day/night on eso

izJordy · January 2016

how does the day and night time work on eso? is their a eso clock or something? when does it turn night when does it turn dark? cause sometimes it day on eso when it is night where i am, how does this actually work?

Robo_Hobo · January 2016

Eso days are shorter, like 1/3rd I think

Eh, 1/3rd is just a guess though, they could be even shorter, but no longer than 1/3rd. The day/night cycle is the same for everyone, so time passes even when logged out. I think it resets to something after maintenance.

Rune_Relic · January 2016

It has to be either of shorter or longer than realtime otherwise if you logged on at the same time everyday you would never notice the change.

My peeve is the day cycle seems to be much longer than the night cycle.
Without staying on 24/7 for a week to document it I cant be sure though.
I aint got time for that lol

Its feels like permanent summer time.

https://www.reddit.com/r/elderscrollsonline/comments/22a1mg/is_there_an_ingame_daynight_clock/

just found this....
http://www.esoui.com/downloads/info241-Clock-TamrielStandardTime.html

MornaBaine · January 2016

The day/night cycles is 6 hours, with 4 hours of daytime and 2 hours of nighttime. I absolutely HATE this. It should be an even 4 and 4. I have no idea what Zeni was thinking with this.

izJordy · January 2016

MornaBaine wrote: »

The day/night cycles is 6 hours, with 4 hours of daytime and 2 hours of nighttime. I absolutely HATE this. It should be an even 4 and 4. I have no idea what Zeni was thinking with this.

yeah.. don't see the logic for that tbh xd 4 hours day and 2 hours night doesn't make any sence to me, 4/4 like real life seems more logic to me but hey ty for the answer ^^

dalodir · January 2016

izJordy wrote: »

MornaBaine wrote: »

The day/night cycles is 6 hours, with 4 hours of daytime and 2 hours of nighttime. I absolutely HATE this. It should be an even 4 and 4. I have no idea what Zeni was thinking with this.

yeah.. don't see the logic for that tbh xd 4 hours day and 2 hours night doesn't make any sence to me, 4/4 like real life seems more logic to me but hey ty for the answer ^^

In real life, day and night are rarely the same. Depending on where you live in the world you may have all day or all night at some times of the year.

I agree if the issue we are trying to solve is people being able to experience both night and day to have it 50 50.

However i'd be interested to hear from someone who knows eso lore. Do seasons exist in tamriel?

Im quite new to the game so apologies if this already exists but i think id prefer having seasons to just a standard 50/50 balance of night and day. This could open up eso to some really interesting amd dynamic environments. Depending on what season you are in influences the weather. Imagine one day going to greenshade and there being a layer of snow. Quests could even be season orientated, for example as winter is approaching everyone is preparing, harvesting their crops however others want to raid peoples farms or town stock piles for their own.
In winter your character would beath condensation. There would be some intensive snow storms. Lakes and waterfalls would be frozen.
In spring the senche tigers or bears would have their young with them.
You could go on...
Having seasons would mean having the appropriate lengths of night and day to allign. Id enjoy that more, but perhaps asking for a little much.

Rune_Relic · January 2016

Well you couldn't have a 4:2 light to dark without seasons.
Its the tilt of a body relative to the orbital period or year.
{Not unless the tilt was geostationary and tamriel was locked in permanent summertime.}

The fact its 4/2 means it has to be 4 light 2 dark in summer and 2 light 4 dark in winter and 3 light 3 dark at the equinoxes.

Guess I will dust off the spherical trig and look at the tamrielic calendar

The problem is the sidereal year vs the tropical year.

ontheleftcoast · January 2016

The Tamriel Day/Night cycle has always been like this at least since Morrowind. But from my observations I think your mistaken by the ratios. What you call 4 hours of "daylight" is, I think, dawn, daylight, and dusk all being grouped together. They are different and if you play a vampire your ability to slip into stealth will still trigger in the early dawn and late dusk.

Nestor · January 2016

Since the best chance to get the Purple fish in Wrothgar is at night, I would like the nights to be longer.

However, it does seem that I rarely login to a night, or have a night when I am playing. But I tend to not play for 4 hours at time. In some ways I would not mind if the cycle was shorter.

Rune_Relic · January 2016

ontheleftcoast wrote: »

The Tamriel Day/Night cycle has always been like this at least since Morrowind. But from my observations I think your mistaken by the ratios. What you call 4 hours of "daylight" is, I think, dawn, daylight, and dusk all being grouped together. They are different and if you play a vampire your ability to slip into stealth will still trigger in the early dawn and late dusk.

