Notifications about the planet’s day-night cycle when you land somewhere. Handier than you might think! (In my opinion)
The mod shows a notification when you land on a planet, or fast-travel to a location on a planet, with one or two pieces of information:
how long the day is OR how long until sunrise/sunset (if the planet has them), in either UT-hours or real minutes
if the planet/moon is tidally locked
Pick which kind of message you want in the gameplay options. Just go look at the images. Bam, that’s the entire content of the mod. What more could you need to know?
…okay I’ll go on
Like all my mods, I made this for myself, because the game doesn’t do a very good job of sharing this info (unless the first thing you do when landing on a new planet is to get out of the pilot seat and sit down in another chair). I would like to have added it to the planet information panel in the galaxy view, but that’s way beyond my abilities, so once again I resorted to notification messages.
I prefer the sunrise/sunset information. It’s good for taking nice screenshots, or when playing on settings where solar radiation can be a threat. It also means that if you’re hopping around a single planet to complete a survey, or returning to your home outpost regularly, you’re not getting the same message over and over again. It works in the same simplistic way as the solar radiation check where sunrise & sunset are considered to happen at exactly 6 AM and 6 PM, regardless of where the sun actually is; for most locations on most planets it will match pretty much perfectly but if you land at a pole it might be more obviously wrong. I’m just copying how the game does it…
There is one special case worth mentioning. Tidally-locked moons don’t have a proper day length in the game data, but they still experience a day because they rotate relative to the star.* The correct value shows up in the wait/sleep menus but I can’t directly retrieve it. I could have tediously hard-coded the exact values for every relevant moon, but instead the mod just checks how much local time passes in fifteen seconds and does a tiny bit of math. It’s not a perfect estimate but it’ll get very close.
Internally, this hooks into a “Ship Landing” game event. So you should see it when you land on a surface, but it will also trigger on a few other occasions, like after modifying your ship. And some fast-travel transitions? But not always? I haven’t figured out exactly why, but it’s not like it shows up every time you go through a door. If you want to look inside the plugin, I prefixed things with “bhu_”. Excuse the mess in the script. It works, that’s the important thing!
*Earth’s moon is like this. Its day is roughly the length of one orbit, but look up “lunar day” or “synodic period” for why it isn’t exactly the same. I don’t know if the game bothers to simulate it and for the purposes of this mod it luckily doesn’t matter.
Credits:
bhurnie
Download mod
| File | File size |
|---|---|
Day Length Messages-1-0-1
|
6 KB |
