Overview
Greetings Victorians, here comes a new Dev Diary that covers the content of the cosmetic art pack Dawn of Wonder. This pack aims to provide more visual variety to the map and interface of Victoria while also furthering the immersion of anyone who’s a fan of its world by adding a cosmetic Day & Night Cycle that can be customized to your liking. In addition the pack also contains a few new assets for characters, map decorations and more that we’ll be taking a look at below.
Dawn of Wonder releases on the 28th of August, alongside both the free 1.4 update and the start of the 1.5 Open Beta!
Day & Night Cycle
At the core of Dawn of Wonder lies the Day and Night Cycle. This feature replaces the static
midday sun that previously lit the map with a customisable cycle of sunlight and moonlight. As the sun sets on your nation, the moon rises, and all the cities and structures turn on their night lights. The city lights have three different hues and strengths depending on your research, so coal powered or gas light will look different from electric light. You will also be able to choose at what speed or even constant time you want the game to be played, in addition, you can also set the cycle to match your computer clock to further immerse yourself!
As night falls the cities still shine!
Dawn breaks on hubs and the shadows recedes!
The light from the lighthouses and hubs makes it easy to navigate Øresund at night.
To customize the speed of the Day & Night cycle there are plenty of options within the new Theme Selector interface (within a separate tab)
The options are as following:
Simulation speed: Controls the speed of the day night cycle and sun/moon movement. By default this multiplier is set to 10 which corresponds to 1 minute 30 seconds in real-time or two months of in-game time at speed 3. The bigger the number, the faster the simulation speed!
Sun Hours: The amount of hours that the sun takes up in one 24h cycle of in-game time, with the remaining hours being night, effectively how long it will be day relative to night.
For example, if the sun hours are set to 23, then you will have 23 hours of daylight and only 1 hour of nighttime (kind of like a Swedish Summer).
Enable sync local time: Matches the current hour of the cycle to the computer's local time. If you use this and match the real time sun hours and sunrise time (see next setting) in your location you can look up from your computer screen and outside the window to experience 100% immersion!
Time of sunrise: What hour the night will end and the sun will start to rise.
Enable manual time: This lets you set a fixed time to experience perpetual day or night. Manual time hour lets you choose the time you want, but take note that this is affected by both the sun hours and time of sunrise settings.
All these options have tooltips in case you need a reminder of their functions.
Light Effects & New carriage
To further accentuate objects and vehicles on the map we’ve made sure to add lights to all of them, so now everything from lighthouses to horse carriages has a light attached to them.
Speaking of carriages, in order to provide more visual variety to the roads of the map we’ve created a new more colorful stagecoach that contrasts the default very functional looking one.
Lighthouse effects guide the way all around!
Trains now also brighten up the night, with the carts being lit as well!
The new carriage brings some class and variety to the roads!
Map Decoration Structures
Bringing further life and wonder to the map are four new Decorative Structures that all have something to do with the sun, moon and stars. These structures are purely decorative and wont yield any benefit to the country currently occupying them, they will however add a bit more flavor to some of the regions of the world.
The sun still shines on the Martand Sun Temple after its near destruction around the 14th century.
The Temple of Poseidon is a mighty view both at dawn and when the moon is full.
Greenwich Observatory has an animation where it opens up for the night to gaze at the stars!
Wat Arun gives Bangkok a lot more personality and signifies the radiance of the rising sun.
New cultural outfits
When it comes to flavor we also wanted to bring a bit of that to the pops of the world through cultural outfits for certain regions. These outfits all have some significance relating to the passing of time or the sun and moon and will add some really detailed and ornate designs to otherwise plain clothes of pops at certain periods of time.
For Hindu pops in India there’s now an outfit related to Diwali, a festival celebrating lights' victory over darkness. And for Russia the Kokoshnik outfit not just symbolizes the passing of time and maturity but also has a half moon shaped tiara.
For the Nordic and Slavic countries the Midsommar dress makes an appearance celebrating the summer solstice, life and love. Last but not least is the Pierrot costume that has many different cultural meanings, many of them having the characters' relation with the moon in focus.
New UI Skin
Further amplifying the new mood of the Day and Night Cycle we’ve also created a brand new look for the interface, this time highly influenced by old folklore surrounding celestial bodies. With a dusk & dawn color scheme and lots of hand drawn details this skin contrasts the existing ones a great deal, giving the interface a bit more mellow yet ornate appearance.
The new interface creates a much more mellow and angular look to the game as a whole.
The existing icon interface looks much more whimsical surrounded by stars
New Map Table and Assets
When zoomed out from the world we’ve also made assets to remind you of the passing of time, the lights in the night as well of the mysteries surrounding the sun and moon. These assets are placed upon a newly created table featuring old wood carvings and a sash frame with illustrations.
The jade sculpture from Hongshan is as ancient as it is mysterious, even the warm flame of a candlelight cannot bring its secrets to light.
Even though it has stopped, a nice pocket watch is nice to have and the Taino sun god statue is both cute yet somewhat ominous, what is that black smoke emanating from it sporadically?
New Paper Map
The newly made paper map also embodies a lot of the same characteristics, featuring patterns of celestial bodies as well as illustrations of old zodiac signs…that may or may not resemble some of us at the art team with our corresponding signs.
The new paper map is filled with illustrations of mischievous suns and sleepy moons and tons of Zodiac signs.
What peculiar cancer signs…who could they resemble?
Dillon!...I mean, Gemini! You son of a…
Theme Selector
To round things off we want to showcase something new we’re adding to the game that comes as a free feature, the Theme Selector. This new submenu can be accessed from the main menu screen and allows you to more easily handle your cosmetic features like the ones contained in Dawn of Wonder. Mix elements from any of your owned packs and base game, use for instance the French UI skin, the default paper map and the new table assets from Dawn of Wonder all together to find the custom combination that you prefer.
The theme selector is accessible from a new button in the main menu, there are icons for each pack to visually help you navigate what asset is from what update.
Summary
So, with Dawn of Wonder we hope that the players who enjoy immersing themselves in the world of Victoria find something that furthers their immersion, whether it be the new Day & Night Cycle, the new UI skin or any of the newly added assets to characters and map.
Last but not least is a new loading screen for the pack, capturing both the mysteries of the stars as well as some of the newly added things.
Our next Dev Diary is scheduled to be published three weeks from now, as we will release Dev Diaries on this schedule in conjunction with the updates to the Open Beta. This is to ensure that all members of the team are hyper-focused on the upcoming beta build itself and have time to communicate with you all on the Open Beta channel on the Discord server. See you there!
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Hello Victorians, Pelly here!
We have previously said that we want to launch the Open Beta on the 28th, alongside 1.4 and the Dawn of Wonder art pack. However, we are delaying the initial launch of the Open Beta to ensure we get the best initial version of 1.5 into the community's hands.
As such, we are still releasing 1.4 and Dawn of Wonder on the 28th, but you should expect the initial 1.5 Open Beta to be released within the first week of September at the latest.
We know people are excited for the Open Beta, so are we, and we are looking forward to receiving your feedback and talking to you about 1.5 in the Open Beta channels when it does release.