Real Year Calendar?

[ShadowDragon8685]

A cursory search didn’t find anything concrete on this, just a tangenital one relating to respawning.

Why not have a real year calendar mode for Cataclysm? Everyone I know looked at “days per season” and immediately cranked it up to 92.

I can’t imagine it would be trivial or simple to code, but I think a real-life calendar mode, with a calendar beginning 1 January and rolling over again on 31 December, would be nice. It would also expose new extension possibilities; you could have holidays with morale effects (get pumped up around nationally-relevant holidays, get sad around Christmas, etc.)

[EpsilonShadow]

I like this idea. I always set season to 90 days. Also I suggest to add calendar items to be able to track current day. Same way as with time. Mobile phone, literal calendar (at least for a year), some watches, or designate blank sheet of paper as a calendar to track days.

[ShadowDragon8685]

Most electronic gadgets would suffice in modern times, let alone postmodern times. Anything that can tell time probably has a calendar function on it, except maybe the antique mechanical watches and clocks.

Frankly, anything with a radio should be able to do so; I doubt the Cataclysm took the Global Positioning System and other automated radio time-beacons down.

[Kryxx]

Oh you want the exact date? doesn’t really matter when civilization is gone. It would also be rough with the default 15 days.

Each season varies some anyways, it’s not like it suddenly snows the moment winter hits Dec 21st. You’d have snow way before that most years and cold.

[kevin.granade]

How is this going to work when the game calendar doesn’t match the real-world calendar?

[dissociativity]

I think what would make more sense is the world starting at the beginning of the cataclysm lore-wise, but there’s really no point in this unless you’d have something to show the impact on the world over time other than purely player and monster based wear.

Like what does a year have to show for it when the player can simply travel to an infinite new random area for new, fresh resources?

[EpsilonShadow]

It’s just an interesting option to add with year affecting freshness of everything there is to find. Plus it could make farming better.
In the Walking Dead comic by the third year there was no food to find. Scavenged by others or spoiled. Only way to get food by that time was farming.

[ShadowDragon8685]

I’m not sure what you mean - I was talking about making the game match the real-life calendar, beginning as of the game’s alleged start year. As an optional mode; instead of days-per-season with years which are oddly only two months long, you get a game-year passing in the course of 365.25 days. Handling leap years is fairly simple, too, for extra grognardianness:

if (year is not divisible) by 4) then (it is a common year)
else if (year is not divisible by 100) then (it is a leap year)
else if (year is not divisible by 400) then (it is a common year)
else (it is a leap year)

(And I would by duly impressed if someone played long enough to see the 2400 Leap Year. But modifying the start date seems more likely to result in seeing a leap century.)

The game already handles weather variations - snow in early Spring and late Autumn, etc - so whilst I’m not sure how it works internally, I think it should be very possible to weight the weathers towards the height of the calculated calendar seasons, so that it gets to be wintry in wintertime and hot in summer, etc.

[Pakislav]

I’m all for a real-life calendar. Don’t see any importance to making gadgets that tell the date, but it would be a nice enough touch.

[Kryxx]

The average survivor lives weeks, not years.

[Pakislav]

I seem to rarely die within the first weeks and then almost never for years. With rollerblades you can outrun hulks.