No day\night cycle, pretty disappointed :(
- Thread starter Mazisky
- Start date
The Fanatical
Prince
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- Sep 15, 2016
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- 417
The three big Firaxian livestreams about the Ages foreshadowed the feature's removal. I really hope Firaxis adds it in an expansion in the future.
friendlysavage
Chieftain
- Joined
- Apr 8, 2008
- Messages
- 39
Genuinely curious, why do you want this? Just for the aesthetics I assume?
Ebon-Hawke-
Warlord
- Joined
- Jan 8, 2025
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- 119
Yeah ngl I liked it for all of one day on civ 6 launch and then I turned it off the next day.
Masquerouge
Deity
a picture mode would be nice, that was the best use for the day/night cycle!
Trengilly
Prince
Day/Night cycle was one of the first things I turned off in Civ 6.
I want my strategy games to look consistent for ease of identification of stuff.
I want my strategy games to look consistent for ease of identification of stuff.
stealth_nsk
Deity
I liked day/night cycle in my wonder videos, but for the rest of the game it was turned off. I guess Firaxis has some statistics about player settings and it showed them this feature isn't top priority.
It would be very difficult to add in the future, since it would mean reworking ALL of the building assets.
queenpea
Emperor
I can see this being patched in. I can also see it being sold as a flavor pack DLC as Paradox has done in the past.
Yzman
Deity
Not sure I care about a day and night cycle in a game where turns can be years.
Lonecat Nekophrodite
Deity
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- Jan 10, 2019
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- 2,799
Better as a patch.
I don't think non-artists realize how expensive this feature is. Not just expensive in terms of the cost for artists to create, but computationally expensive on the user's end.
If your lighting is constant, then you don't need special luminosity maps; the lighting can be baked into the regular color map. A typical game object has several texture maps: a regular color map, and then some additional maps for special effects, such as a normal map for "bumpiness" or a specularity map for "shininess." Lighting requires a luminosity map for brightness (in lit windows or pools of light produced by lamps, etc.) for areas that stay lit when external lighting changes.
Texture maps require texture memory, and that's a limited resource on the user's machine, so a game has a texture budget it must stay under. In a case where every object already has color, normal and specularity maps, adding a luminosity map means increasing your texture footprint by a third. That translates into 25% fewer different objects you can have active in a scene at the same time. For a feature which doesn't really add any play value, in Civilization's case.
Especially since Civ7 has to live on consoles and portable devices, they don't have a lot of wiggle room in their texture budget to be adding things like this. This is probably one of the ancillary reasons behind the Age system... limiting the amount of different kinds of assets that can be on screen at the same time.
If your lighting is constant, then you don't need special luminosity maps; the lighting can be baked into the regular color map. A typical game object has several texture maps: a regular color map, and then some additional maps for special effects, such as a normal map for "bumpiness" or a specularity map for "shininess." Lighting requires a luminosity map for brightness (in lit windows or pools of light produced by lamps, etc.) for areas that stay lit when external lighting changes.
Texture maps require texture memory, and that's a limited resource on the user's machine, so a game has a texture budget it must stay under. In a case where every object already has color, normal and specularity maps, adding a luminosity map means increasing your texture footprint by a third. That translates into 25% fewer different objects you can have active in a scene at the same time. For a feature which doesn't really add any play value, in Civilization's case.
Especially since Civ7 has to live on consoles and portable devices, they don't have a lot of wiggle room in their texture budget to be adding things like this. This is probably one of the ancillary reasons behind the Age system... limiting the amount of different kinds of assets that can be on screen at the same time.
This would have sense if it didn't exist already in Civ 6, a game that was also on all consoles and had a day night cycle.
It is fine that you and others don't care about it and I respect it, but please don't find excuses: a feature that have been present in the previous game have been removed.
Vandlys
King
I'm sorry, but I have to point something out. I empathise with you as I also will miss these graphics but your logic doesn't hold up.
A feature in a previous game doesn't necessarily make it easier to implement in the next iteration. Only if the game were exactly the same would this make sense. But the game has improved graphically in many ways, and as far as I can tell there are many more buildings and units on display.
Also, many other features present in the game were removed. Not just for Civ VII, but alsof for VI and earlier iterations. Some of them were essential and added at a later date (production queue in Civ VI, I'm looking at you...), others less so (a clock displaying real time in Civ IV).
If Civ7 had a similar number of assets of a similar quality to Civ6, then that would be a valid argument. They made a choice of whether to keep the day/night feature or to add dramatically more and more detailed assets, and they chose the latter.
I'm not "making excuses," merely explaining why if you expect that feature to be patched back in some time later, you are going to be disappointed.
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