I am looking for someone to build a custom game clock for my forum-based Star Wars RPG game. I am running on IPS 4.5.4.2 now with my game.
FORMAT – Month 1, Day 1, XX ABY, 00:01 AM
The above is from our IPB 1.3 forum in 2006 of what the game clock would display as. Nothing crazy, no frills.
Here is a breakdown of the way the calendar works in the Star Wars universe.
60 seconds = 1 minute
60 minutes = 1 hour
24 hours = 1 day
35 days = 1 month
10 months (350 days) = 1 year
Our game clock is constantly running, and is also accelerated. It doesn't need to be live-running, but just allowing it to update on each page refresh is fine as well. Whichever is easier is ok with me. Due to pace of gameplay in my game, real-time is too slow. We had a feature in our old forum many years ago that allowed us to set an acceleration rate – for instance 12x. 12 would indicate a 12:1 acceleration, so that one real world month would equal roughly one year on the game clock. Similarly a 6 would indicate 6x speed or 2 real world months being about one game clock year.
In the past – the game clock was formatted around UNIX Timestamp. I don't know how or why, or if that was indeed the best way to do it.
We additionally want to be able to set a custom suffix (year format) to the clock. Star Wars has year formats of BBY (Before the Battle of Yavin) and ABY (After the Battle of Yavin). If we could have a way to toggle this or add it onto our clock as shown above in the first graphic, and like in the below graphic on the ACP, it would be perfect. BBY/ABY works like BC and AD. It's a year suffix. BC would count towards 0, and AD counts away from 0. Similarly BBY counts towards 0, and ABY counts away from 0.
The clock should have a pause/unpause function as well. It had one in the past, and is a necessary feature. Obviously if we pause it, it should then be able to be unpaused and pick back up at the time we stopped it at. This is generally just to allow us to pause for major international holidays and allow players the ability to not worry about our game during holiday periods. Finally, a way to reset the game clock would be amazing. After many months or years, we have in the past needed to restart the game - or decided we want to restart at a new time period if the game got stale. When we reset the clock - it should reset back to Month 1, Day 1, and whatever year is defined in an input box as the starting year. (See below graphic).
The above graphic is just a several year old screenshot of what our ACP looked like where we could manage the game clock.
The last part about this - is that we never had this ability on our old forum software, but if we are able to put the game clock in a sidebar widget, it would be the most logical place to put it. Also, while not mandatory, if there would be a way for us to attach the "game time" into posts within certain forums, so for instance, when you post and it gives a day/time that you made the post. It would be great in the ACP if we could toggle certain forums to allow us to use 'game time' instead of 'real world time' as the post date/time. .