Day/night speed depended on time instead of sun dawn/set

[Sipke82]

Could you make it an option to trigger day and night time on a specific time? because on some maps the rush hour now takes place in night time.

[dymanoid]

To shift the rush hour, use working hour sliders. Rather than specifying an exact time for a speed switch, it is better to go the #31 way. This needs to be thought out well, however.

[Sipke82]

Well i don't want to change the rush hour time......

I want to make sure that the faster Night time, starts at for example 11 PM, instead of the start at sunset.

I Believe #31 is to add additional slowdown.

[dymanoid]

With the 'slow down on rush hour' option activated, the time will flow slowly even after sunset (supposing a faster night time speed is set), until the rush hour ends. So #31 solves your problem in a nice way, I think.

[dymanoid]

Okay, I reopened this issue. You say we need some kind of "business hours", as mentioned in #34 and #31. What about weekends? "Business hours" on Sunday? No, we need another name. But the idea makes sense maybe.

[Sipke82]

Why not "Realtime" and "slow time"? it fits the mod :=)

EDIT: Slow time was ment as "Fast time"
Still this could be a bad suggestion :-)

[originalfoo]

Note: The title of this issue should perhaps be changed: "Duration of working day should be independent from sunrise/sunset"

While the speed setting is a factor in this, it also encompasses budgets and affects the general patterns by which a city operates.

Spike82: Why not "Realtime" and "slow time"? it fits the mod :=)

No, anything with 'time' will just confuse things more. There are already too many types of time lol.

dymanoid: "Business hours" on Sunday? No, we need another name.

At weekend, there is still a sort of 'business day' for the people working in shops...

Actually, the concept of "Shopping Hours" is ideal - those hours encompass the active period both on weekdays and weekends, at least in people's minds (for example, the term "late night shopping" illustrates that even though many shops might be open longer than normal, or even 24/7, the public still perceive a certain window of time which they call "shopping hours", and most transit happens during in those hours).

Whatever we end up calling it, ideally there should be sliders to set the window for each of the 7 days.

I urge the use of the vanilla day/night sliders (as seen on budget panels) as it will help people see the link between these settings and the day/night aspect of budgets.

Why have setting for each individual day? Because...

During the 'business days' (Mon-Fri) many places have a half day. Where I live, rural England, it's Wednesday - many of the businesses, particularly low density commerce and industry, shut at 2pm. In rural Scotland it's generally 11am or 12pm when they shut, either on a Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday. In Islamic countries shops often close on Fridays, and so on.

Saturdays and Sundays have distinct patterns pretty much everywhere. For example, in many countries people are far more active on Saturdays (shopping, partying and other recreation) than any other day of the week. Whereas people are more chilled on Sundays because they've got work the next day.

All these patterns, and many more, largely coincide with "shopping hours".

[originalfoo]

Addendum: An option, per day of week, to specify whether some shops remain open outside of shopping hours would be useful.

For example, some places have bans on Sunday shopping - so there would be no shopping hours on Sunday, but also no shops operating outside those hours. On other days, some shops will remain open outside shopping hours. But it's not unique to Sundays; for example Islamic countries often have complete shopping shutdown on Fridays and so on.... so a checkbox next to each slider to define if shops are allowed to open outside those hours.

[Sipke82]

Personal i think that day and night time are not that bad names.. and they correspond nicely with the budget sliders in the game. IMO players will understand the difference between day and night time. and that is is possible that the sun is already set at day time.

Although i like the ideas of aubergine of per day sliders, I'm not sure if that would be over-complicating matters. perhaps we can settle for discrimination of weekdays and weekends.

IMO opening of shops and stuff should be related to the work shifts and not be related to day/night time.

[originalfoo]

I'm really loathe to use daytime/nighttime as a concept. Are we talking about position of sun in sky, or working hours, or something else? It's too ambiguous.

CO's decision to define budgets by day or night was a huge blunder IMO. For example, does disaster response service suddenly become less essential after sunset, or outside working hours? No, of course not. It should just be a single slider, unaffected by anything else.

So what are we actually focussing on here?

It's about "when is the bulk of city activity taking place" - would you agree?

And why do we want to define this period?

• PT budgets
• Building construction (except weekends?)
• ...other stuff I've missed?

Note: I'm going to create separate issue for budgets, because I think ultimately they all need scrutinising.

The closest thing i can think of that defines the period is what most people would consider "shopping hours" - the period when the vast majority of shops are open.

While we could simplify by thinking of weekdays and weekends, that goes against the ethos of the mod IMO. RealTime is more about making activity within a city feel real than it is about making time feel real (it's both, but the time element is really just to enable the activity element).

This is why I'm keen to have the 7 sliders, one for each day. It doesn't add code complexity (just copy, paste, tweak); each day the mod still has to check what hours are the busy period regardless of how the settings are implemented. I would really love that extra granularity...

...It's like the Emergency Light Manager mod - it's really just a minor tweak, but makes the city feel much more real for me. Same sort of thing with Ambient Sounds Tuner or Vehicle Effects and so many other mods. Same thing with being able to have a half day on Wednesdays, and different dynamic between Saturday vs. Sunday etc

IMO opening of shops and stuff should be related to the work shifts and not be related to day/night time.

I've had many jobs and from personal experience I've not found many open shops between 11pm and 7am. Some supermarkets and some (most?) petrol stations, but that's about all.

In my experience, the level of activity in a city is when the commerce is open.

[dymanoid]

We should not forget that it's just a game and not a real city simulator. Over-complicating things is not a good way IMHO. Statistically, the more options and settings users get available, the less those options will be ever changed. This is proven.

Here is my idea how we can start:

• we introduce two user-configurable parameters: "wake up time" and "go to sleep time"
• these apply every day regardless of day of week
• these are decoupled from sunrise and sunset
• time between "wake up" and "go to sleep" is considered as day (both by citizens and by game's budgets)
• time outside of that period is night
• the time flow speed depends on these night and day, not on the sunrise/sunset
• citizens (mostly) start activities after wake up and mostly sleep after go to sleep
• of course, there are exceptions (night work shifts, tourists, some random bad asses, etc.)

Once this is implemented, we can listen to players' feedback and maybe enhance some points, if necessary.