[Suggestion] Local Time Interpretations

Bugs & Features
#1

One thing that can sometimes get confusing is trying to coordinate times between players of different timezones. And issue pretty much everywhere, but at least here in Wolfery I think we can make a fairly straightforward and elegant solution.

Invoking in a pose, message, say, etc., with something like {t:4:00p} it could be interpreted as client local time, then sent to the server in UTC and passed back to be interpreted by the console of each recipient in their own machine-local time zone. And in the example above could potentially look similar to how the forum interprets formatted time: 11:00 PM (Preferably omitting the [relative] date if itā€™s not included)

I feel this could help improve immersion by not needing to move to OOC to figure out timezones or include them at all in IC conversation. Would make ignoring the timezone difference while IC a lot easier, IMO.

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#2

I think this forum software does something like that.

But maybe we should have some ā€œin-gameā€ time (a feature also frequently suggested), which can be converted to RL time based on the browsers timezone setting?

Though, I think that format you suggested might be too complicated for most. But I think the idea in itself, to have a way of communicating time without revealing player timezones, is a good idea!

#3

Honestly, we just say ā€˜The station park clock keeps its own time, regardless of whatā€™s happening in the riftā€™ and just use that as the standard. Pick a time zone and stick the station clock to that (need to determine whether it does DST or not - being an analog clock would push it in the ā€˜noā€™ direction for me, though) and everybody uses it as a reference for their own personal time in the rift. It works both for the need and lore-wise.

#4

I was just basing it off the formatting Discord already uses for timestamps, but replacing the ā€œtime in seconds from 1 Jan 1970 00:00:00 UTCā€ with just whatever local time format users would like to use, but the actual summoning of the function could happen any number of ways.

I think the only implementation hurdle this has would be, in an effort to prevent errors, predetermine what inputs are invalid and mark them in the error style in the console itself before the message is sent.

I had originally mentioned that Moment.js is the library the forum uses to do this same thing, but I guess I took it out of the post at some point before finalizing it, heheh. Moment.js has a constructor that will try and automatically parse an input string in machine local time, and we can try and include common formats for expressing local time for ones that arenā€™t automatically caught, to help make formatting a date/time as easy for the user as possible.

#5

Iā€™ve noticed we seem to lack a simple ā€˜timeā€™ command. If we had one that returned a ā€˜Wolfery Standard Timeā€™- whatever that might be, likely UTC- It would be perhaps the easiest solution to say simply 'What time is it, for all of us, as regards IC matters."

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