You mean 3 hours daylight 1/2 dusk 2 hours night and 1/2 hour dawn ?
Twilight.

{EDITED for sun up/down.}

Gidorick · January 2016

This is from a longer post with other concepts which can be found here: http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/157644/environment-weather-systems-overhaul-concept/p1

Gidorick wrote: »

b]Night Enhancements[/b]
To be honest, I had planned to have a section for Day Enhancements but I truly feel the day environments are just about perfect in Tamriel. The appearance of the sun, the movement of the shadows, and the skybox are all wonderfully designed and constructed. There is nothing I could imagine that would make the days of Tamriel better than they are. Well, except for fog removal, as mentioned above.

Opposed to day, night in Tamriel actually leaves quite a bit to be desired. There are a few enhancements that should be made to make the night play significantly different than the day in Tamriel.
Darker nights: First and foremost, Tamriel needs darker nights, depending on the cloud cover.
The current night brightness should be the setting for bright nights with clear sparkling skies.

The darkest the night should be a stormy night with completely covered skies.

Darkness should vary naturally from the brightness night to the darkest night, dependent on cloud cover.

While it would make sense for the brightness of the night to be effected by the phases of Masser and Secunda, I think it would be too much to ask to have both weather and moon-phase to impact the brightness of the night.

More dangerous night wilderness: To go along with darker nights, each and every citizen of Tamriel should experience more dangerous nights. Certain beasts, such as wolves, should be more abundant at night and there should be some night-specific creatures such as ghosts. This could be a way to introduce zone wide (or at least area wide) creatures.

Imagine a ghost that appears at night on the shores of Greenshade, we don’t know where, but legend has the ghost walking along the shore. The player can attack the ghost and kill it every night if they wish but then there are books and clues along the shore that gives the player clues as to what happened to the ghost and how to go about laying its soul to rest.

Towns shut down at night: With the justice system, it would amazing to have NPCs that go home and go to bed. Players, if they so desire, could break into homes and burgle homes and merchant carts throughout the night. To make up for the lack of NPCs in town there could be a heavier guard presence at night. There should be a couple of 24 hour merchants available, such as the Bartender, Outlaw Den’s merchants, Traveling Merchants, and Guild Merchants.

There was a thread that included these types of concepts from @Neizir that can be found HERE.

Two moon reflection: The fact that there is only one moon reflecting on the surface of the water when there are two moons seems like a gross oversight in the environmental design of ESO, especially considering the careful attention paid to the majority of the rest of the environment.

I made an independent thread about this HERE.

Day/Night Length Adjustment

The total amount of time it should take for one day/night cycle on Nirn should 10 of our hours. this would mean every Earth-day=2.4 Nirn-days. More on why later.

While the difference in length between the day and the night in ESO isn’t exactly unrealistic, ESO includes mechanics for Werewolf and Vampires that could involve more interesting night elements and, when considering the above suggestions for night enhancements, night should offer a completely different level of gameplay.

There are two options of enhancing the day/night cycle.
Equal Day/Night Lengths: Adjust the length of day and night to be the same length of time, giving equal time for creatures of the day and creatures of the night. This would offer an even “fair for everyone” approach to the length of the day and night.

Variable Day/Night Lengths: Dynamically adjust the length of the day and night to change over time. At one point the day is longer, then the day and night equals out, then the night is longer than the day. This would also be “fair for everyone” but over a long period of time.

I personally prefer the Variable Day/Night length concept as it would make it so players that have bonuses at night would have a period of time that they have an advantage and a period of time they have a disadvantage. Using this concept, the maximum difference between day and night should be 2 hours. This would allow the maximum different of a 10 hour day to be 4 hours day/ 6 hours night on one end and 6 hours day/4 hours night on the other.

So yea... I agree it's an issue.

Reorx_Holybeard · January 2016

A few game time related facts I've found:

A game day is 20955 seconds long (5:49:13) in real time.
Sunrise is at 04:00 game time.
Sunset at 20:50 game time.
This makes a game sunlight/daytime 16.8 game hours long (4:04:29 real time).
The "crickets" sound starts at 18:00 (evening/dusk?).
Sun angle at noon is 66 degrees above the horizon. This corresponds to the same angle on Earth if you were at the equator.
The time between full moon phases occurs in 360000 seconds (4.17 days) of real time, or 17.2 days of game time.

Some of these are old values obtained just after game release and in theory could be different by now.

Nestor · January 2016

There are crickets?

Smitch_59 · January 2016

Nestor wrote: »

There are crickets?

I never noticed crickets, but the birds start singing shortly before dawn.