Calendar

[weogarth]

Welcome HippyCraig! MnBlockHead nailed it, unfortunately for you. In a nutshell, we were told in the Kickstarter era that the 'stuff' is there for the calendars but the interface (and probably other things) aren't to the point where they need to be.

Chemlak, myself and others have been....enthusiastic....proponents of this feature and we're all hoping that after the survey results are collated, it rises to the top of the list.

I am not sure if the survey is still open, HippyCraig, but look for the survey topic links and see if you can still take it and if so, let your voice be heard.

 

[HippyCraig]

I did fill out a survey, and I did rate that item as high. Thanks for your input, this is going to make running my games so much easier.

 

[Chemlak]

Just to inject a little realism here: I was chatting to DavidP before Christmas (or was it between Christmas and New Year? I forget) about calendars, and (if a little reading between the lines is permitted) it seems to me that the more we ask for with respect to calendars, the longer and harder the process will be for the developers to meet our requests.

Speaking for myself, I just want them, however complex and gruesome the process to input them is. I don't need a pretty front end, but I would certainly like one.

The more bells and whistles we want, the longer calendars are going to take. Please be mindful of this when asking for more features.

I now return you to your regularly scheduled calendar enthusiasm.

 

[weogarth]

Just to inject a little realism here: I was chatting to DavidP before Christmas (or was it between Christmas and New Year? I forget) about calendars, and (if a little reading between the lines is permitted) it seems to me that the more we ask for with respect to calendars, the longer and harder the process will be for the developers to meet our requests.

Speaking for myself, I just want them, however complex and gruesome the process to input them is. I don't need a pretty front end, but I would certainly like one.

The more bells and whistles we want, the longer calendars are going to take. Please be mindful of this when asking for more features.

I now return you to your regularly scheduled calendar enthusiasm.

I think that is true for every feature when you get right down to it.

 

[Farling]

The more bells and whistles we want, the longer calendars are going to take. Please be mindful of this when asking for more features.

So iterative design:

1 - a single calendar

2 - linking calendar together

3 - stupid calendars where the number of hours per day, or days per year changes in an almost random fashion ;-)

 

[Chemlak]

weogarth, Farling:

Well, yes, I'm just aware that all the cool stuff we want (and some awesome things in the survey) could be construed as "give us everything, now!", when actually we want things incrementally.

For example, if all it takes to switch calendars on are enough of us being willing to write up the format of the most popular ones in, say, XML, and share the code here, then by golly, I want that! And I'll take that over a 9 month delay while we wait for a pretty UI, any day.

 

[Dark Lord Galen]

Speaking for myself, I just want them, however complex and gruesome the process to input them is. I don't need a pretty front end, but I would certainly like one.

&

weogarth, Farling:

Well, yes, I'm just aware that all the cool stuff we want (and some awesome things in the survey) could be construed as "give us everything, now!", when actually we want things incrementally.

We do??? lol
Seriously, I'm pretty sure if there were a "poll of the poll" (heheh) that all would vote now over increments, but I think we are all (well maybe not all, most?) rational enough to realize that LWD only has a finite amount of labor resourcing at its disposal (ie programmers)

As you point out, All, no matter their banner (as long as CALENDARS are waving at the top), would prefer getting something in increments than to wait till the end for all things to be fulfilled.

DLG
Paladin Champion to Calendar Banner

 

[MNBlockHead]

Hear, hear!

weogarth, Farling:

...if all it takes to switch calendars on are enough of us being willing to write up the format of the most popular ones in, say, XML, and share the code here, then by golly, I want that! And I'll take that over a 9 month delay while we wait for a pretty UI, any day.

 

[Zaphod Beebledoc]

I've just re-read the Bromeliad trilogy by Terry Pratchett, where the Nomes are only 4 inches high and live for 10 years, but still experience the same life-span as humans. Consequently, each day for them is 10 times as long.

One of my home-brews will have PC's that are an inch high, and live for about 2 1/2 years. Their day is 40 times as long as ours.

I know that the calendar needs a unit analogous to a second for it to mesh properly, but can it cope with smaller units?

 

[weogarth]

I'm going to guess that incrementally isn't going to work but I've been wrong before. I'm basing this on the fact that by and large, they are mostly done.

 

[rob]

The smallest increment utilized by the calendar mechanism is one second. If you want to have a unit of measure smaller than that, it's not something that we'll be able to model. Honestly, I'm not sure what tool out there would let you do that, so you might find yourself needing to create something entirely custom to do what you're asking.

That being said, the calendar mechanism is pretty darn generalized and abstracted. One thing you COULD do is standardize the calendar around the PCs' world view. So you simply change the definition of what "one second" actually is. One second is the smallest unit of measure within the calendar mechanism, but that does NOT mean it has to be the same length as "one second" in the real world. It's just a term that applies to a concept.

