How to create a custom calendar?

[Vargr]

I agree - in principle it is simple and I would approach it in much the same manner you describe.

I believe the GUI is the real headache here. Especially if you want to allow leap years and weird stuff. Maybe even add the ability to state that the fourth Sunday before Equinox is a sacred day or whatever.

Anyway; I am looking forward to the calendar system and hope it arrives soon.

 

[Ladyofdragons]

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.

Which doesn't invalidate what I wrote at all. Those alternate calendars have rules. The GUI is what lets you enter the rules and checks them for consistency, that's the hard part. But it's still a common thing to convert days between those calendars programmatically.

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.

That's along the lines of my thought process. It doesn't really matter what each calendar's time scales are set to or how deep/wide you go in defining them, if there's a multiuniversal constant that can be used to calculate difference to a base setpoint. If your game world timescales are so complex that you can't explain what's happening in terms of seconds, you probably need an astrophysicist, not a GM program.

 

[ruhar]

Hello Guys,

Maybe this is an stupid question but here it goes...

Aaaaa don't do it...

How do I create a custom calendar? I know that RW supports that but I cannot find it anywhere...

Oh no, he opened the can.

Calendars were not the top priority PER THE USERS (we were polled).

It has been a bone of contention since the Kickstarter.

Before the next poll I suggest we make a list of those who didn't vote with us and form a posse.

The problem with letting people use the current calendar system is that they'll be creating a lot of data. We don't yet know how we might need to change the underlying systems and data structures ...

Thanks Joe. I think your explanation of why we can't play with what is done so far helps put it more into perspective. I still want the calendar (NOW), but I don't want to break what we have now in the process. To quote Vargr...

Yes, we really want the calendars! And we want them now! - But we also want them working right - and so we wait.

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.

I never realized calendars was just as crazy in real life as it is mentioning it here.