[MUD-Dev] Time Theory

[Anderson]

From: Mats Lidstrom [mailto:mats.lidstrom at torpet.ac]
> From: "David C.Z. Wacks" <david at dreamzion.com>

>> I am toying with the idea of keeping ticks for events
>> (healing/combat/etc) but using real time to synch mud time. so 1
>> day=1 day
 
> The downside of that is that since most people got a couple of
> hours a day to play they will always experience the same stretch
> of time in your MUD. If your MUD is on the other side of the globe
> from me and I log in when I'm home from work I always see the
> nighttime/early morning in there.
 
> Great if I'm a vampire, but not so great if I try to keep away
> from them.

We wanted to plan the same sort of thing so that you could figure
out when a certain time in the future was on the mud.. mainly so
that if you're planning a wedding, etc, you didn't need to just say
the system time, since reading ooc things in an IC context can
sometimes ruin the "mood".  So we came up with three alternatives.

No matter what, we need to have a strict time schedule so that you
could plan IC time.

  1. 22 hours = a real life day.  So the mud time is slightly faster
  than real life time.  People could figure out on their own pretty
  easily what 3 days from now would be (3 days, 6 hours).  You could
  probably write a pretty easy function to translate 5:00pm on the
  16th to give you the IC time in the game (and translate back).

  2. 6 hours = a real life day.  Only problem is that if you have 2
  hours you'll still match up with the same hours every day.  But
  then if someone can play for 4 hours at the exact time every day,
  they can still play almost a full day (so some daytime, some
  nighttime).  This is even easier to match up to the exact time in
  the future.

  3. 24 hours = a real life day.  Basically what you're saying, so
  you can say January the 15th at 5pm, and it will match up exactly
  with the real life date/time.  However, in order to allow people
  to have some daytime and some night time, you could introduce some
  RP to your world in which there are multiple night times (bunch of
  stars spinning quickly around your planet.. you figure it out).
  (this wouldn't work for a realistic earth mud, but for fantasy
  games, it's just fine. Add in 4 night times into your mud and
  you've gotten basically a 6 hour day, but where you don't need to
  translate day for day.. plus people then would have fun RPing
  words for "3rd night, 2nd day" and things like that.

Dave
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