Calendar

[gamemasterbob]

Perhaps you can release a version of the calendar gadget that only loads calendars and does NOT edit. Then YOU can make the Forgotten Realms calendar (seems to be the most mentions - and the one I need) and a few more and add them to the updates. This will hold many of us till you tame the authoring tool. Has this been suggested? I didn't read the entire thread.

[Grey Mage]

+1 for this so long as the World of Greyhawk calendar(s) are also added...

[ShadowChemosh]

Originally Posted by gamemasterbob

Perhaps you can release a version of the calendar gadget that only loads calendars and does NOT edit. Then YOU can make the Forgotten Realms calendar (seems to be the most mentions - and the one I need) and a few more and add them to the updates. This will hold many of us till you tame the authoring tool. Has this been suggested? I didn't read the entire thread.

I like that idea also as long as it has the Golarion calender.

[Bidmaron]

+1 for major calendars (is the Mayan calendar major?)

[EdtheDM]

I agree with the Original Poster....the ability to use custom calendars is very, very important to my game.

Thanks for soliciting feedback on this type of thing, I think this is going to be a great product.

[Viral Platypus]

Custom Calendar for me as well. Putting in recurring events and with months of varying lengths.

Possible feature to add would be multiple calendars side by side. For example I wouldn't mind being able to have a seasonal/celestial calendar to mark the movements of planets and mark seasons on top of a normal calendar that might not always coincide with said seasons. Or to have different calendars for different nations/continents/planes/planets.

[darloth]

One of the main reasons I bought this was the promise of custom calendars.

Almost nothing else even DOES custom calendars, let alone custom calendars arbitrary chunks of time into the past and future.

Exalted, for example, has 5 seasons of 3 months, each of which is... I forget, but I think 25 days?

Then there's 5 excess days at the end of the year, and they also have TWO summers (kindof), so tracking that without help is pretty complex, just to be able to -accurately- answer the question "what's the weather like today?"

[davidp]

Originally Posted by darloth

Almost nothing else even DOES custom calendars, let alone custom calendars arbitrary chunks of time into the past and future.

Having worked on the custom calendar support in Realm Works, I know WHY you don't see custom calendar support elsewhere: It is hard.

We have the underlying support in place for a good majority of calendar systems we know of as long as it is built on some simple underlying concepts. However, the UI for creating and editing and mapping the custom calendars needs work to be easier to use. That is why we have calendars disabled at the moment, even though the underpinnings are mostly in place.

[jerrycnh]

This is probably all redundant at this point, but perhaps it would be helpful to the dev team to have a few "pipe dream" examples of functionality on hand in order to robustly test their coding plans to see if they fit all different kinds of systems, and so with this in mind, I humbly submit the calendar I use in my campaign world and how I would ideally want to see this software work.

There are 252 days in a year: 12 months of 20 days apiece, and 2 "festival" periods of 6 days each which are seperate "months" in their own right. The seven days of the week are as Earth norm, but renamed as kri-Ahn, kri-Beht, etc., so that a short hand date could be written "kB857Q14", which would be kri-Beht, the 14th day of QuaalMa in the year 857. In my pipe dream, the software would have an abbreviation field for each day of the week and month of the year and then allow me to customize display of the date so that dates could show up in that format.

The world has two moons, Goed and Kwaad, on a 20 day and 36 day lunar cycle respectively. Ideally the software would have a button, during a game session, for me to time lapse any period - 8 hours, 1 month, a year - and then show me the phases of the moons as well as the date and time.

Ideally I would be able to mark a single geographical topic with a check mark that denotes "current PC location". The program would know to only let me have one at a time checked. There would be a section entitled "weather" where I could put the different weather types experienced, roughly how often they change, and the percent chance of any given type of weather in weighted format (Ie in the most simple chart, "rain 9 sunny 1", it would know that there was a 90% chance of rain every time it rolled). Every time I did a time lapse the system would also let me know whether the weather changed and what the current weather is. (If I didn't put a weather chart on the geographical topic in question, it would ideally have a "Default" one to fall back on).

When printing or displaying the calendar, the headings of any Holiday or Event topics (provided they were revealed) would show up on their corresponding dates, even ones with a rotational date (IE first Tuesday in August, instead of "July 4th"). It would also display dates of the full moons.

So... yeah, I know that's a wicked tall order, and if I can't have everything, eh, such is life. I'm just happy they're looking at doing some of it.

[weogarth]

jerrycnh - Cool post.

Redundant or not, one of the things they've said is that repeated requests will give them an idea of how popular a request is so as to let them better prioritize.