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The light: a real sun, a real moon, and every shadow
The sun now follows its real path over Lashkar Gah for the day you're fighting, the moon is the real one for the date, and everything in the world casts a shadow that moves with them.
Until today the light in Section Command was a colour wash over the map that followed the clock. The shadows were redrawn every few game minutes, and each model carried a shadow baked into its picture, falling to the south-east whatever the time. At dawn the light was dawn-coloured while the models' shadows still fell as if the sun were in the north-west. Today I threw that out.
Before
After
The sun
The sun follows its real path over Lashkar Gah, worked out for the date of the operation. On Zarghun's first day it comes up in the east-north-east, stands high in the south at noon, and goes down in the west-north-west, carrying on under the horizon through the twilight. The light is one smooth curve with the sun's height: blue sky by day, pink at sunrise and sunset, then the blue hour, then starlight. The sun is white when it's high, gold when it's low and red as it goes.
The moon
The moon is the real one for the operation's date too: its phase, when it rises and sets, and how high it climbs. On Zarghun's first night it rises at half past eleven. The valley's first nights are black. As the evening comes the game tells you what the moon will do tonight, because it matters: by moonlight you can see further, and so can they.
Every shadow
Everything casts a shadow now, from its own shape, worked out on the graphics card every frame: the ground's own height, the walls, rooms and towers, the HESCO, rocks and trees, the men, the animals, the vehicles and the base's kit. The shadows move as the sun does, soften with distance and as the light gets low, and fall across slopes the way slopes face the light. A section sitting against a wall in the afternoon is darker for being in its shade. And the shadows are blue against a gold sun.
It has to be cheap, and it is. At noon, when the shadows are short, it costs nothing at all, and in the early morning about three milliseconds a frame.
Night
At night the moon throws shadows, and so does every flare and every fire, ours and theirs. Tracer lights the ground it passes over, red for ours and green for theirs, and a muzzle flash or a blast lights up what's round it for a moment.
None of this changes the rules: it was always darker at night, and the clock always ran. But a game you watch from above for hours lives or dies on its light, and now first light looks like first light.
Who makes this: Section Command: Helmand Ops is made by one person, Jack Mustard, who is the whole of Tactical Chicken Studios.