Beginning Day and Night Cycle (Patreon)

v0.5 was really fun. There are some users starting to get comfortable using the clothing customizer. I hope more do moving forward.

Keeping the train rolling we roll into the sleeping behavior which was supposed to be part of v0.5 but did not make it in time. This will allow Shinobu to sleep on the bed. You'll be able to bully her or pat her head when snoozing. There are lots of japanese voice actress lines that will be used for this behavior. Since she will be sleeping there needs to be a nighttime mode for the map.

The first thing I did was improve the volumetric cloud shader. In v0.5 and earlier versions, the clouds would cut off in the distance. Like so:

This was because there was nothing being rendered on the far side. The cloud skybox (the cloudbox as I call it), was just a plane in the sky:

Meaning it never actually reached the horizon. I tried to mitigate this by making the plane MASSIVE but I ran into other issues such as camera far distances. So what I did was switched to a dome mesh:

I then did some shader math to fake an infinite plane when looking at the dome. Otherwise I would have had a dome made of clouds. The result is this:

So now we have a perfect infinite horizon full of clouds. If you look really hard you can see how it kinda gets pixely in the far horizon. This is because the clouds are rendered at 1/3rd the Screen since clouds are very GPU intensive.

Then I made a system that allowed me to make day and night cycle "phases". Each phase dictates a specific point at a certain time of day from 0 to 2*Pi (because the sun revolves around Earth). The current WIP cycle is as follows:

Depending on which phase you are in, the cloud, fog, sky, and sun color changes. I am using Unity's default skybox shader since it has very nice atmospheric scattering which is the effect of sunlight scattering as it traverses the earth's surface:

The math behind such a simple sun effect is very complicated and the shader is carefully tweaked for cross platform performance. However I edited it so I could have support for moonlight.

By next devpost I will definitely have finished the day and night cycle system and should have begun animating Shinobu for her sleeping animations.

A day and night cycle opens up many possibilities for game mechanics. For Halloween I will be implementing fireflies.

Stay tuned.