Add a calendar date to status display

[alexpkeaton]

 

One thing I wish we had was a calendar date. It would help with RPing faxes and other documents. Also, if the date were coded to increase by one day each round, that would also provide a very simple way of documenting a precise game moment to admins in an after-the-fact communication, e.g. "on 2/14/2560 at 12:35, (IC NAME) did this to me..."

 

Additionally, certain dates could be referred to here in the forums or other places if certain events occur that might be considered to be made canon for a certain species lore, or if there were some other purpose to discussing a specific round.

 

Perhaps also, coders could put in special easter egg items to spawn on specific days like Valentine's Day, Christmas, etc.

 

[NTSAM]

Sure!

[Jamania]

I'd like this. I forget a lot about the date, and it seems it'd be important, especially for things like NTRep, Magistrate and other roles like that.

[Tauka Usanake]

Would each round count as a day though? I mean sure each shift starts at noon or so-ish but that's a lot of time that's going to go through. What happens if we get a holiday with in-game time?

[Twinmold]

 

As it currently stands, you can find out the 'current date' by printing out your balance statement in ATMs (and then put your ID in your hand and hit logout so no one can take your money). However, I believe what you are getting at is a progressive day system, instead of random days, in which there is sequential order, which would prove useful for star dates, making progressive stories for characters with 'this happened this day' for role-playing purposes, and for documents to be able to be more official with adding the shift's date without having to look further into the system to figure out what the shift's date is.

 

The biggest issue with this, however, is the continuity-error that would arise out of, say, the station getting destroyed. A single day (22 hours after the end of the shift, presuming they are still following Earth-standard time, while circling the sun of the Epsilon Eridani system) to rebuild the space station 'perfectly' would effectively be poor RP, and worse if you try saying there are more than one station at any given time that could be moved up in such a short time span.

 

Finding a perfect 'time' would also prove difficult considering, or would throw us further into the future than necessary and make effectively tracking station time to real time difficult for your suggested use for admins, unless a single 'day' actually has multiple shifts, and for easy of mind for the crew to make it feel somewhat normal to them in the outer reaches of human-explored space, all shifts start at 'about' noon. In this case, it would merely be easier to put today's date + 544 years, with the shift number for the day, for tracking purposes.

 

Example welcoming message from the game to the player:

Welcome to the NSS Cyberiad. Today's date is January 31, 2560. This is shift 11 of the day on the Cyberiad.

 

I put 11, because if no shifts were cut short, it would effectively be the shift starting at 11:10 PM (23:10)[Presuming first shift countdown started at 00:00/12:00 AM], and effectively be the last shift of the day, less we also change 'station time' to reflect the current time of the host, so there is 'continuity', though self-destruct/full-destruction of the station would still leave a poor RP set, which is part of why it is as it is right now and wasn't changed (other than difficulty in changing it, I'm guessing). Considering the 3 minutes in lobby, the 1 minute for end-round, the 1 minute for restart, the 1 minute of voting for transfer, the 10 minutes for non-emergency shuttles to arrive, 3 minutes to board, and 2 minutes to get to Central Command/NAS Trurl, we come up to about 21 minutes between end of shift to start of next shift. If we include this, each shift is normally 2 hours and 16 minutes with a 5 minute 'grace' period, or for easy of calculation, 2 hours and 21 minutes, a total of 141 minutes a round. There is 1440 minutes an day, so we end up with 10 full shifts a day with a possible 11th starting before the switch in days, which is only a 50 minute grace period for a potential 11th shift in a day, not including patches and other possible delays.

 

This, of course, would only work if Byond is even capable of pulling the 'current' date off the computer, and allowing you to select the year, if not just the month/day and set the year to itself (which would be easy to fix once a year if needed). Else, we'd have to effectively monitor the time itself and update it accordingly, which is not going to happen.

 

 

Shift 1 = 00:00; Shift 2 = 02:21; Shift 3 = 04:42; Shift 4 = 07:03; Shift 5 = 09:24; Shift 6 = 11:45; Shift 7 = 14:06; Shift 8 = 16:27; Shift 9 = 18:48; Shift 10= 21:09; Shift 11= 23:10; Shift 12 (becomes Shift 1) = 01:31

 

 

[fludd12]

You could have day progression tied to last round's crew score. If it's a really poor crew score, increase by a week, or even a month. This'd keep RP, as well as give players a day/time to talk about, and still retain the logging ability.

[Professor Cupcake]

How about we just stick with the whole "current date plus offset"(544 years) thing for simplicity? And to hell with continuity because that's a bottomless pit of problems.

[Plotron]

 

And to hell with continuity because that's a bottomless pit of problems.

Yeah, it's not like we can't roleplay away OOC problems.

 

[Fox McCloud]

The year offset is exactly 540 years; the date is in your notes.

[Professor Cupcake]

 

The year offset is exactly 540 years; the date is in your notes.

So the servet year is currently 2556, not 2560?

 

[Spacemanspark]

 

...Pretty sure it's agreed that the server year is 2560, as last year was 2559.

There was even a thread about that, but I'm too lazy to hunt for it at the moment.

 

[Twinmold]

 

Wiki even says 2560 right now (which is where I pulled the numbers).

http://nanotrasen.se/wiki/index.php/Backstory