PlaneShift
Gameplay => Wish list => Topic started by: Zan on April 03, 2005, 12:30:43 pm
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I think we should have some sort of ingame date. I know there are months and everything available in the character creation but it would be handy to be able to check the PS date somewhere.
That way people have a much easier time planning events, meetings, ... and it makes RPing easier I believe.
Players from all over the world and all sorts of timezones are gathered here and it isn\'t always easy to convert one timezone into another so giving the game its own \'clock\' would make certain things a lot easier.
Also I think I \'ve already said this before but a simple compass somewhere on the screen could help out when giving directions. All you really need is appoint the north, east, south and west .. so that when people ask for directions you have some point of reference.
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Well, we already have the time of day visible ingame in the details window.
The date is possibly something that will be added later. I see no reason why we shouldn\'t have it. :)
Compass is heavily discussed- please use the Search button to find previous threads talking about this.
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Originally posted by Moogie
The date is possibly something that will be added later. I see no reason why we shouldn\'t have it. :)
Cool, I look forward to it being implemented... then we can have birthday celebrations in Kada-El\'s as we all have in-game birthdays
Xirius
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Having time pass... would require adding onto the aging discussion... It could implement an interesting adition to moon phases, or such. After all, the moon even in life has an effect on all of us, and tides.
It was known for many years that patients during surgery would bleed heavier, or less depending on the moon phase.
That could be something, depending on birth dates and such, now you\'re getting into astrology.
or maybe, I\'m spinning too many new ideas.
I\'m getting so bored talking to myself... ;)
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Who says there is a moon? Living in a stalactite you know with several levels ;)
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You don\'t have to see it, to feel it\'s effects. ;)
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Aaaaand I'm reviving an old thread again. Looks like a habit of mine lately :)
Alright, basically we've been confronted with serveral RP ideas for some time now but the lack of an in game date is a bit of a nuisance. Let's give this idea a shot... since we have days, months and years available in Character Creation, why not have such a thing is game as well, in addition to the time of day already on display. Something like dd-mm-yyyy or even better dd-month_name-yyyy, like 11th of Yndoli, 1124. Of course, the date would have to be would have to be dinamic starting with Character Creation to match the "birth date" of the character, instead of all being born in the year of grace 750 as it stands now.
Ok, ok, I know it'll bring up the issue of age, but let's not discuss that already shall we? It's another feature, another idea, which has its roots in this one, but still another idea. We can roleplay these ages however we want when that particular feature gets implemented, in the mean time we can pretend we're just having a good time revelling in immortality, or even roleplay that based on this idea.
"BUT WHY?!" one might ask, right?
Well we can have a sense of passing time, a sense of or birth or of our coming to Yliakum through the magic portals, we can roleplay birthdays, and even write history. Basically this idea of evolution and history has always revolved around the idea of RPG's because time doesn't stand still or goes by unnoticed. Having historians record great events like wars, battles and extraordinary events right now is a little bit hard... because there is no actual date to place the action.
Please excuse the "revival" of this thread, but I hope it is for a good reason. Feel free to add comments and ideas, but keep the on-topic. Age is discussed somewhere else, in countless other threads.
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I was also thinking about this. Right now a lot of people seem to ignore the fact that days in PS are actually 1/6 of a real day. With an in-game date system it would bring real-world time out of it. It'll be very original (and this is the good kind of originality)... people could say they have work shifts that last a whole day, but it wouldn't be unusual in Yliakum because the days are shorter.
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erm... sorry for brings this thread.... again! :oops:
but I was thinking about a /date command or something to know current day and month... and searching brings this to me. I not mean the AM/PM clock at information window, I mean for example 25th Azhrod of 1.365, 11 o'clock PM
Its true that implementing date will add the issue of character ages... sometime in a moment will have character with 2.000 years old.
But that's a Talad decision. Yliakum is a unique world, and I think it's not crazy to think on long life characters. Besides what is a normal life in Yliakum? 80, 350, 2.000, a 1.000.000 years?
Have month count will perform the roleplay, making posible be a farmer choosing month for harvest, or even implementing a weather cycle that brings rain on rainy season, or snow on winter.
what do you think?
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Date will for sure be added at some point. Just need to figure out exact length of the months and how to keep that data in sync after a server crash.
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Date will for sure be added at some point. Just need to figure out exact length of the months and how to keep that data in sync after a server crash.
I guess that means that at some future date the character creation feature will get changed as already you can pick a month/day of the calendar for the date of your birth. It appeared to me as if it was already decided but I did not examine it extensively. There is nothing wrong, of course, with this changing but it will be a consideration that will need to be taken.
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well if you don't want to think about the character aging then just ignore the year part of the day :P. WE can just have a day of the week, time, date in month, and month.
One problem i see though with even a date system and heaven forbid a year system is that every time the server crashes the time is reset. You can observe that now, when the server goes down and comes back up the in-game time is 12:00 AM. I guess we won't worry about the year ticking over for our characters anytime soon ;)
If we want an in-game, in-client calendar system it will need some small mods to the server and client - the time will have to be logged somewhere so that it can be loaded next time the server down and up.
