Calendar

[Mystic Lemur]

Make sure the custom calendar supports leap year settings. My Forgotten Realms campaigns have to have their leap years for Shieldmeet.

[MaxSupernova]

+1 for this, I want to date my Star Wars campaign in BBY and ABY...

[Vargr]

I would like to add my voice to the chorus saying how important custom calenders are (note the plural).

I run my own world and I use many different calendars. The old Empire had one calendar, the new one (thousands of years later) has another. The countries to the south use yet a third calendar and so forth.

This is wonderful when setting up plots. Like the old prophesy refering to some dates in an old calendar and the players have no idea if the things have happened long ago or are supposed to happen some time in the future. Figuring out how to "translate" the old calendar to the present calendar can be an entire plot in itself.

All this just to say, that I would really like the possibility to have multiple custom calendars in one realm and being able to write one date in one calendar and get the corresponding date in all the other calendars I have.

Furthermore being able to easily choose which calendar will be used to show all the date information in the realm. So I can say "Kragôrn Imperial Calendar" and I can see all dates according to this calendar - then I can switch (by an easily drop-down menu?) to say "Late Raez Federation Calendar" and all dates will change to this calendar.

I assume that programwise this would require a generic calendar that all custom calendars are referring to, so it "just" becomes a matter of "simple" translation. I know, it is much more complex than I make it sound.

I would - like everybody else - like to get my cake now AND eat it now as well, but it is important that the calendar system (hopefully with support for multiple custom calendars) is robust, well thought out and easy to use. If that means we will have to wait a while, so be it.

[gloranphile]

+1 to further calendar integration

[lifer4700]

Originally Posted by Vargr

I would like to add my voice to the chorus saying how important custom calenders are (note the plural).

I run my own world and I use many different calendars. The old Empire had one calendar, the new one (thousands of years later) has another. The countries to the south use yet a third calendar and so forth.

This is wonderful when setting up plots. Like the old prophesy refering to some dates in an old calendar and the players have no idea if the things have happened long ago or are supposed to happen some time in the future. Figuring out how to "translate" the old calendar to the present calendar can be an entire plot in itself.

All this just to say, that I would really like the possibility to have multiple custom calendars in one realm and being able to write one date in one calendar and get the corresponding date in all the other calendars I have.

Furthermore being able to easily choose which calendar will be used to show all the date information in the realm. So I can say "Kragôrn Imperial Calendar" and I can see all dates according to this calendar - then I can switch (by an easily drop-down menu?) to say "Late Raez Federation Calendar" and all dates will change to this calendar.

I assume that programwise this would require a generic calendar that all custom calendars are referring to, so it "just" becomes a matter of "simple" translation. I know, it is much more complex than I make it sound.

I would - like everybody else - like to get my cake now AND eat it now as well, but it is important that the calendar system (hopefully with support for multiple custom calendars) is robust, well thought out and easy to use. If that means we will have to wait a while, so be it.

This.

+1

[Mystic Lemur]

Originally Posted by Vargr

All this just to say, that I would really like the possibility to have multiple custom calendars in one realm and being able to write one date in one calendar and get the corresponding date in all the other calendars I have.

It seems this will be the case, as they've already mentioned that the current Gregorian calendar is just an implementation of their "custom" calendar. Something about all the date entries having to be internally consistent, no matter the calendar used.

[lifer4700]

Well, obviously, the best solution is to count the number of seconds that have passed since I was born, then add 63 days to that...

That's how Unix did it. That's how POSIX does it - and it's worked out pretty well so far.

[Zaphod Beebledoc]

Originally Posted by Joe

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 calendar/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.

(My emphasis added above...)

Don't know if things have changed, can't image they have for the calendar engine tech, but this was the state of play last August...

[Mystic Lemur]

So how is the interface going to work? Is it all going to be relational to "Earth time" or will we have to figure how many seconds are in a day on Seti Alpha V? What will the calendar layout look like? Will we be able to define how many "weeks" are in a "month"?

I just want to plaaaaaay with it. Pleeeeeeease.

[Chemlak]

Consider this:

In the real world, there are 60 seconds to the minute, 60 minutes to the hour, 24 hours to the day, 7 days to the week. A month varies between 28 and 31 days, and the weeks interact cyclically so that if a week crosses into the next month, the week doesn't reset. There are 12 months in a year. Every 4 years an extra day gets added in to one of the months. There are 10 years to a decade, there are 100 years to a century, there are 1,000 years to a millennia. There is no year 0. Time goes from 1 BC to 1 AD.

And now for the clincher: this utterly batshit crazy calendar has been successfully built using the calendar tool, to run consistently from 10,000 BC to 10,000 AD, taking all of that into account.

I think we can safely say that it will do whatever we want.