Of the clocks I did not influence, Slarti's was the best in my opinion. It's nice and polished and is quite "active". I'm surprised that Shaotang's clock is beating both of ours; I thought his wasn't very creative. (Though, it is quite polished and technically sound)
It's got a slew of features. Figure them out when you play the map; it's more interesting to do things than read a wall of text, anyway.
Essentially, it's a sundial. The shallow semicircle of lights that are laid out in the shadow's path light up at the appropriate time to mark off the hours. I don't bother adding minutes or seconds because getting the hours to sync up with the lighting system was an absolute bitch. It may not work right if you don't play on the fastest game speed, too. Apparently, it worked out (through trial and error) that I had to put the day length as 126.5 seconds, and the seconds per hour as 4.4 (24 hours in a day, mind you). This makes absolutely no sense, but for some insane reason it works out that way in the engine. Keep in mind that 4.4 times 24 is 105.6... yeah...
List of features in no order:
Zerg air units fly overhead, leaving shadows on the ground as they fly by, sometimes passing through the camera's field of view.
There are three cameras that are randomly used (and can change every 24 hours); put your graphics settings on ultra for full effect, since I use some DoF.
A realistic day/night lighting system. The only thing that isn't simulated is moon lighting, which requires a second full-scene shadow, which I'm not sure is possible.
The sundial shadow traces out the path of the time.
Along the path of the shadow are glowing markers placed at hour intervals.
The glowing markers change color depending on the time, synced with the shadow's path. A small explosion effect happens when each hour is marked off. The day and night colors are different, too.
There is a doodad-spam terrain surrounding the main area, which is a crater-like place with a 10-story protoss sundial in the center.
The water rises and recedes in an exaggerated tidal movement. The high point is high noon.
At midnight, there's a flash and a large explosion at some random part in the crater, leaving a permanent scorch mark. This essentially tallies off the days as they go by.
Oh, just a minor detail that took me the vast majority of the time to do right: a random set of ghostly units appear off-screen and charge toward the crater to do battle. One army is terran and the other protoss. The army size and quality increases every successive night. The units are unselectable, unhighlightable, etc, and are transparent and tinted, and pulsate lightly. Some of their projectiles and ammo units are given the same conditions. At day, or when they die from combat, they explode in a light puff of smoke that scales to the unit's size and height.
A spiral of lights ticks off the minutes. At each hour, the spiral intersects with the hour marker and the sundial shadow.
In other words, I just added crap until I felt I could call it a day.
Edit: tiny update and screenshots...
Edit2: large update and a screenshot
0
Of the clocks I did not influence, Slarti's was the best in my opinion. It's nice and polished and is quite "active". I'm surprised that Shaotang's clock is beating both of ours; I thought his wasn't very creative. (Though, it is quite polished and technically sound)
0
UPDATE: New version with a couple more things
It's got a slew of features. Figure them out when you play the map; it's more interesting to do things than read a wall of text, anyway.
Essentially, it's a sundial. The shallow semicircle of lights that are laid out in the shadow's path light up at the appropriate time to mark off the hours. I don't bother adding minutes or seconds because getting the hours to sync up with the lighting system was an absolute bitch. It may not work right if you don't play on the fastest game speed, too. Apparently, it worked out (through trial and error) that I had to put the day length as 126.5 seconds, and the seconds per hour as 4.4 (24 hours in a day, mind you). This makes absolutely no sense, but for some insane reason it works out that way in the engine. Keep in mind that 4.4 times 24 is 105.6... yeah...
List of features in no order:
In other words, I just added crap until I felt I could call it a day.
Edit: tiny update and screenshots...
Edit2: large update and a screenshot