Well, speaking from a metaphysical point of view: maybe...
That's what Front Runner was getting at in his thread "
Base Time 2018". It has been discussed before in a few other threads, but I don't think anyone has gotten to the root of the problem yet, like Front Runner has. The game keeps really accurate track of the time of day (or night) - but only under certain circumstances.
The game engine is basically SH3, from 2005, so you can say it's probably 2003 software technology, if not older. The idea of using something truly "stable" to keep track of time of day was not well-programmed for future computing. With computers that are as fast and efficient as they are today, the games' (SH3, 4 & 5) get out of whack when running at "real" time. They can draw the screen at a much higher rate than the computers of 10 years ago could. Since the use of the higher Time Compression settings basically negates the effect of screen refresh rate, and hence "time of day" being tied to it, the effect is not seen.
Basically, what Front Runner describes is a cumulative effect, where after playing the game for some time, sunset and sunrise (and the moon phases) all get out of whack, and you might be seeing the game as representing night time, but the game AI is seeing it as daylight, such that it seems the enemy is either clairvoyant, or has a new top-secret radar that the US doesn't know about... So "yes Margaret, you can be attacked at what you think is night time, by an enemy AI that thinks it's day time." One way to alleviate the issue is to Save the game, exit, come back in, and load the Save - presto change-oh, everything is back in sync... What a "fix", eh? Like so many other of the games' fixes...
Using the nVidia Control Panel, if you have an nVidia card, or maybe the ATI / AMD CCC for one of their cards, and you might be able to set the game to not go beyond using 30fps (Frames Per Second) when it "draws" the game assets, such as ships or sea or land, etc. That seems to be the solution. Conversely, if you have an older computer, one that you can't get above 30fps anyway, no worries - that might actually be "cutting-edge technology" for the games.
Maybe we can talk Front Runner into doing a picture-laden tutorial on setting up the nVidia control panel for this...