Once you define "one second" based on the world the PCs operate within, then everything scales up based on that definition. You could define a real world calendar that simply scales all the values based on whatever translation you decide on for your world. The only limitation will be that "a second" is "a second" is "a second", which means that definition is fixed. "One second" in the real world calendar will actually equate to "N seconds" (or minutes or hours) within the PCs' world calendar.

So you'll have to be careful with your terminology to keep everything anchored to the PCs' world. However, I'm guessing that's a problem you'll face with the world you've proposed, regardless of how you handle things.

 

[Vargr]

This sounds very interesting - I have to restrain myself in order to not ask a barrage of questions regarding the calendars.

Now, go get the content market and web-based edition out of the way

 

[Zaphod Beebledoc]

Does "one second" have to be called a second?

 

[Chemlak]

Does "one second" have to be called a second?

This is one of those fundamental questions that I'm not entirely sure of the answer to. I'm pretty sure that you can have (say), 12 seconds to the flarb, 9 flarbs to the whatzoo, 6 whatzoos to the pilonk, and so forth until you have 73 quimps to the gazoon, and as long as all of your different calendars have "seconds" (pretty sure they're forced to), RW can convert dates merrily from one to another, but I don't know if you can call that basic time unit anything other than a "second". I certainly hope so (dreams of decimal time with a base unit equal to 0.83 seconds...), but we'd need Rob or David, or one of the other developers, to confirm.

Of course, the other side of the coin is the human element: we understand seconds, minutes, and hours, and making up different time units for use in your world could be a distraction.

 

[Vargr]

Well, now that the string on the question purse has been opened...

How many seconds (or "Base units") would the calendar system be able to handle? From the very first base unit in the beginning of time till the end of the universe?

3.1536 * 10^11 base units?

(That is 10.000 years, by the way)

And I agree with Chemlak - my experiemce is, that the calendar division and terms should be at least somewhat familiar to the players in order to make them use it and understand time.

 

[weogarth]

And I agree with Chemlak - my experiemce is, that the calendar division and terms should be at least somewhat familiar to the players in order to make them use it and understand time.

I agree. I regret changing the names of the months. I copied the format of the Faerun calendar but used my own month names and it's hard to remember what each are so nobody considers seasons at all when they see the month.

 

[rob]

The base unit of time is a "second". But it's a unit, so it doesn't have to be a "second" in the real world. However, the name is fixed, because there has to be something to conceptually anchor everything. As @weogarth pointed out, the more fanciful the calendar, the less anyone (especially the players but also the GM) is actually able to track anything based on that calendar.

We could potentially let you rename a "second", but I honestly don't see the benefits of doing so. And I'm NOT going to engage in a discussion about that subject right now - I have more urgent things to deal with. Once calendars percolate up the list, I'm sure one of the standard bearers for calendars will bring this up again.

The total span of time that the calendar mechanism can support varies, as you can carve up time into segments of your own choosing. The absolute limit of the entire time continuum is roughly 10^28 seconds. However, once you start carving things up into ages, epochs, years, seasons, months, days, hours, and minutes, you can lose a little of that. Regardless, you should have plenty of time span to comfortably model billions of years.

Oh, and the really nifty thing (IMHO) about the calendar design is that you can actually CHANGE THE CALENDAR without breaking all of the dates you've defined. So you can suddenly decide that you want to want to make the month of Granz a leap month after entering lots of dates based on the calendar. Or insert a new holiday season every 10th year after entering lots of dates. All of those dates will REMAIN VALID after you make the change. Any other calendar system I've ever seen would cause all existing dates to MOVE (read: break) after changing the underlying calendar. So the calendar mechanism lets you adapt it to the story you want to tell in interesting ways as your game evolves.

Alright, that's enough on calendars. I have lots to get back to here. But that should give all the calendar a sense of why calendars are the complex beast that we keep saying they are.

 

[weogarth]

Thanks Rob. Soooo....how are those more important things going? Well I hope?

 

[MNBlockHead]

Ugh...soooo painful to read about the incredible-sounding calendar features that are in the works and know it will be months before there will be a chance to use them.

 

[Chemlak]

Thanks for your time, Rob. Every tidbit of info about calendars makes me want them even more, but there are other priorities for you wonderful folks developing RW, so I'm not going to press for anything.

I'm sure that once calendars get up a bit more in the "now let's get this bit done" list we'll be more than happy to engage you in discussions about the features and any improvements we can think of (not that I expect us to think of all that many - it sounds like you have a darn good set of tools to be going with).