Hi peeps.

I'm new to modding, and was wondering if there is a way to change the day/night cycle for neighbourhoods?

I've created a holiday location for my vampire sims, so I'd like to change the day/night cycle to either be all night, or preferably have a day cycle that runs from 12-4pm and a night cycle that runs the rest of the time.

Is this possible?

I've seen items that speed up or slow down time, but haven't found anything that changes the time cycles.

Cheers!

I haven't seen anyone do it, so this is just a theory...

One could potentially change the lighting files (see Gunmod's lighting and my own seasonal lighting mod for those sorts of files - installation instructions for them will tell you where to find the originals) and use the same settings for day as you do for nighttime, to make for a permanent night. I don't know if it's possible to change the times of day the day/night transition happens - that might be something done elsewhere via hacks and someone else would know better... but all night is probably doable via fairly easy means. Editing lighting files is mainly a matter of first backing up your originals, then plinking around in the txt files (they open in Notepad - don't even need SimPE) and then start by drastically changing one thing you think you understand (there are comments in the file and the names of parameters are somewhat descriptive, if I recall correctly), then test and see what happened.

I think the vampire code probably compares with the clock time, rather than detecting the lighting conditions, unfortunately. Probably the easiest would be to make a patch that stops Vampires getting sun phobia in holiday locations - though that would not be specific to one holiday location. Or an object/patch pair so Vampires would be ok all day on lots that have this object.

Yeah, I didn't think that'd stop the vampires caring about it, would just make it look right.

There're at least 2 major pathways to go for what I see you want.

The problem is similar to the weather problem (inside or outside behaviourally or graphically): There're the game ethnic part (bhav, game settings, etc...) and the graphical presentation (mostly done in scripts like material shaders, lighting.txt.)

For the game-play, as Inge suggested, mod the vampire not to be killed during day during holiday/vacation in a lot.
For graphics, just switch the boolean day/night check for the material shader and probably alter the day/night placement in the lighting scripts.

Normally, the graphics should follow the commands from the time cycling of bhav and probably other settings. So, figuring out the location of day/night switch can save all the works for the above two.

In material shader, Maxis uses "if (tsIsDay)" to separate the day/night graphical pathways. "tsIsDay" is an example of boolean in this case.