Isolated Day/Night Cycles

[Avanoh]

I’ve seen YouTube videos on how to make a clock and day/night cycles that follow that clock cycle, but I haven’t seen anything with isolated day and night cycles. When I say isolated, I mean in specific areas where it’s always day or night regardless of the time of day or where it’s always the same time of day in certain areas.

For example, if I wanted to make a country that was cursed with endless night no matter the time of day. Or if there was an area that was a demon’s domain and the clock always reads 6:66 even though you’re using the same action to check the clock as any other area. Is there a way to make the clock check what area you’re in as you check it and act accordingly to make these kinds of things happen? Preferably without plugins if possible because I’m planning to get the Switch version when it comes out but even if it’s only able to be accomplished via plugins, I’d like to know for future reference.

Another example would be, once you reach a certain point in the game, it’s always night everywhere in the game until you clear that part of the story, then it would return to normal. It may be locked at a certain time of day during such events as well. Or, for example, time stops in a certain area, locking the day/night/time cycle at its current state and only starts back up when you leave that area. I’ve got some ideas that may take some weird maneuvering if they’re possible.

 

[Wavelength]

Yes. Set a variable that holds your location, and change it every time you change location. Whatever your clock logic is, have it check the Location Variable before displaying the clock or the time of day. Make sure you don't change the ACTUAL clock or time of day as RPG Maker sees it (unless you want it to stay changed even after you leave the area).

So for example:
* You'll have a Variable that stores the real time (for example 9:43 AM which might be held as "583" meaning 583 minutes after midnight)
* You'll have a Variable that stores the location (for example Demon's Domain which might be Location #16)
* You'll have Variables for the display of Hours, Minutes, and Time-of-Day. A conditional branch will check whether your Location is considered a "special location", and if so, it will display fixed values; otherwise, it will display 9 (hours), 43 (minutes), and "Morning". Since Location #16 Demon's Domain is a special location, it will instead display the values for that location: 6 (hours), 66 (minutes), and "Eternal Night".

 

[bgillisp]

I did this in my game by having switches, and I just turned on the appropriate one. Then whenever I entered a map, a parallel process checked which switch was on and set up the tint and such.

Just make sure to always turn off the switches not being used, else you may end up being both mid-afternoon and midnight at the same time.

 

[Avanoh]

Thanks for the answers. I’ll have to mess a around with things a bit when I actually get the game to make sure I’m doing it right but I’ll definitely try it out.

 

[Avanoh]

Is it possible to make sublocations for this purpose as well? For example, if I wanted an area called Camelot but it had several different subzones that are part of Camelot, could I add a subzone called Castle Town but have a condition to check whether or not it is Camelot as a whole rather than the subzone Castle Town when performing certain actions?