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How to create a custom calendar?

Good lordy. If you think that creating the cosmic Whovian extraplanar time traveling time bending time less calendar nonsense floating around in our minds is only going to require a few check boxes and a pull-down list.... The simple answer is that it's a GUI issue. But the real answer is that there's probably a lot that needs to get hooked to that GUI that isn't in place yet. :)

If we want Aztec and Incan and Chinese and Martian AND we want them to all synch up with one another, it's going to take some coding magic to tie things together. The more complex the UI, the more data that will be created and the more interesting the results.
 
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@AEIOU: If I remember correctly, Rob said way back when, that the underlying functionality was there to support a wide variety of calendars... it was the GUI that they felt was lacking and were not happy with. I believe they also mentioned needing someone that was good with designing the GUI.

Also, aren't there already web applications that will convert between any two, three or more real world calendar systems like you already mention? If so, then the math for that is at the least already established. The main argument I can see is the minimum time scale we can all agree on for a calendar system. If you want to be arbitrary about that, then make that scale either the minute, hour, or day. If you don't want to be arbitrary then use something like the vibrations of a cesium atom, or whatever atom is used for the current atomic clocks. Once the standard is set and clearly stated then for Real World calendars, the conversion should be straight forward. For fictional calendar systems, the linking would require the GM to establish an initial link date and then the framework for the different calendar systems.

I agree it's probably not simple. But my recollection is that this wasn't the problem but it was specifically the GUI... those check boxes, spinning dials, radio buttons and what have you.
 
On another note... how many GM's are going to create Calendars where the year is something odd, or specific, like 287 days 13 hours 27 minutes 2 seconds and 37 nanoseconds?

If your going to create a length of year like that to base your gaming world calendar(s) on, then I think you may be overthinking RPG details a little too much... for the calendar anyway.
 
@Vinking2054
I contemplate doing that - not down to the second, but close.
Looking at the real world we see some really weird things (such as the Gregorian calendar - that one must have involved at least three illegal substances).

Whether it is "just the GUI" or "The GUI and something else" is not that important. Apparently it is not easy to solve in a satisfactory manner, otherwise I am pretty sure they would have done so - if for no other reason than to get the vocal "Calendars now!" pressure group off their backs.

Apart from all that: Yes, we really want the calendars! And we want them now! - But we also want them working right - and so we wait.
 
My question is more about miscommunication. In my opinion we were led to believe that it was a GUI problem and not a capability or structure problem. If it is only a GUI problem and the code is functional but disabled inside the code base... then why not let us decide if we want to work with an inferior GUI or not? I'm sure there are a small minority of users that might brave the lacking GUI while others would scrap it after a while.

Real Life calendars based on a planets orbit, rotation and lunar orbit can't be helped. But in my opinion, anyone who designs a calendar and game system like that deserves the headache he gets. I can understand an occasional leap day or reverse leap day... but I wouldn't want to deal with leap minutes or leap seconds or whatever in my RPG worlds. I will basically force my worlds into nice clean orbits that for the most part have a static number of days in the year thereby foregoing any problems created by the principles of real life orbits around a star.
 
@Viking2054

The problem might be the real Earth calendar: it does not have a nice clean orbit.

I have at least two calendars:
1) a very simple 360 days calendar plus whatever leap days to get to the next spring equinox (priests check it on the spot every year, though);
2) a simple moon calendar (12 new moons = year) that is part of a a big year (the next new moon at the spring equinox);

I'm starting to use the Julian days in order to keep Gregorian and Julian calendars in tandem, but I have to use proleptic ones as my calendar starts about 10,000 BCE.

In short, I hope RW makes use of Julian days or at least the Julian/Gregorian Calendars so I can keep track of real (or as close as possible) astronomical events of importance (I have Starry Night software to find and keep track of them.) I can't possible expect it to be able to factor in equinox dates... can I?
 
Viking2054 said:
Real Life calendars based on a planets orbit, rotation and lunar orbit can't be helped. But in my opinion, anyone who designs a calendar and game system like that deserves the headache he gets. I can understand an occasional leap day or reverse leap day... but I wouldn't want to deal with leap minutes or leap seconds or whatever in my RPG worlds. I will basically force my worlds into nice clean orbits that for the most part have a static number of days in the year thereby foregoing any problems created by the principles of real life orbits around a star.
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Even avoiding leap seconds and the like, what about festivals that fall outside months, a common feature of some calendars?

