[Request] Night Vision for Spectator Mode

[ApacheTech]

Synopsis:

This client-side mod would add a command :

.nv on|off

This command would only have an effect in Spectator Mode.

When activated, it would add an effect to the player to enable them to see in pitch black, as if it were daylight.

Background:

Spectator Mode is used on secondary "Camera Accounts", to create stop-motion third-person timelapses. This involves either placing the camera in a static position while you build, or setting a path for the camera to follow, and specifying a duration for the flight along the path. Usually, in third-person timelapses, you would need to record over a period of hours, in order to get enough material to fill the time you need for the scene.

Currently, in game, it is only possible to record in 20 minute intervals, because the nights are ridiculously long, and far too dark to record anything in. At 128x speed, this is only ~10 seconds of footage.

Allowing the camera account to have visibility 100% of the time will allow for much longer, uninterrupted recording sessions, which will result in much more impressive, and usable footage.

Example:

As an example, the timelapse at the beginning of this episode was recorded over a 15-20 in-game day period. It's a decent size build, but nothing huge. It has a mix of static, and moving camera segments, and the footage is only sped up to a maximum of 32x. Because the maximum duration of any camera path is around 20 minutes, if you start at dawn, it means that you end up chasing the camera around as you're building. It's a very frantic way of building, and you waste a day or two setting up the camera paths. As soon as it passes midday in game, it's far too late to build anything that day, and you have to wait around until dawn. If you oversleep, the next day is entirely wasted. If a temporal storm warning comes up, you waste up to three in-game days while you reset everything, ready to shoot again.

All in all, everything I've described here would have been eased if the camera were able to be rolling constantly, without the need to reset everything every 20 minutes. Having night vision on the camera would allow a huge range of incredible footage to be filmed that is currently unavailable.