Following on from discussions in the ‘RPG Immersion’ thread, I’ve resurrected an idea I was tossing around in my thoughts a few years ago. At the time, I never took it further, but I’d be interested in whether people think it could work. Background In most RPGs, the passing of time is accelerated. A game-day is of a developer-chosen RL duration, usually around an hour (though I’ve seen longer and shorter). Amidst this accelerated time though, NPCs walk around at normal speed, fights play out at ‘normal speed’, and as one person pointed out, a sword-slash would apparently be taking 5 minutes to complete, you’d spend 20 minutes crossing the road and so on. This apparently breaks immersion for some players. On the opposite side of the coin, if the game-world played out in real-time, you’d be waiting hours for an NPC shop to open, have to get up at 3am because that’s when the assassin you’ve been told to kill will be on the rooftop, etc. There are ways round this of course, for example using a Wait/Sleep function to cause game-time to quickly pass, however even this could be considered ‘immersion-breaking’ in its own way (since the player is artificially manipulating the game-time). The New Idea A few years ago, I came up with another option. As far as I know it hasn’t been done in any other game, though I’d happily be proved wrong. Of course, there might be good reasons or it not to have been done. The option is ‘fluid time’. When the player isn’t in an ‘influence zone’ of an NPC or game-world area, the game-time flows at its highest rate (e.g. Game-day = RL hour). However, once the player gets close enough to a location/NPC they start to be influenced by that proximity. The game-time slows down fluidly the closer they get, so by the time they are interacting with the NPC, we are back to equivalence (game-hour = RL hour). Now every second counts normally – your 10 minute real-time exploration of a house, sneaking because the owner is asleep in the bedroom with the door open, really takes 10 minutes in game-time, rather than suddenly having the NPC coming downstairs because according to the game several hours have passed, it’s morning and the NPC is going to work. Of course, if it’s an abandoned house you don’t get quite such a slow-down – but there again, you didn’t need to sneak around either. Because it’s linked to both locations and NPCs/Mobs, you can adjust it so time is closer to real-time in a city, but still accelerated until you start getting into situation where you are interacting/influencing the surroundings. When you sneak down into the catacombs as night is falling, and stumble across a vampire-lord, you can’t just flee for your life knowing that since you’ve been down there 20 minutes, dawn is breaking outside and all you have to do is open the door/curtains to be safe. On the other hand, while out on the open road, running or riding between towns, it really will take you a game-day to travel between them. I should point out that I don’t expect the NPCs/animations to change speed as this all occurs. I don’t expect to see the NPC that’s walking away from me gradually accelerate as she increases the distance between us. Also, there would probably need to be some way to tell the player roughly what the ‘fluid-time’ is running at – so they don’t wait around for half an hour real-time expecting it to get dark, when actually there’s an NPC round the corner quaffing ale who has slowed the flow of game-time. Also, there'd probably need to be some variation of the 'Wait' command, if only to shift things along at times when actually in a city, waiting outside a shop for it to open etc. Anyway, this is just a rough idea initially. I’d appreciate your feedback. Yours, Ann-Marie PS. I know I haven’t expressed it very well in my post, but I’m still feeling the loss of the hour this morning (shifting to British Summer Time). I’ll try to revise and tidy it up a bit later. [Edited by - Archimage on March 30, 2008 9:36:24 AM]

Since it's their story, it wouldn't be bad for the player to have control over time in some sense. Obviously if they skip time, they'll skip over some things. And thus, it's crucial for the player to be able to skip things indefinitely if they wait too much. This would work for games in which that factor can be implemented. Some games can't allow for that. It's all about what would work well obviously.

What I'm thinking of is basically just setting a time at which you'd like to wait around. Possibly only leave this for certain places, like outside of a shop. This keeps the player character's story from including in its massive tome the words "And Tyran sat outside the shop for a second, and another, and another. Somehow the clock on the great clock tower looked to be broken as he sat there...waiting..."

If you were sitting outside that shop, you could just set a time to wait until, and it flashes you to that time, showing you getting up from sitting, a nap, whatever. Or possibly, it speeds up animation, showing you everybody walking past like in those videos of cars going really really fast.

Or if there's some notification of when something will happen at that place you're at, it gives you only the option to wait until that one moment.

