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Time Engine — the game clock, day and night, lights
Time Engine runs the in-game clock and makes scenes follow it: the same place looks different in the morning, at noon, in the evening and at night. It also lights scenes with lamps and windows and gives you a portable lamp after dark. It is an engine mod: games such as Cthangover and the tile-map RPGs include it, and you see its work in every scene rather than as a screen of its own.
The clock
The time is shown in the top-left corner of the screen. One real second is one game minute, so a game hour passes in a real minute. Some actions take game time at once — for example, cooking or crafting moves the clock forward by the recipe's time.
The calendar is simplified: 30-day months and 12 months a year.
Day and night
Every scene background is drawn in four moods — morning, day, evening and night — and the picture blends smoothly between them:
00 ─── night ─── 04 ⇢ 06 ─ morning ─ 09 ⇢ 11 ──── day ──── 17 ⇢ 19 ─ evening ─ 21 ⇢ 22 ─── night ─── 24
(⇢ = a two-hour cross-fade from one mood to the next)
Lights
At night a scene is dark except for its lights. Windows, candles and lamps glow where the scene's author placed them, and each light has its own colour, radius and strength.
The portable lamp. From 22:00 to 06:00 a lantern appears at the top of the screen. Drag it onto the scene to light the spot you want to look at.
For authors
Place lights in a scene from its scenario with light_set and a list of lights. Positions are fractions of the screen (0 to 1), so they fit any window size; up to 10 lights per scene, plus the portable lamp:
light_set [{"x":0.673,"y":0.461,"radius":500,"influence":1,"color":"#ffff00"},{"x":0.135,"y":0.315,"radius":500,"influence":1,"color":"#ffff00"}]
x,y— position as a fraction of the width and height;radius— how far the light reaches, in pixels;influence— strength from 0 to 1;color— a hex colour.
An empty light_set removes the scene's lights. The light editor of Editor Tools places them with the mouse and writes this line for you. The lighting.clear_map scenario action turns off a scene's depth lighting when you switch to a scene that does not use it.
Night-aware backgrounds. A background lights correctly when it has a depth map next to it, named like the picture with _depth (for example bar.png and bar_depth.png). A background can also have an _albedo companion. Without these maps, scene lights have no shape to shine on.
Other mods read the same clock: the RPG tile map follows the same day as the backgrounds, and the time's change is announced to every mod once a game minute.
If something goes wrong
- A scene stays bright at night. Its background has no depth map, or the scene does not use time-of-day shading.
- No lantern at night. It appears only from 22:00 to 06:00 and only in games whose interface includes it.