Just a thought experiment on Time

[c13Garrison]

Greetings everyone.

I enjoy BTS just as much as any, however there is one factor that I wish could be changed. It would be nice if time counted Up, from the founding of your first city, and then when you adopted a state religion changed to the number of years after the founding of that religion.

Example;

First City is founded at 4000 BC, and time begins to count Up from that year 0 (zero). Then, in year 450 of this society, they adopt the Hindu faith which their neighbors had founded 45 years ago [3 turns], so their calendar would then switch- the current turn would be Year 450 of the original Society, but then the next turn would be year 60 of the new faith (founded 4 turns or 60 years ago).

This would be a much more realistic way of counting time for the player, and ditch the artifice of backdating everything to 'BC' times, and then initiating 'AD' times when you may not have ever even heard of Christianity.

Is such a time-display structure possible in this game format? If so, how difficult would it be to execute- or, has someone already managed to do so?

 

[Dancing Hoskuld]

It must be possible since there are mods out there that replace the date with "Era y turn x" so that the date changes when you advance into the next era as "Era y+1 turn 1". I suspect it "just" requires some python.

 

[c13Garrison]

Thank you for the information- so, it should be possible to write a small add-on mod that would allow time to be represented as years progressed beyond the founding of your state &/or state religion. Good to know.

Now how much fiddling to bring such a thing about, and in a fashion that would not crash whatever mod it was dropped into... time will tell!

 

[lfgr]

I attached a quick-and-dirty solution for this I made yesterday, however it counts from the starting turn rather than the founding of your first city (easier to code). It also only changes the display of date in the upper right of the main screen, nothing else (f.e. the religion founding dates in the religion screen are still displayed as BC/AD).
I added some religion-specific calendar abbreviations after a quick wikipedia search.
There is only one block of changed code in CvMainInterface, marked with "TIME" and "TIME end".

If you're not satisfied with this, it would be best to directly change CvGameTextMgr::setDateStr() in the SDK. That should cover everything.

 

[c13Garrison]

I am amazed and delighted! Thank you, very kind of you to take such initiative based simply upon the general curiosity of a nubie.

I'll DL this tonight, and see if I can get it to work with BTS/LoR/&-or QC:Majesty.