I also like your idea. It's like in SimCity where it slows time when there's a disaster. I find that you don't have to keep the focus on "your character's back" at all times to keep the game immersing. It would work however. Personal preference, but I'd rather just having time slow all the way in town. It'd be more convenient. Being so close to NPCs, I'd get used to the slowed time and then suddenly it speeds up...then slows down...then speeds up, and keeps fluctuating that way lol. But, yeah, if you're near an NPC in the wilderness, it slows down faster as you get closer. I like that.

Im Zelda: Majora's Mask, the player was able to speed up and slow down time when it was necessary, but this was part of the gameplay, because the game took place over a repeated 3 day cycle. But some sort of expansion on this could be interested.

I think it's a really good idea, however, as DaFatal pointed out, it would probably be best to have time rates in blocks for example in cities, and then possibly have small areas you can enter in which time travels quickly, ie. Taverns (if we're going for the whole stereotypical middle ages thing) or cafes or just any other place where you would logically go just to pass time.

In terms of showing the player time progression, have a little analogue clock as part of the HUD, and then either have it subtly change in some manner depending upon the rate at which time is changing, or just rely on the faster clock movements to display the faster progression of time. You could even have a calendar for travelling between cities, with it flipping to the next page for every day or some similar little animation.

The manner in which I would go about it would be to have fixed progression rates for different content, so when you're in town, you get a clock with a hour, minute, possibly even second hand; but when you're in an adventuring area, you just get the hour hand, and possibly a minute one; and for travelling, you would get a little calendar indicating the day, and clock with an hour hand. I think this system would work better than an algorithm based upon proximity to NPCs and such.

additionally, you could even have interaction with objects that affects it, for example, if you go to an inn, click on a bed, you get a short animation of the character getting into bed, sleeping for a few second, possibly turning a bit in their sleep, clock whizzing round quickly, and then the character getting out of bed; possibly newspapers, click on it, the character opens it, looks like it's reading it for a while, clock moves more quickly while this is occuring, indicating a passage of time.

This could become strategic as well, if tasks need to be accomplished within a certain time, ie. doing some research on something before the following day, you could force the player to be strategic, rather than just systematically opening every book, since reading through a book takes time in game, in addition to in the real world.

sorry, that really is quite a mouthful, I just genuinely like the concept and really think you could go far with it, and implement it in a myriad of different, and most importantly, interesting ways.

I may have misunderstood this, but it reminds me very much of Fallout. In Fallout, time spent on the overworld while travelling was very, very fast. It could take you a week to walk across the wasteland, but the player would just have to watch the little "you" dot move for a few seconds while the clock spun.

While in "encounters" or in cities, time moved in real-time, and you always had the option to fire up the PipBoy and "rest" for any amount of time, either to rest, to wait for nightfall, or for a guard's shift to end, or whatever.

It made time into an integral part of the game without being a huge hassle.

One thing you need to make sure of in systems where the time flow changes is consistency. Make sure that it takes the same time to walk across a city, or across the world manually as it does with fast travel style maps. Also make sure that game behaves the same when you use a wait menu as it does when you leave the game sitting while you go eat lunch.

Your idea wouldn't work, you would create a time sink where ever you walked. i.e. where ever you walk around most will always be behind in time to everywhere else, with the places you never walk being days ahead. You can't limit the time speed or the world will be stuck to your time speed anyway. The only way is if you let it run unlimited (or have some limit) but make all other zones at least the current day time, but then time speed will increase as you cross into a rare zone, (assuming a linear transition) or receive a large time jump (binary transition)

Quite a few games have variable time speeds - having it adjust itself in the manner you describe leads to a few problems:
1. You can't hope to synchronise multiplayer, so you're limited to single player.
2. The player can detect NPCs through change in time (if time is moving slowly, something is nearby).
3. You are trying to predict what the player wants, but this is very difficult to do - if I run away from a battle, am I running to my local town (should be fast time), or do I just want to gather my strength, re-equip, and jump back in the fight asap (should be slow time)?

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Original post by Argus2 3. You are trying to predict what the player wants, but this is very difficult to do - if I run away from a battle, am I running to my local town (should be fast time), or do I just want to gather my strength, re-equip, and jump back in the fight asap (should be slow time)?

What do you mean by gathering your strength? I didn't know mobs paused so you could take a breather. I thought they were always out to, well, kill you.

Sounds like an awfully bad timesink to me. Who wants to spend their day WALKING, instead of PLAYING, in their game? Definatly make it to where if your traveling time passes quickly just as your moving, otherwise spending X amount of hours traveling makes a very boring experience.