Its not necessarily something I want to implement anytime soon, as I cannot think of a good reason to really do it, but it started me thinking about the subject.

In a large world with dozens of large cities, supposedly days journey in world time, the sun generally comes up all over the world at once. I was wondering if anyone else has considered this subject. How hard would it be to figure out which rooms (or zones) get sun at what time.

This led me to another thought, has anyone seen/used a MU that implemets a globe/donut/cylinder as the world. Do you only link ew, or do you go for the donut apporach of some old strategy games and link ew & ns, or ty for the actual globe, and link, ew, nn & ss?

Maybe it is just my desire to avoid autoCAD at the moment, that leads me to think about cr-p like this. *Shrug*

If you're using a coordinate system, very simple - you'd just make the day/night status relative to the coordinates. On the most simple level, you could just divide the max coordinates by 24, and use that value as an offset of the time. In practice you'd probably want to make it more advanced than that (otherwise someone could see the sun come up, take a step forward, and then see the sun come up again). If you're NOT using a coordinate system then it's going to be more complex - but you could probably utilise something similar by applying a time offset to each area. The real problem with that is that unless you've got a really large world (which is unlikely with just regular areas), it's going to feel a bit strange.

I've always tended to go for a donut shape (it's nice and simple, and the players are unlikely to notice the difference), although I believe some of the people on MUD-DEV may have utilised a proper globe model (Nathan Yospe or Adam Wiggins, perhaps?). The "patch" approach - whereby the game world represents a piece of a world rather than the whole thing - also works reasonably well, and a flat-earth model would also be quite effective (yet simple to implement).

I am intrigued by the co-ordinates idea, but I cannot see how to do it. Since I started with Circle code, and I am slowly getting the hang of it (well some bits), I am not sure how to implement it with the room system it has (Heavily modified as far as exit flags/types/affects; extra values and functionality - current, but still uses the same basic system as far as linking to other rooms. I could calculate a coodinate for each room in a zone after they have all been loaded, and then translate those into a world coord (I know this is a clumsy way, but I have never considered it prior to writing this), but I am sure there must be a better way.

In addition, the system I cobbled together above, does not handle zones that move (which would require a recalculation)

*ponder* need to spend some more time on this..