Dynamic Day Night Cycles

A Godot 4.x Plugin for Dynamic Day Night Cycles.

Description

The plugin allows correctly simulating the daylight, nighttime, dawn and dusk of you game's planet. It calculates the alteration of day-lengths throughout a year so days get shorter in the winter and longer in the summer.

The plugin allows full customization of the days per year's, day duration and the location on the planet to give the most immersive results.

Features

• A CustomEOT-Node node that can be customized for calculating a planet's day-night-cycle.
• The daytime_shader.tres-Shader for tinting the screen throughout the day with dawn and dusk.
• The DayColorVisualizer-Scene for testing the shader's look on an example image.
• The EOTPlot-Scene for displaying the evolution of dawn, dusk and more throughout the year.

How To

• Add a CustomEOT-Node to your Scene.
• Configure the Days per Year, Day Duration (in seconds), Year Start Day, Latitude and Longitude to fit your game's worlds setting.
• Add a ColorRect-Node as an Overlay over your game and add the daytime_shader.tres to it.
• Alter the day_time_colors-Texture with either an a GradientTexture or an ImageTexture resembling a gradient if you want. The gradient should have with the (morning-)night color at 0.0, then day-color at 0.5 and and end on the (evening-)night at 1.0. The colors between those points will be scrolled during sunrise/dawn and sunset/dusk.
• Change the shader_opacity for more/less opacity.
• If you want longer twilights and increase twilight_duration_factor. Be careful this might break the shader when using high values!
• Update the value of current_time during the course of your game's day to match the "progress" of your day in percent.
• Each new day calculate the value for the day using the CustomEOT-Node's get_full_info_about_day(_day)-function. Use the corresponding entries from the dictionary sunrise_time, sunset_time and twilight_duration in the shader.

Code example coming soon.

Installation

• Download the latest release from GitHub for your version of Godot.
• Create an addons/-folder in the root of your project and place the dynamic_day_night_cycles-folder inside.

📃 Credits

Made by Luca "eisclimber" Dreiling.

Calculations are based on "The Latitude and Longitude of the Sun" by David Williams.