Re: Help with dates

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... NEW? | http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html STFA | http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=php-general&w=2 STFM | http://php.net/manual/en/index.php STFW | http://www.google.com/search?q=php LAZY | http://mycroft.mozdev.org/download.html?name=PHP&submitform=Find+search+plugins