (ex: In December the ground is covered in snow. The in summer it's just grass?) my thought was to take the grass texture and modify it with different shaders or something like that?
I do not 100% know how to do this so any ideas or thought are welcome.

Uh well... I ain't an expert on this but I don't think sandbox can change map textures just like the real world, I think making textures to gradually change as the time goes by is well... kinda hard, as the engine must alter every ground tile on the map (Textures and physics, to make snow feel like snow, to make sand feel like sand, etc). You could try to make two maps; exact geometry but different textures, the first one: Autumn and the second one: Winter.

The only simulator that I've seen doing that is Rigs of Rods, (uses Ogre engine) you can make the time go by, pressing the "+" key to make it advance and "-" key to make it go back.

The calendar you mentioned before... is has something to do with timers, but I don't know if timers can be parsed on the PAS games.

As I said before, I'm not an expert, better wait until a moderator shows up to say something

You'll need to do some heavy scripting to accomplish any of that.
the RPG side of things doesn't even have a concept of time, day, or night.

day/night is obviously much easier to do in the SVN, since we have dynamic lighting there, and as for seasons, you can always swap textures around by setting up a script to load specific seasonal texture sets; you'll need to bypass the -art cfgs for this.

Alternatively, you can make seasonal and time variants of each map.


What it comes down to, you'll need to teach the game about time, and you'll then have to incorporate it within scripts.