Posted by Jochem Maas on 10/04/53 11:10

Jason Barnett wrote:
> Jochem Maas wrote:
>
>>....
>>
>>>It's mostly the past. The RPG is set in Egypt and the beginning of the
>>>society in egypt has been taken as year 0. The start date I think is
>>>obvious, but I do not understand an end date of a calendar.. Perhaps I'm
>>>just blond.. but could you perhaps explain that one?
>>>
>>
>>I must be blond, I don't even grok that question :-/
>>
>>rgds,
>>jochem
>
>
> It comes down to the amount of information that you can store in memory.
> Consider: my start date is 6000 BC. And I believe that the universe
> will end around, say, 320 Quadrillion AD. And I want accuracy in my
> calendar (that is I can convert time) to the nearest second. Good luck
> finding a computer that can easily handle that! Heck, good luck even
> trying to store all of the seconds of the calendar as bytes on the computer!

er...grok.
thanks Jason :-)

>
> This problem is related to the Y2K "bug". Back when hard drive storage
> / memory was more expensive they needed to find ways to express more
> information with less technology. So they traded accuracy for
> efficiency and dates were stored with two digits in each year. It was
> ok though because the expected life of the program wasn't supposed to be
> beyond 2000.
>
> So getting back to *this* problem... what exactly is the relevant span
> of time? Will game time in the RPG extend for thousands of years?
> Hundreds of thousands? Would it really be ancient Egypt once you make
> it past 0 BC?

egypt is pre 0BC, even Discovery Channel admits that :-)
(0BC is 2005 years ago)

>
> So decide on an upper limit for the game calendar. And decide the
> accuracy you need (nearest day, etc.) and then you can create functions
> that will do the necessary date conversions. It can be in PHP or in the
> DB itself... but that's the next step in the decision process. :)
>
> --
> Teach a man to fish...
>
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