Random Sleep Time Adjustments

[Bill Tarling]

Rather than selecting specific number of hours to exactly sleep, I would love to see it where those are more # of hours to try sleeping.

Then your sleep can be interrupted (whether by noises, weather, distant or near wolf howls, etc.), or you just aren't sleeping the full time because you're not really too tired [period becomes more like rest, or restless sleep].

Likewise you may actually oversleep -- so it's not as easy to balance hunger, dehydration, and even trip planning.

Having that slight random adjustment means you won't necessarily be able to plan the exact time of events.

[mikey]

Rather than selecting specific number of hours to exactly sleep, I would love to see it where those are more # of hours to try sleeping.

Then your sleep can be interrupted (whether by noises, weather, distant or near wolf howls, etc.), or you just aren't sleeping the full time because you're not really too tired [period becomes more like rest, or restless sleep].

Likewise you may actually oversleep -- so it's not as easy to balance hunger, dehydration, and even trip planning.

Having that slight random adjustment means you won't necessarily be able to plan the exact time of events.

I love this idea. I don't recall starting with an alarm clock. I imagine short/medium naps; deep sleeps, etc. If you are very fatigued, it should be harder to wake up after only a couple hours. If its cold and the fire is out, it's harder to sleep for long periods, etc.

I love this idea so much.

[Guest Alan Lawrance]

I have to say this idea is interesting. Sleeping as much as you need adds another layer of strategic thinking, and could prevent excessive sleeping that pads survival times. Lots of potential here.

[accurize2]

I like this more random method. it seems more believable. If you sleep as much as you need to relieve fatigue or cure something like food poisoning. Then, the dehydration rate would need adjusted. We'd all be dying in our sleep after 7 hours or so. Also, if you had moments where you couldn't sleep simply because you weren't tired, it would be nice to have some other minimally energy draining option to pass time during a blizzard, it might get a bit boring just waiting 20 real time mins for a blizzard to pass. I guess you could attempt to forage for reclaimed, but that's not really intended for advancing time. Maybe something as simple as "Wait for sunrise" and "wait for change in weather"?

With this more relative measure of time passage, it might be possible to remove the time clock altogether, and use your eyes and sense of time to decide when you might want to start looking to settle in for the evening.

As for how to deal with ailments and the time needed to recover. Again, in real life you wouldn't know the exact time needed to recover from food poisoning. You'd just have to plan on resting, relaxing or sleeping until you felt better. So after each "rest" activity. You'd need to check your ailments to see if you were still requiring more rest. On the backend, if the required amount of rest could be a time range rather than an exact hour, this would seem more realistic and unpredictable. Perhaps have the amount of time needed to rest be tied to the players' health condition when they got sick or injured. Again, this would be only evident in the backend coding, all the player would see is they still required "rest". Healthy people do tend to recover quicker than people with suffering health.

[Raphael van Lierop]

Cool. Yeah we've discussed at various times the different ways we can/should modify the current sleep system. I like the idea of a needs-based Rest system, although there are some pretty thorny design issues in general. The notion of your sleep being interrupted already exists and is something I'd like to see happen more, particularly if you are already well-rested. I've been wanting to get rid of the "real clock" for a while now so this might be a good excuse to do it...

[Bill Tarling]

I've been wanting to get rid of the "real clock" for a while now so this might be a good excuse to do it...

Might be more work than it's worth, but figured I would throw this out for the sleep variation cycle.

Rather than time clock, perhaps occasional random sounds, images (good and bad), or other type dream effects. Noting crystal clear or sharp [perhaps transparent at about a 10% level, and images randomly slide or overlay].

If suffering from blood loss, it might include more wolf sounds and images... If health near critical it might include audio and image snippets from Will's pre-accident period [wife, kids, family business, going down for crash, etc... just real short backstory snippets].

The worse the health condition, the more jumbled, random, and audio overlayed the sounds are [near death would be like a cacophony of sounds and voices].

That could give a sense of how restful the sleep is (as well as warnings of how severely recovery is needed).

If don't need sleep, but just want to rest to wait for later hour -- perhaps some snippets of music like the awesome stinger pieces...

Some audio or images might even be teaser shots and dialogue from story mode at some point -- nothing much, just teasers

[brent_knowles]

Just want to second/third/fourth the idea of a bit more randomness to the sleep cycle and ailment restoration.

I also think that certain "state" changes should wake you up, either always, or with some variation. If I sleep too long and hit "starving-state", I think I generally should awaken, perhaps adjusted by how fatigued/injured I am.

[accurize2]

All the ideas sound good. I think this was mentioned with blood loss already in another post somewhere, but a blood trail, like the already existing foot prints (followed by a pack of wolves )

The only thing I must have is this...

"I'm so sleepy, I'm starting to feel awake again."