I would think that the calendar system should be able to handle Gregorian, Julian, several different lunar systems (both Asian and ME), including seamless date conversions between the systems and the major fantasy calendars. The problem is I know of no publicly available widget that can handle even the real world parts of that. Having done some work in this field back in college I can point out just one of the bizarre issues that makes this so hard, dates that didn't happen in different parts of the world. For instance in the UK and most British dominions except Scotland the dates 3 September 1752 through 13 September 1752 never happened. The calendar was advanced to match the rest of Europe which had switched to the Gregorian calendar much earlier.
 
Viking2054 said:
My question is more about miscommunication. In my opinion we were led to believe that it was a GUI problem and not a capability or structure problem.
Click to expand...

I just want to clarify here that my statement was just my own view on the matter, which may not be entirely accurate. I wrote 0% of the calendar codebase, and designed 0% of it's UI. Personally, I don't know the functionality very well at all, as I've been focused on other things.

In general, I am conservative in my estimations. I'm not generally willing to make statements like "It's just a GUI problem" until I actually review all the functionality in detail and can say so with certainty. The fact remains that there is a chance that we discover that something fundamental or structural needs to change. If that happens, it will be far easier and less time consuming to revise if there's minimal impact on live user data.
 
Dates are in general held within databases in some sort of floating decimal format. That number is the difference from a base date. I believe in Oracle it's some date in 1970. Once you map what that base date value is, then it's a matter of converting it to what that means in whatever calendar for the display. And the GUI has to make sure that what you create follows logical rule and doesn't crash the application.

Sadly we just can't do that whole Doctor Who time travel thing (or perhaps Hermione's time turner) to give them extra hours to implement a solution. :)
 
Ladyofdragons said:
Dates are in general held within databases in some sort of floating decimal format. That number is the difference from a base date. I believe in Oracle it's some date in 1970. Once you map what that base date value is, then it's a matter of converting it to what that means in whatever calendar for the display. And the GUI has to make sure that what you create follows logical rule and doesn't crash the application.
Click to expand...
It's much more complicated than that. You can certainly put down some point in time as the starting point for calculations That's reasonably easy.

The problem comes in defining calendars that are not standard day/week/month/year type and handling conversion between calendars that do not stay in sync. Just here on Earth we have the Gregorian calendar we are all familiar with and many less familiar calendars, usually lunar based, which do not sync with it. That is why Easter and Passover are not at the same time every year, and why they are not together every year, and why Ramadan moves around year to year. Add in the really weird calendars like the Mayans and you add in an entire additional level of complication.

A lot of RW is third party components customized to do the job. That makes sense for a small company doing this sort of project. Custom calendars is a domain that literally has to be done from scratch. I'm not saying it can't be done but that no one should expect it quickly.
 
If I were a highly ambitious GM, like I used to be when it came to world design anyway, I wouldn't want my fictional worlds calendar's linked to a 'Real Earth' calendar system.

Now I would like to be able to attach a note that says when we played and it covered this part of the fictional worlds calendar. But I don't want it to link up day for day. I'd even like to be able to attach journal entries to calendar dates for the fictional calendar.

Although I think the week/month system could be scrapped and changed for something else say seasons, migration patterns or whatever. I don't see the day or year really being changed since they are based on rotation of the planet and the travel of the planet around its star.

I suppose if you want to throw in realistic time, we would have to agree on a minimum time scale. In which case you might define that based on the combat round time for the game system your using... 3 seconds, 5 seconds, 6 seconds, 1 minute or whatever. I suppose with that you could have blow by blow logs of combat in your journal or calendar. But personally I'd probably never use anything less then the 'day' time period inside Realm Works, at least for the calendar system.

Some things, I'd just make a note on how the world works. Say the day is 30 hours instead of 24 hours in my fantasy world. I'd put that in my world information and just share it with the players. I wouldn't actually build that into the calendar.

Anyway, I guess I don't see calendars in Realm Works being used like appointment calendars where you have a line for every 15 minutes of the normal business day.

I can see adding things like phases of the moon(s), season changes, equinox(s), solstice(s) or other interesting events that happen on a regular basis.

