Mystic Lemur
Well-known member
Make sure the custom calendar supports leap year settings. My Forgotten Realms campaigns have to have their leap years for Shieldmeet. 
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- The Lone Wolf Development Team
Calendar
- Thread starter Chemlak
- Start date
MaxSupernova
Well-known member
+1 for this, I want to date my Star Wars campaign in BBY and ABY...
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.
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
Well-known member
+1 to further calendar integration
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
Well-known member
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.
Zaphod Beebledoc
Well-known member
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
Well-known member
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.
I just want to plaaaaaay with it. Pleeeeeeease.
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.
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.
Except when the year is on a century boundary
Except when the year is on a century boundary
Unless the century is evenly divisible by 400.
There would need to be some standard measure that would be consistent between the calendars in order for everything to work well together.
Do we use the Day? Well, what defines a day? Most people would say "24 hours", and most people would agree that they are correct. And, loosely speaking, I suppose they would be.
Another, more accurate definition is the time it takes for a planet to rotate on its axis*. This means that on another planet - which spins faster or slower - a day will be longer or shorter.
The same thing goes for years. The time it takes for a planet to complete an orbit of the sun. This can be very different for two different planets.
Mars, for instance, spins just a few percent slower than Earth, so their day is actually around 40 minutes longer than ours. A day on Venus takes over 100 Earth days to complete, and a year on Venus consists of 2 Venus days. And it's retrograde, so the sun rises in the West and sets in the East. Wierd stuff.
So, a day, and a year are virtually meaningless to compare to each other without some other time unit. Hours and minutes are simply groupings of seconds to make it easier for us humans. Could you imagine asking for the time and getting a response of "About fourty-five thousand" instead of "half past noon"?
So the second seems to be the only constant that could possibly link all the various calendars together.
I won't ask what happens when another civilization happened to choose a time period that doesn't happen to be around 9 billion vibrations of a cesium atom...
* - I'm not even getting into Sidereal vs Stellar days. But this brings up another point, what about a planet like Uranus? Imagine living at one of the poles. The sun would be high in the sky - unmoving. Slowly, over the next 21 Earth years, the sun traces an ever-widening circle, eventually circling the horizon. Then it is gone below the horizon for 42 Earth years, eventually returning to trace the horizon again, in an ever-decreasing circle for the next 21 years, where it is again stationary, high in the sky.
Do we use the Day? Well, what defines a day? Most people would say "24 hours", and most people would agree that they are correct. And, loosely speaking, I suppose they would be.
Another, more accurate definition is the time it takes for a planet to rotate on its axis*. This means that on another planet - which spins faster or slower - a day will be longer or shorter.
The same thing goes for years. The time it takes for a planet to complete an orbit of the sun. This can be very different for two different planets.
Mars, for instance, spins just a few percent slower than Earth, so their day is actually around 40 minutes longer than ours. A day on Venus takes over 100 Earth days to complete, and a year on Venus consists of 2 Venus days. And it's retrograde, so the sun rises in the West and sets in the East. Wierd stuff.
So, a day, and a year are virtually meaningless to compare to each other without some other time unit. Hours and minutes are simply groupings of seconds to make it easier for us humans. Could you imagine asking for the time and getting a response of "About fourty-five thousand" instead of "half past noon"?
So the second seems to be the only constant that could possibly link all the various calendars together.
I won't ask what happens when another civilization happened to choose a time period that doesn't happen to be around 9 billion vibrations of a cesium atom...
* - I'm not even getting into Sidereal vs Stellar days. But this brings up another point, what about a planet like Uranus? Imagine living at one of the poles. The sun would be high in the sky - unmoving. Slowly, over the next 21 Earth years, the sun traces an ever-widening circle, eventually circling the horizon. Then it is gone below the horizon for 42 Earth years, eventually returning to trace the horizon again, in an ever-decreasing circle for the next 21 years, where it is again stationary, high in the sky.
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Yes. I do too.
Of course, as far as I know, the Golarion calendar is just an overlay to the Gregorian calendar, just with different names for months and days, and 2700 added to the year. (4707ar = 2007)
At least, that's the way I run it - that way I have complete histories of weather, sunrise, sunset, celestial events, etc. to draw upon.
Mystic Lemur
Well-known member
If we start inputting dates now, will we be able to convert them automagically when the calendar becomes fully functional, or would we need to go in and change every entry individually?
Except when the year is on a century boundary
Unless the century is evenly divisible by 400.
And yes, the calendar mechanism we have in place handles that cleanly, too. It handles a heck of a lot more insanity, but there are a few really wonky things we didn't think of that need to be added. That's not hard at this point.
The REAL work is the interface. The current interface is just crude and clunky. It needs to be completely reworked, and that will take a healthy amount of time. That's why the calendar mechanism is currently withheld from the released version. We need to make the interface USABLE.
Sadly, you'll need to manually fix all the dates, so please don't try that approach. Unless you REALLY want to do it all twice.
Sadly, you'll need to manually fix all the dates, so please don't try that approach. Unless you REALLY want to do it all twice.
This got me thinking, Rob.
As I understand it, a single realm can have numerous calendars running simultaneously (to allow for things like nice simple lunar cycles as well as actual dates), and as long as they use the same "second" (got to be a better term... minimum time integer (MTI) satisfies the scientist in me), you can find out what phase of the moon it was on the 14th day of Flargh in the year -84, as long as you've specified a "reference date" to both calendars so that RW knows how they lined up at one point in time, so that it can extrapolate forwards and backwards from the reference date.
What I'm hoping (and tell me if this is a pipe dream) is that I can set a reference date between the Gregorian calendar and the Calendar of Harptos, so that I know that 1/1/2000 (Gregorian) matches up to 1 Hammer 1359 (Harptos), and ask RW to display both in date snippets. (This is actually relevant to my home game, since there has been some inter-world travel between Earth and Faerun, and having both dates available would be rather useful for many things.)
What I actually don't need is the ability to convert from one calendar to the other, but to display existing dates on the Gregorian calendar as their equivalent dates in the Calendar of Harptos.
Thanks, as always, for your input.
Yes, the calendar mechanism supports this through a tooltip when you hover over a date and there are additional mapped calendars, it shows you the date in those other calendars. When we fully rework the calendar mechanism, we may change some details of this, but you would still have the ability to see equivalent dates from other calendars in some fashion.