Custom Calendar Conversion Software (outside of RW)
 

[EDITED TO CORRECT FACTUAL INACCURACIES AND TO "TONE DOWN" THE ORIGINAL POST]

Based on the recent survey results, and calendars not making the top of the list of desired features, it looks like it could be another 6-9 months before custom calendars will be supported. In the meantime, I would still like to use the custom-made calendars that I created and would like an easy way to perform conversions among them. For example, I would love to enter a date and have it spit out that date in the four main custom calendars that I could then just cut and paste into event articles in RW. Eventually, when custom calendars are supported, this will not be necessary, but it would be a very helpful stop-gap if there were some way to easily perform custom-calendar to Gregorian date conversions.

I've spent a lot of time looking at various products, but have not found anything that meets my requirements. The easy thing to do is to just select some historical or lesser-known religious calendars and use them as there are products that will support an impressive array of real-world, but lesser-known calendars.

I've read up calendar coding (e.g. Dersowitz's Calendrical Calculations) but am not a software developer and it just don't have the time right now to properly study and learn to do this myself. I am thinking of posting a project to Guru.com to see if someone can create a java script to do this for me, but before I do, I thought I would reach out to the community and see whether there is anything that I've missed.

My bare minimum requirements are:

I want to enter any date from Gregorian (because that is what RW uses), past or future, and have the script spit out converted dates for two to three custom calendars. None are particularly foreign from the Gregorian. For example one is just 12 months of 30 days with 5 intercalary days (6 every four years). Another is based on old norse (old icelandic) calendars but I'm ignoring the runic half-months. I was also using the Harptos calendar for some realms, but can drop it.

It would be great if there was some way to configure additional calendars, but that seems to be asking too much (which is why I was excited when I thought that RW would support that, I just have not found anything else that does).

[Admin Edit: See post #7 below for more details.]
(I've edited this post to remove the inaccuracies of the original and make the tone less negative. In the original I misstated/exaggerated the time estimate for calendars. Rob had correct to state 6-9 months).

If you Google well enough, you can find WeatherMaster which will allow you to have custom calendars and also do moon phases and other things.

In some ways, it was to calendars and astronomy for RPGs what Realm Works is to full campaign management.

It's well out of date and you have to do some hacks to get it to run but you may find it worth the hassle.

http://donjon.bin.sh/fantasy/calendar/
http://heldenhaufen.de/Ca

I wish my programing ability was strongdr. I have tried to do the weathermaster bat file, but I just cannot figure it out. It was probably the best program out there. I loved the weather generation.

Salcor

WeatherMaster was a fantastic piece of software that i purchased many years ago. Sadly it went out of use and since then nothing has come close to it. I genuinely hoped that RW might finally fill that void.

Guess not.

IIRC, my uncle (a huge gamer) asked me to find a way to make WeatherMaster work again. (He'd bought a copy a while ago, installed on an older computer that finally died.) I was never able to find a way around the long gone registration setup. :(

Maybe I should look around again.

Important clarification: Calendars have NOT been abandoned. Not even close. Portraying them as such is a gross misrepresentation of the facts.

Calendars simply have a few other things that came out as higher priority in the eyes of the user base. I realize some users don't like it, but that's not an excuse for changing the facts and resorting to hyperbole that just isn't true.

We now return you to constructive discussions about alternative options for calendars in the interim until custom calendars are completed within Realm Works...

Great! Thank you.

Great News!

Good to get clarified (again).

I will try to be a good boy so that I might get my Christmas present early this year :D

Thanks, Rob. I knew this already, but felt I couldn't comfortably reply to this thread without ranting.