I’m in my trial period for Aeon Timeline, and I got super lucky in that the first thing I explored was whether or not it was able to create multiple eras that match my saga’s 25,000 year timeline with six eras, each resetting the calendar year. I also noticed that the software is able to customize the number of days per month and number of months per year.
So I spent a little time thinking about this. As I’m writing High Fantasy, I figure it’s probably best to make it different from real life but still relatable. I decided to go with 30 days in each of 12 months, making a 360 day calendar year. Kept 7 day weeks as I think straying from this would be jarring for a reader.
Then I experimented with entering some events. After this, I was quite shocked to discover that I could no longer edit the custom calendar’s proportions! Adding or removing ages was disabled. Adding or moving months and days of the week was disabled. Permanently!
This is why I say I was lucky because I happened to try this feature out first BEFORE entering thousands of events into the timeline. Imagine if I hadn’t! That would have been devastating.
I’m not particularly excited about the fact that calendar structure is locked as soon as you enter events. I would have thought each event would have an absolute position in the timeline and adjustments to eons would shift things around but in a way that would be easy to compensate for by sliding them together. But I guess I can see why this is how it functions.
What I do not understand is why there’s no WARNING when you’re about to lock the calendar structure. Please, for the sake of new users who don’t know yet, can you put some kind of really obvious alert in the software when this irreversible change is about to take place? Users who may be interested in custom eras and calendar structures really need to know that the structure must be set in stone before any events are entered into the timeline.