Moon Phases
Use dynamic moon cycle, or pick your favorite moon texture and settings.
This mod is my attempt to add another layer of realism to Cities:Skylines by implementing a basic moon cycle(purely visual for now) into the game.
Current features:
- 24 different moon phase textures.
- Moon size slider.
- Custom HD 4096px outer space cubemap based on HYG 3.0: Hipparcos, Yale Bright Star, and Gliese star data catalogs.
- Automatic moon phase changes based on game date-time.
- Automatic moonlight and outer space/stars brightness change depending on current phase. ie. dim stars and bright moonlight during full moon; bright stars and dim moonlight during new moon that progressively increase/decrease during cycle.
- Option to set Static mode, which lets you pick your preferred moon, moonlight and outer space/stars brightness and have it stay that way indefinitely.
- Option to have dynamically changing moon phase, but static moonlight and outer space/stars brightness.
- Slick In-Game Option GUI that remembers its position on screen across sessions.
- GUI Toggle button in Toolbar (Next to temperature panel).
- Save your settings or reset them to mod default with the click of a button.
- More to come! Stay tuned!
The mod loads its assets into memory right after you click the load button when starting/loading a city. It will add about 5 seconds to your loading times.
When the city finishes loading, the mod sets its custom cubemap, horizon color, brightness settings, etc, then checks the day of the year against its list of moon phase change dates, and sets the current moon phase accordingly. If you’ve previously set the mode to Static, this doesn’t happen and instead your saved settings get loaded.
During game play on Dynamic mode, the mod detects when a phase change date has been reached, and updates the moon phase accordingly.
If you disable day-night cycle or it is currently day time in the game, the mod does nothing, so it shouldn’t be taxing on resources at all. In fact I didn’t notice any performance hit whatsoever even during night time with dynamic mode on.
Phase changes occur every ~15 game days, which means several times per “night”.
What? Yes, the day/night cycle is independent of actual game days, as you might have noticed.
This is currently not customizable. If you think its too quick, please leave feedback and just use static mode for now.
It is incompatible with any mod that change the moon textures, outerspace cubemap textures, moonlight brightness, stars intensity, night horizon color, or moon coronas.
The only mod I know of which does any of that is:
This mod changes the night sky cubemap and as such it will conflict.
Please disable or unsubscribe from Skyscapes 1 if you are using it before using Moon Phases.
This mod is compatible with every other mod, including Map Themes which will simply have their moon textures and night colors settings overwritten by Moon Phases.
Ultimate Eyecandy
Use Ultimate Eyecandy to help you achieve your desired look/feel for your screenshots! It’s a great mod, and I took a lot of my inspiration from it, as well as using it as a base to build my UI from. Thanks Judazzz!
- Improve the moon textures(Help needed with this, if you’re an animator or an artist and you’re interested, contact me in the comments below) I’d love to have more phases and achieve a smooth animation effect, where the moon slowly waxes/wanes over time instead of the current “steps” it takes into the next phase.
- Improve the outer space cubemap.
- Add more cubemap options so you can pick your favorite sky.
- Add alternative moon textures so you can pick yellowish/blueish moons, etc.
- Ability to customize phase change frequency through options GUI or in xml file. Currently if you try to do anything like that through xml file you will break the mod: Don’t do it.
- Ability to change the night horizon color.
- Ability to change the game stars brightness(currently game stars are disabled entirely, the ones you see are from outer space cubemap)
- Have the moon phase influence the game in real ways; for example, tides and crime rate fluctuations.
- Figure out how to make the moon render brighter.
Sometimes for some obscure reason this happens:
To fix it just increase the moon size until the white lines disappear, then save settings. Will try to find a definitive solution.
FIRST:
This is mod is entirely useless. Yes, you heard me right, it doesn’t really *DO* anything, its only for eye candy, just visuals, for taking screenshots and such.
I am looking at the possibility of adding some meaningful aspects to it for future versions but as of now, its a pretty much useless exercise in modding and UI building. I did it because I was tired of always having a full moon and because I enjoy a challenge. If you don’t like it, I totally understand you, feel free to not use it ?
SECOND:
I am not a professional programmer, as such, I cannot guarantee my code is optimal. I did my best with what I’ve learned so far to make the mod as lightweight as possible. If you do notice any performance issues, please let me know in the comments below and I will do my best to address them.
Finally:
If you have any ideas to improve this mod, please let me know in the comments below, or feel free to start an Ideas discussion.
If you have bugs to report please use pastebin and post a link. DON’T paste your output log to a comment.
If you want your sky to look like in the Screenshot, you need Ultimate Eyecandy and disable LUT color correction.
Otherwise its not as black.
This mod is licensed under a MIT License (MIT)[opensource.org] If you’re feeling generous and would like to buy me the morning paper or a drink, you can donate using the link below.
All donations are extremely appreciated. They are a great incentive for me to continue working on Mods in the future.
Thank you!
[www.paypal.com]
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