strange timescales (read for info)

[Anon]

For a game I am working on, I need to have 16 weeks of real time simulate 40 years of gameplay.

IE: January 1st, 2001 = day 1 in the game
April 30th, 2001 = last day of the game

Any have any good suggestions as to the best way to do it???

~Matthew

[theslinky]

I'm not sure whether you are asking how to manipulate the date proportion/ratio or how to program the time components involved in your game. Anyway, my suggestion would be to store all dates as UNIX timestamps. This is the best when doing calculations and finding out the correct number of years corresponding to one day and keeping track of the year you are in. You can always use mktime, or strftime to construct an english, read-able time string.

-sridhar

[msaskin]

What i'm looking to do is manipulate the date proportion/ratio. At any moment (such as when a person does something) I want to be able to take the real amount of time since the game start (whether is be 10 seconds, 10 days, whatever) and calculate it to be a certain amount in game time (where the final scale is 16 weeks = 40 years)

~Matt

[nimbus]

well, just a few thoughts while reading your posting:

16 weeks equal
10080000 seconds

40 years equal
1261440000 seconds

that makes a ratio of around 125. meaning that one second in "16 week time" repesents over 2 minutes in "real 40 years time".

or: roughly 29 seconds represent a full hour in real time.

get the real start date in seconds, get the amount of seconds since the game started, multiply the seconds with 125, add this value to the real start date seconds and build a full date:time out of this. you should get the date in real life. using unix timestamps and php's functions to convert should be very easy.

hope this helps. 🙂