All up, i don't think it's going to happen anytime soon, though it will be nice :)
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@acraig: if the time in ps is running at roughly 1/6 of real time... then curious as to why one might not calculate it based on real date?
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I was thinking that today actually but couldn't be bothered to work it out. :P
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I don't know how does the date work from the computer side, but I think there could be problems with exact date, when it would come about day/month because Yliakum has 30days in every of the 10 months. Thus PS time cannot be entirely based on the real time.
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I would have thought it easy to just connect to a time server every crash and find out what the RW time and date was then run a rather simple calculation to convert it to 30 days and 10 months from a specific 'time zero' set on the server. then agan Im not a programmer making a PC game lol
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It would seem to be so, Idoru. That is why I asked... but there must be another consideration here, I think.
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Why not just have a file that gets incremented every minute or so that could be read on startup and the ingame time/date could be calculated by this nunber difference from 0. If for instance the server was running on linux you could add an instruction to append a character to the file (echo . > time.date, I think it would be. ) Then on startup you parse the file, count the characters and that would be your differential. You could also in the parsing routine create another file that indicates the overall difference at time of parsing and just keep track of the number of ticks between server reboots. Obviously this could be refined to match coding requirements but this night be one way to do it.
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How does one keep track of the number of ticks between server reboots without another server? I think, of course, that your description is somewhat like they are trying to implement it, Bilbous. Of course, since it probably counts on using the date and time in some manner to do all this tracking, a lot of cycles could be saved by calculating the PS date based on RL date. Which is why I was wondering why that wouldn't work...
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Well to me, time only passes while the game is running. Therefor while the server is down no ingame time passes. If you are talking about while the game is running most programming languages have means of determining duration be it counting clock cycles or whatever. All that I have proposed is that every specified duration, specific file is appended. It need not remain open between writes. Now this may have performance issues, that is a different story. It might be that everytime the PS clock changes hour (as currently displayed) might be an appropriate time to append said file.
I guess that does not directly address your question so I must say I don't know.
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Correct, Bilbous. But there is no way to tell how much time has passed when the server isn't running. And that appears to be the problem... Heck, I don't know exactly either...
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now I think about it the use of a time server is not necessary, I was just being stupid, obviously the time could just come from the server itself, just because its rebooting and the server software crashes doesnt mean that the servers clock would be out of sync with RW time :-[
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I don't really understand why you would want ingame time to pass when the server was not running. How would it be better in a RP context to lose x number of hours to account for the time the server is off-line than to have the time reset to 12:00? I would think you would want the clock to return to as close to the ingame time before the crash. You may end up living through and hour a second time but that would be preferable to losing an hour or more of ingame time, to me anyway.
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Wouldn't the simplest solution just be to store values for year, month, day, and time in the database? The same process that increments the time by one hour could update the information in the database. During the server boot, it could set those variables based on the information in the database. I agree with bilbous. If the server is down for a week, there is really no need for time to pass in-game. Our characters are basically 'frozen in time' at that point anyway.
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I don't really understand why you would want ingame time to pass when the server was not running. How would it be better in a RP context to lose x number of hours to account for the time the server is off-line than to have the time reset to 12:00? I would think you would want the clock to return to as close to the ingame time before the crash. You may end up living through and hour a second time but that would be preferable to losing an hour or more of ingame time, to me anyway.
Yes, right now whenever the server restarts it will reset the time ( and day ) back to the start of time. What I think might be a suitable solution is to place a periodic save time to database event. This would store the time/date in the database and can be loaded on startup. Thus you might repeat some periods of time but it will not be very much.
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Sounds like a better solution. Thank you. Right, no reason for time to be tracked if the server was down.
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true, I suppose it would be hard to RP 'ohhh, we were all knocked out.... that was one hell of a party' ;D
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I don't really understand why you would want ingame time to pass when the server was not running. How would it be better in a RP context to lose x number of hours to account for the time the server is off-line than to have the time reset to 12:00? I would think you would want the clock to return to as close to the ingame time before the crash. You may end up living through and hour a second time but that would be preferable to losing an hour or more of ingame time, to me anyway.
Yes, right now whenever the server restarts it will reset the time ( and day ) back to the start of time. What I think might be a suitable solution is to place a periodic save time to database event. This would store the time/date in the database and can be loaded on startup. Thus you might repeat some periods of time but it will not be very much.
Or you can try with the real world clock with proper conversion rate (as suggested), but in this case there would have to be some time zero from which on the time is counted all the time... what make me think that log file is much better, coz there will be less counting. I could have missed this somewhere in discussion, i didn't read every single post.
So yeah, with real world clock based date we would only loose the time the server is down, not repeat the same time as in case of logs.
hm
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Reguardless of how it was handled, an in-game calander would be extremely useful. You could plan specific events at a certain time or date. Like a certain person who only shows up during a specific time of the month or something.
You could also celebrate your birthday, since you would then know when it was. O--)