How do you deal with time in scifi games? Like, the time we

>>50335603
Just introduce timezones on a galactic scale.

>>50335655
That was what I was thinking. But the problem is that every planet, assuming it would work like earth, would have their own individual timezone.

That means, like, a dozen hundred time zones in just one star system, assuming it has multiple planets.

The question is how do we make it so that the time zones can easily be remembered without making a new time measurement unit for every single planet.

So, every planet would have different months and weeks, depending on the local orbit, days, hours, minutes, and seconds would be the same: 100 in 100.

This way, you might have a six-hundred day year, but your day is still a twenty four hour day and not some sort of fucky twenty-nine point six and three-quarters minute day or whatever the fucking.

God damn it the more I cthink about this the more my brain hurts HELP

Assuming your civilization is within one galaxy, perhaps the basic unit of time is based on the rotation of the black hole at the center of the galaxy, making an equivalent of a second. If you have FTL communication, this can then be the metronome the galaxy follows.

>>50336121
how fast does the galaxy's black hole spin if it can be used as a second?

Does it actually fully spin in just one second?

>>50335603
>Like, the time we use nowadays is entirely dependent on earth's orbit.
No, it isn't. We use cesium atomic clocks for a reason.

>>50335603
Each planet has thier own time and dating system while also learning a very standard and dull trading calander that they all use to interact. It would almost certainly be entirely in multiples of tens for simplicity sake

>>50337861
A standard trading "minute" being 100 seconds, a standard trading "hour" 100 minutes etc.

>>50337861
>>50337893
Vernor Vinge's "A Deepness In The Sky" portrays unix time as the interstellar standard

>>50337893
Furthermore I may not be an expert on time but what the fuck would we need timezones for? We shouldn't even have them right now, chang should just be cool eith thier 12:00 being at night.

>>50335603
>Like, the time we use nowadays is entirely dependent on earth's orbit.

It isn't. Far as I can tell, it was just arbitrary. The seasons drift around the calendar, years drift without leap days and seconds added in places. The calendar was fucked with for the sake of political point-scoring, and since it predates proper record-keeping about the climate, it doesn't track to climate shifts.
The roman empire, which codified the modern calendar, fell because their warm period ended and started the Dark Ages.

Either we'd continue using the same arbitrary system, or switch to an entirely logical one bound to an easily-measured, stable, and reliable constant.

>>50335799
You ignore it. If you try and track it, you'd ALSO have to track relativistic time dilation, time lost in passage through FTL, gravity's effects on time, and so forth.

Just fluff it that Ship Time runs on a natural human cycle, and only introduce Local Time when it's a requirement. Do you really want to spend time each and every visit to a planet carefully syncing up clocks and timezones and sleep cycles?
You really don't. Just handwave it away.

>>50337980
Timezones were invented to account for the fact that midday happens at different times as the planet rotates. They were properly enforced to make sure clocks in Britain were all on the same time, and that ships crossing the Atlantic could tell how far west they'd gone by comparing a clock left synced up to Greenwich Mean Time with one set by the sun to local time.

>>50335603
The SI unit for time, second, isn't dependent anymore on earth's orbit and rotation.

>>50338026
And now we have easy communication so why not have one fixed clock

>>50338064
BECAUSE I DON'T WANT TO HAVE THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT BE SIX AM YOU FUCK

>>50338064
Because midday in the UK isn't midday in New York, and midday in New York isn't midday in LA?

>>50338054
This. Most of measurements are completly independant now.

>>50338054
Well yes and no. An SI second is a certain number of counts of an atom. The number of counts originally deriving from the number of oscillations within a Traditional Second (1/3600 of an hour)

I feel like y'all are forgetting relativity.

Time doesn't mean dick when traveling fast distorts your time, relative to another observer.

This is to say, a clock which is running on a very fast vehicle will be out of sync with EVERY other clock. (Barring situations where there is another vehicle and another clock traveling at an identical velocity.)

Therefore, time across systems or sectors is malleable. It only matters to the individual system what the time is. You can probably sync to the signals sent by the local system, for sure, and I mean it's still reasonable for the same time format to be used galactically, but the idea that there is some sort of 'objective' time is fucking really strange.

And if you did want an 'objective' time, why not use the time format invented on Earth? Why wouldn't a terrestrial minute and a solar year be in common use, at least for date keeping and mundane time keeping?

>>50338090
And? Timezones are primitive as fuck. Who cares at what time on a 24 hour clock midday is? It wouldn't destroy the world and using an global clock would if anything make life easier.

>>50336292
Most black holes with any spin do so much faster than a single rotation per second.

>>50341912
>Who cares at what time on a 24 hour clock midday is?
Anyone who intends to actually go outside and do something? I mean really, the fuck are you suggesting, that half the planet go out and do their errands in the dark just to match up with the other half, 99.999% of whom aren't interacting with their counterparts anyway?

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>>50335603
>I just got this idea and I'm a little fuzzy on it. But I can't stop thinking about it because the issue of keeping track of time across multiple planets is going to bug the shit out of me until I can figure something out satisfying.

"Right, so it's currently 10 decims past the 2nd tenth, and..."

"Is the sun up?"

"Uh... uh yeah. Let me check, uh, yeah, the sun's up."

"And is the guy we're going to see going to be at his office?"

"Probably? I mean, he works 0 tenths to 4 tenths, so..."

"Cool, we go there."


From a gameplay POV, no matter how cunning a system you devise, unless it's a) evocative, b) easy to understand, and c) actually useful to the players, they are going to ignore it. Sorry dude, iron law of GMing. Your worldbuilding means nothing if it can't be used in a story.

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>>50338725
Depends on the setting and whether or not it has instantaneous communication, because that's the only way to guarantee a universal standard time. Otherwise, every planet and colony is going to have their own local time.

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>>50342676
Has semi-instantaneous communication.

The worst lag you'll get as the average joe is probably a couple of seconds. Think of it as sort of having high ping, but on your cellphone.

Also >>50342622
It's not for a campaign(at least not one I know of), just some world building. Also the conundrum came to me one day at work.

>From a gameplay POV, no matter how cunning a system you devise, unless it's a) evocative, b) easy to understand, and c) actually useful to the players, they are going to ignore it. Sorry dude, iron law of GMing. Your worldbuilding means nothing if it can't be used in a story.

That's the part of the problem. I want a system that can easily adapt to any planet and still have at least the twenty-four hour period for humans split in to equal halves of 12 hour day and 12 hour night.
Because I think it totally unreasonable for a human being to deal with having a day longer then a week.

Like wtf is that.

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>>50335603
The solution is pretty simple. Just use Unix Time.

>>50344358
and then install Gentoo in the AIs, right?

>>50335603

Time is not universal. To calculate the transition of time from two frames of reference, you have to use the Lorentz transformation.

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>>50344372
No, Gentoo allows access to proprietary software in its repositories you fascist. All AI must run off of Free Systems of their own choice. My personal choice would be gNewSense.

Please refer to our ambassador Stephen Fry:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dcxtEKShXA

Relativity is a bitch. Even sattelites are not in syn with Earth's clocks. It may be a small number, but it can produce large errors.

https://youtu.be/GguAN1_JouQ

https://youtu.be/fHRqibyNMpw

>>50335603
Everything goes on standard earth time in space, IE, a generalized time based on a 24 hour period in some part of the earth. If on a planet or such, time is based upon that planet.

Humans could just use UTC or Unix time as the standard, as defined by atomic clocks in Earth conditions. Local clocks would need calibrations after a while if they were moving at a high speed or were located in a gravity well different from Earth surface but that's barely a nuisance.