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Calendar

C

Chemlak

Well-known member
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
 
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!
 
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.
 
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.
 
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...
 
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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. :)
 
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?
 
A calendar tool that is able to handle intercalary months (for lunisolar calendars) and moon phases for different moons (our fantasy campaign world has to moons with different phases) would be a definite plus.

+1
 
+1 this.

Will the calendar include functionality to include various moon alignments and orbits, along with icons or notes for holidays in a fairly straightforward manner?
 
AzrofD said:
Will the calendar include functionality to include various moon alignments and orbits, along with icons or notes for holidays in a fairly straightforward manner?
Click to expand...
+1

I have hacked WeatherMaster for this. Would love this functionality in RW.
 
Some extra things that would be handy for the calendar: Repeating events (ie certain holidays and such that happen every year so we just have to put in the date and a checkbox so it is tagged for every year, or every decade). I'd also like to have a way to track celestial bodies (moon, constellations, etc) so that if a player gets bit by a were i'll have that info at my fingertips.

Edit: And a way to enter a date as just a year without needed to specify a month/day.
 
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+1 need for a really flexible calendar system.

I'm running a campaign in Shadow World (Rolemaster) and need to keep track of the Kulthean Calendar. I will also need 25 hours in each day.

Will the system track other calendars as well. Some of my game involves a crossover to Spacemaster which uses a Standard Imperial Calendar which has different day/month/year lengths to the planetary one. I would love to be able to synchronise the two.
 
absolutely looking forward to custom calendars! I'd like to be able to model forgotten realms, greyhawk and golarion calendars including all the weird number of months and/or days, moon cycles (multiple moons) and festivals.
 
I presume that, regardless of how the main game calendar offsets to real world date/time (if it even does), all your material is flagged with creation/modification/view dates, right?
That is, can I create a list of material that (as examples):
1) I haven't modified in the last 6 months?
2) My player Astanel has viewed this week?
 
Hi when you implement the final calendar control the ability to enter the date via the keyboard, rather than a mouse driven control will be essential. I don't want to have to click back from the current date to 931BC to enter the death date of Abdul Alhazred for example.
 
glassboy said:
Hi when you implement the final calendar control the ability to enter the date via the keyboard, rather than a mouse driven control will be essential. I don't want to have to click back from the current date to 931BC to enter the death date of Abdul Alhazred for example.
Click to expand...

Our game calendar control allows quick navigation to various years. If you click on the "Month, Year", it will zoom out to show a year at a time. If you then click on the "Year", it will zoom out to show a decade. Keep clicking and it will eventually zoom out to show the epochs, which for Gregorian calendar is BCE and CE. Click in on one of those to zoom in and keep zooming to get to the appropriate item. It takes a few clicks, but it is certainly faster than clicking forward or backward by a month at a time.

As far as supporting keyboard input for the calendars, that becomes quite tricky and most likely won't be available for a while. Since the calendar mechanism is designed to support custom game calendars that can be in very different formats. Also, we support defining several different formats for showing dates and we would need to come up with ways of parsing the user entered data either by forcing it to follow the current display date format or make guesses for formatting by trying each display format and then possibly having problems because of two display formats having conflicting versions of dates.

Basically, the custom calendar mechanism is very flexible and supports a good portion of real and made-up calendar systems we are aware of. It is also very complex and we haven't had the chance to visit the editing portion to make it accessible to a good portion of users which is why it is disabled currently.

It is definitely on our radar to allow for keyboard input of dates. We just have a number of things to work out before allowing it.
 
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