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Play day or night using time of day.

INTRODUCTION

Racer includes a notion of the time of day. Normally, the sun colors are defined in a track's special.ini file, but the 'time' script command can overrule those values based on a time-of-day.

SETTING TIME OF DAY

Use the console command 'time' to set the time, for example: 'time 1400' sets the time to 2 o'clock in the afternoon. Other examples: 'time 0700', 'time 2300'.

The time sets the sun color, position, diffuse & ambient colors. It also changes the sky clear color, which is the color that the framebuffer is cleared with on every draw. To take advantage of this, don't add any opaque sky domes, but rather add blended ones. Those may include clouds for example.

TESTING A TRACK

To test how well a track handles the time-of-day command, just load it up and enter the console command 'fast_time on'. This starts a fast day/night cycle so you can check odd things. Issues may very well include:

• No effect on the skydome; is/are the skydome(s) transparent to take advantage of the background color change?
• Objects stay lit at night; perhaps the track.shd file defines emission values for a lot of the materials. It's better to get rid of most emission things (except for things that are truly lit) and let the sun parameters do their work instead.

THE FUTURE

In the future, I'm planning to add software generated gradients to handle sky gradients in a better way.

(last updated May 28, 2010 )