Time cycle

Introduction

This document only covers gta3 and vice city at the moment.

The timecyc.dat file contains the information for how to display the sky, weather effects and time of day. It is broken into the many sections. There is one line of data per hour in the game, per weather type. In the Vice City timecyc.dat, there is an extra section at the bottom of the file named "EXTRACOLOURS". These extra colours are used for building interiors, but should function the same.

Note: A comment in the timecyc.dat file is preceded by a series of slashes ("//") and they will precede each type of weather, and time of day in the file.

TimeCyc.dat Structure

Amb

Coming soon.

Amb_Obj

Color

Controls the amount of ambient light on dynamic objects, like streetlamps and mailboxes.

Amb_Bl

Coming soon.

Amb_Obj_bl

Coming soon.

Dir

Coming soon.

Sky top

Coming Soon.

Sky bot

Coming Soon.

SunCore

Coming Soon.

SunCorona

Coming Soon.

Sky top

Coming Soon.

SunSz

Coming Soon.

SprSz

Coming Soon.

SprBght

Coming Soon.

Shdw

Coming Soon.

LightShd

Coming Soon.

PoleShd

Coming Soon.

FarClp

Coming Soon.

FogSt

Coming Soon.

LightOnGround

Coming Soon.

LowCloudsRGB

Coming Soon.

TopCloudRGB

Coming Soon.

BottomCloudRGB

Coming Soon.

BlurRGB

Coming Soon.

WaterRGBA

Controls the color of the water. On the pc version of the game, the water texture is greenish-blue. It needs to be converted to grayscale to fully see the effect of changing the water color in the timecyc.dat, as the colors defined in this file, are multiplied by the water texture color ingame.