Question Halloween theme mod

[Tallon300]

Hi people!
I'm new here so i don't know if this is the right place for questions. If isn't, let me know, please.
I never used any mod but i read that have a way to make unnoficials mods to the game. So, let me ask this:

I'm thinking make a mod with the inverted day cycle. I want make it a halloween themed mod, or something like that.
A better explanation from my idea: you wake up 6PM and sleep at 2PM the other day. The crops will grow during the night, and all possibles events will work normally.
So, could i do this? There's any obstacle that i can't see? The important part is the inverted day cycle and the crops.

PS: The programming is not a limitation.
PS2: Sorry for my english. I'm trying learn it without the google translator. :P

 

[Rotan]

This sounds like an interesting idea. I would definitely check it out if you succeed :)

Also your english is good ;)

 

[kdau]

This is a fun idea! It will require some heavy modification of the game code with Harmony, but should be doable. (Of course, check out the entire SMAPI modding tutorial and reference if you haven't already.) I can think of two approaches to this; let's call them "clock turning" and "clock spoofing".

In the "clock turning" approach, you would adjust the day to begin at 1800 and players to fall asleep at 1400, with an invisible time jump from 3000 (6am improperly) to 600 (6am properly). In the normal flow of game time, the hours between 2am and 6am aren't numbered at all and have 100 instead of 60 minutes when calculating things like machine running times, so that behavior would have to be shifted onto the 1400-to-1800 period. The advantage of this approach is that everything naturally follows as expected: light and dark, NPC behaviors, business hours, catchable fish, etc. Only the player(s) are on a different time cycle. The main challenge of this approach is that you'd be putting normally invalid values into the timeOfDay field for four hours at night, which combined with the moved start/end times of the day could cause unexpected edge case behavior in the base game, and is likely to conflict with a lot of mods.

In the "clock spoofing" approach, you would leave the timeOfDay field untouched and alter the world and UI to present the time as if it were backwards (AM for PM, PM for AM). Aside from changing the DayTimeMoneyBox UI element and various dialogue lines, the key thing would be to alter lighting conditions. For the logic required, see Sakorona's Dynamic Night Time mod. The entire town would jump onto a nighttime schedule this way, unless you adjust specific people or places (or fish, etc.) to be the other way around. The advantage would be maximum compatibility with various game subsystems and other mods, while the disadvantage would be the need to patch a lot of individual systems to create nighttime effects and the chance of leaving odd behaviors present if you miss patching them.