Bad default dates

[hades200082]

When using dates in Realmworks the date picker fields default to "01/01/20000 BCE 00:00:00" ... since you can't type directly into these fields it makes the date fields completely useless unless you want to spend days clicking back on the year-range view to get back to a sensible date.

[Cornelius]

As far as I know it starts at this date. But it remembers the last date used. So you only need to go through it one time. After that it is easier. that is assuming you do not have a date range of 1000s of years.

[davidp]

If you click on the month/year header, it will zoom out. Keep clicking it seven times, and it zooms out to "Default Epoch" with BCE and CE listed. You can then click on CE and continue to zoom in to a particular year, month, and finally day. So it will take 8 clicks to zoom in and select a day, so 15 clicks total to go from any particular day to another day.

[Acenoid]

Would prefer to type it in as it goes faster for me. At the moment it's always click, read, click, read, etc..
You have to check where to click.

It's not just click quickly 8 times, you also have to check where to click / scroll. Maybe I could get used to it, but I rather type in 8 numbers that I have in mind already (if the dots are skipped automatically that is).

Of course the "click" method should still be a possibility, but it would be excellent if it would be possible to paste a date , date range in, or being able to type it in manually.

[Chemlak]

That might be a possible enhancement, it depends how custom calendars "recognise" the date format (and could be hugely prone to user input error).

It would have to differentiate between, for example, 25 November 1862 CE and 25 November 1862 BCE - most people don't include the era when typing a date, and the software would have to guess which you meant, and then let you change it easily without having to type the date out in full if the software guessed wrong.

And that's not even mentioning something as trivial as the US mm/dd/yyyy versus the more common dd/mm/yyyy format, which just adds to the difficulty of the software recognising what you're typing in and turning it into a date suitable for your currently active calendar.

So this definitely gets a "ooh, yes, please" from me, but I wouldn't pin my hopes on it happening even by the time calendars become available.

[Acenoid]

Its prefilled as with a default date, i dont think its a real problem. It just remembers the last date you entered. Only if you would enter dates that are always on the other end of the scale it would be annoying...

[Farling]

Originally Posted by Chemlak

And that's not even mentioning something as trivial as the US mm/dd/yyyy versus the more common dd/mm/yyyy format, which just adds to the difficulty of the software recognising what you're typing in and turning it into a date suitable for your currently active calendar.

This is why having a calendar based on the host computer's "system" calendar would be very useful. For this base calendar it could use the system's configured date format.

It seems that any new calendar facility might have to handle "real-world" dates separately from campaign calendars for this very reason.

The game session window allows two dates to be entered: a real-world date for when the session occurred, and a campaign-world date.

[MNBlockHead]

While setting the default would be nice, I would much prefer to be able to type the date.

[Vargr]

Also, Windows is notorious for getting the default system date formats wrong.

The length I have to go to in order to make for instance Excel understand what I want date format wise is frustrating.

So I would much prefer to keep Windows "understanding" of date formats far away from RW.

And yes, it would be nice to be able to type the dates directly but I can see some problems with that depending on how "strange" your calendars are.

[Cornelius]

Originally Posted by Chemlak

It would have to differentiate between, for example, 25 November 1862 CE and 25 November 1862 BCE - most people don't include the era when typing a date, and the software would have to guess which you meant, and then let you change it easily without having to type the date out in full if the software guessed wrong.

And that's not even mentioning something as trivial as the US mm/dd/yyyy versus the more common dd/mm/yyyy format, which just adds to the difficulty of the software recognising what you're typing in and turning it into a date suitable for your currently active calendar.

There is of course a step between the way it is done now and giving the user total free reigns in how to enter the dates. you could also make a form where you must enter the different fields separately. So in you example you would need to enter day, month, year, era in four different fields. That would mean that it is easier to switch between 1 januari 20.000 BCE to 23 july 2016.