Anyway, I'd like to see some basics for Calendars implemented sooner rather then later. Being able to define and rename the day/week/month/year scales for a purely fantasy world should be easy. I can wait for the really nice things to be added down the road like phases of the moon, summer solstice, spring equinox, etc. I can wait even longer for things that are conditional like say Easter or Passover. And if I happen to design multiple calendar's for the same world then I should be able to set a specific link as to when all the different calendars link up. But I rarely do multiple calendars for a fictional world any more.
 
for a fantasy setting what Vicking says is true enough, but it get really complicated in a scifi setting where you have to be able to sync different planets that do have different day/year lengths. Check out the appendices of On Basilisk Station the author go to great length to describe the issues.
 
Or planar travel where time may be inconsistent. Or dreams. Or alternate dimensions.

Or heck, just simply our own Earth. The length of a day varies based on gravitational pull, ocean levels, magnetic poles, etc. The variation for us is miniscule but over centuries or epochs it's quite significant.

Here's a fun article: http://phys.org/news/2016-06-earth-ancient-magnetic-field.html
 
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How many gaming groups play the same characters for centuries, millennium, or epochs? In dreams, does anyone really worry about time or calendars?

As far as space travel goes... if you can devise each planet's year in length of days, then you should be able to link as many different solar system calendars as you wish. You just need to decide on a link and maybe the controlling calendar. Again, I'm skipping things like leap days, leap minutes. But if you have a master calendar that all others are linked to, as far as calculations go then it should simply be a matter of counting days from the link.

Again, why not the basics sometime relatively soon but add the more complex stuff as time goes on. Heck, what I want wouldn't be that complicated and I could probably run a space opera game with a basic calendar system that only dealt with days and years.

In my opinion, if your trying to time how long it takes a planet to rotate around its sun/star down to the nanosecond and account for gravitational or magnetic changes in the star and planets of the system then you deserve the days and days of headaches your going to have from trying to manage such a beast.

This is mostly for an RPG and not Real Life after all. Even earth based games may follow a real world calendar, but are actually only arbitrarily connected to such a device.
 
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Generally people's (GMs') use of calendars or indeed need for one varies widely.

I have played in campaigns where no dates where ever mentioned and it worked - after a fashion.

I have played in campaigns where the dates where known and adhered to and it worked.

For myself as a GM my campaign spans epochs and millennia, the characters themselves might not live that long, but the history and plot does. All good stories have extensive background stories and information (whether obvious for the reader or not) and besides, it enables me to run several campaigns in the same world, set at different times.

So what I am saying is, why limit ourselves with making a tool that only gets us so far? Do you only need an approximation of day and time, do that. If you need more detail, do that - the tools will accommodate you (I assume).

Technically wise, I believe it will be very difficult to produce a rudimentary system and then later expand on that to make a more complex system. I would assume it would have to be made all in one go so as not to risk having to throw all the calendars made with the rudimentary system out when the complex one arrives.
 
If we can agree on a minimum time scale, I don't see why it would have to be that hard.

For the sake of argument, lets say we agree that the minimum time scale is 1 second. I design my calendar... Say it's a 328 day year, no months in the calendar just 4 seasons Summer and Winter are both 100 days long while Spring and Fall are only 64 days. Further lets say a day on this planet is 23 hours. Let's also say the weeks are 8 days long for 41 weeks in the year. Once you set your starting point for the calendar, each day would advance 82,800 seconds.

your base structure would be defined by a multiple of 1 second. So a day is 82,800 seconds long. If you need to break your fictional calendar into smaller units sometime in the future then you insert cells based on a lesser number of seconds. So if you need to have the calendar split into 1 hour increments you would add cells that advanced the calendar by 3,600 seconds (unless you redefine an hour as something other then 60 minutes each of 60 seconds). But still the day would only change when a multiple of 82,800 was reached.

I personally don't ever see the need for anyone to use a time scale less then one second in a calendar. I can see an argument outside the calendar for cyberpunk style games where hacking may be involved, or maybe superhero games for characters with super-speed... but I wouldn't apply that to a calendar system. If you want to rename your second to something else, that's fine but that would just be a name change and not a change in scale of time.

After all that it is down to defining the calendar structure and setting a starting date for a so called zero hour. Other calendar systems would have to link to the initial (starter) calendar for the system... But I think that is more of a pointer between the two calendars.

One last thought, just for ease we may need to agree upon the so called zero day or start of the entire calendar system. Personally I'd set it as the first day of spring (say 12:00:01 am of that day), of whatever year the creator of the calendar wants to call it. The calendar can then work forwards or backwards from that zero point.
 
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