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-   -   Calendar (http://forums.wolflair.com/showthread.php?t=45442)

Chemlak August 21st, 2013 03:58 AM

Calendar
 
A couple of points before I start:

Firstly, I'm well aware that a custom calendar function exists in the development team, but we've been told it's clunky and inefficient, and a pain to use, and they want to make it better before releasing it.

Secondly, rob has said that there are advantages to feature requests being repeated, so that they can get an idea of priorities for things on the to-do list.

So, taking those points together, I've started this thread so that people can chime in with thoughts, or just "+1" the thread to help with that goal.

Custom calendars are, to me, vital for full management capabilities in my games: every now and then I might run a game set on Earth and use the Gregorian Calendar, but most of my games are Pathfinder and set in the Forgotten Realms, using the Calendar of Harptos, and figuring out dates is pretty non-intuitive, even after 20+ years.

Having moved significant chunks of my campaign into RW (including the entirety of my current adventure), the one thing holding me back from abandoning my OneNote files is the current inability to flesh out my campaign timeline.

I need this.

Gimme!

:p

Maidhc O Casain August 21st, 2013 04:29 AM

Lots of things I want, and I've barely scratched the surface of this great software, but this is potentially one of the coolest aspects of the program.

+1 from me!

wildfire142 August 21st, 2013 06:17 AM

A calendar other than the Gregorian one is essential for timelines in any game, so +1 to getting this feature added.

DeckOfManyThings August 21st, 2013 06:28 AM

I know the Star Wars calendar is 10 months long, with 5 day weeks, 7 week months, and there are three festival weeks and three holidays that exist outside of any month.

I just hope it supports something as wacky as that.

Chemlak August 21st, 2013 08:23 AM

Deck, (I'll take 3 cards, please!), the current info says something along the lines of "virtually any calendar can be created" (and considering the historical popularity of the Forgotten Realms, with its 12 months of 30 days each in "rides" (weeks) of 10 days, plus 5 festival days that fall between certain months, and a leap year every 4 years with an extra festival day added in for that, implementing that sort of calendar should be feasible, if for no other reason than "marginalising users is bad, m'kay?"). I highly suspect that we won't have a problem with the variant calendars that RPGs throw out, once the tool is available. To be honest, I'd be most interested in learning what calendar types can't be created. We know that you can have multiple calendars running concurrently in a single Realm (so, a lunar calendar (or 3, for worlds like Krynn) can bimble along next to the actual calendar of dates, plus calendars for other worlds/dimensions/societies), so I'm confident in the tool. It's mostly that the calendar has a very high priority for me.

Zaphod Beebledoc August 21st, 2013 10:10 AM

Plus 1 from me!

If the Gregorian calendar can be put on a computer, (365 days broken up into 12 irregular months, etc) then I see no reason why the Star Wars, Forgotten Realms or other more extreme calendars can fit! They are, after all, just numbers...

Joe August 21st, 2013 11:21 AM

The Calendars system is a very complex beast that needs some taming. I don't fully understand all it's nuances yet, as I've focused on other things since coming on board recently, but that's changing now.

It's definitely very flexible, and was designed to support all the kooky calendars from all sorts of fantasy and scifi settings. The real problem isn't so much the calendar engine tech (which is solid), but the interface for making managing the complexity understandable and relatively straightforward.

As far as I'm aware, the only real limitation is that your calandar/date/time system must have some kind of indivisible unit analogous to a second. It doesn't have to be named "second", there don't have to be 60 of them in a "minute" (or whatever you rename that to) but they have to be consistent. You can't have a "minute" consisting of both "seconds" and "otherseconds" which are different time lengths. To be honest, I can't even really comprehend such a system, so if you're trying to do that you're so far down the road to Crazytown that even software can't help. :)

There may be other limitations as well, but like the "seconds" debacle above, they are just as likely to be practical limitations as they are technical limitations. For instance, while it may be technically possible to have hundreds of calendars running at once in a Realm, at that point we're really stretching the limits of user comprehension, and we may limit the number to a considerably lower level just to make the interface for dealing with it all even a little bit sane. :)

billcoke August 23rd, 2013 04:56 AM

In a campaign that I'm running the players travel to different worlds. These different worlds experience time at different speeds than on their home world. So when the players go from HOME to World_A they find that time on World_A is going 2 times as fast. This means that on World_A the players will go through 2 days worth of time (sun comes up/goes down), but in the same amount of time on their home world only 1 day will go by.
Will there be a way to model this different passage of time?

rob August 25th, 2013 12:34 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by billcoke (Post 163950)
Will there be a way to model this different passage of time?

If I'm understanding your example correctly, then I believe the answer is "yes".

Zaphod Beebledoc August 25th, 2013 01:47 AM

When creating a date based snippet, it would be useful to be able to put a tag where the label is.


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