Hours, Minutes, Seconds adjustment

Feature Requests
#1

Hi,

I know the knowledge base states:

Hours, Minutes, Seconds

As mentioned above, the custom calendar allows you to specify the number of hours in a day. Aeon Timeline does not allow you to customise units smaller than this. An hour will always be composed of 60 minutes, and a minute will always be composed of 60 seconds.

But here’s the thing: I have a different time system in my world.
Which means I have more seconds, minutes and hours in a day.
I can imagine other authors who also have a secondary world, like me, heavily adjusted that time works differently could also benefit from this.

For example, my world has 64 minutes in an hour, with 64 seconds in a minute. This results in 25,6 hours instead of 24 hours. It would be nice if my custom calendar could reflect this.

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#2

I’d second this idea. Science fiction and fantasy writers in particular would need this. I have a world based on decimal system. 100 “ticks” (seconds) to a “minim” 10 “minims” to an “interval” etc. I can do 10 hour days which comes close, but anything less than that breaks down. We’re a creative lot, we writers of weird fiction :slight_smile:

2 Likes
#3

Second and third this!
I’m writing an SF novel which is set on another planet (eventually… several others). It’s also a thriller and timing is incredibly important; every chapter has a countdown to some unspecified “future event” etc. etc.

I tore my hair out trying to figure out how the clocks would work (it’s in our universe, but in the far future, a colony) since I didn’t want it to be too weird, but still realistic.

The solution I came up with was to keep the length of seconds the same (it is the SI unit of time, after all; Vernor Vinge based some of his novels on “kiloseconds” but…), and the same number of minutes in the hour, BUT to change the number of hours in a day and number of days in a year. So, for instance, my planet has 392.73 days in a year (leap years simply round at the end of the year…), and approx 23.74 hours in a day (there is one “short” hour at the end of the day, just before midnight, that is only 44 minutes and 23 seconds long…).

The non-integer lengths are because the length of the day is set by planetary rotation, and the length of the year relative to that, but they don’t require any special relationship to each other or to Earth’s intervals for these things.

Anyway, this would work for any planet, while keeping “ordinary” hours.
I ignore months and just use days, although if I did add months I would probably do something like 28 days (four weeks) each. The critical thing I need to keep track of for setting though is the season (although I can figure this out from the day-of-the-year).

Aeon ALMOST does what I want - but I can’t enter non-integer number of hours in a day, and there is no way at all to change the number of days in a year.

Currently I’m trying to use a spreadsheet but it’s driving me crazy…

Screenshot 2025-10-20 at 11.38.09 AM
Screenshot 2025-10-20 at 11.38.09 AM3060×604 260 KB

#4

Indeed, and that’s the point. No matter how customizable they make the app, there always will be a way to make up some fancy calendar that wouldn’t fit in.

I think the remedy lies in a clever workaround. In my opinion, this involves programming tools that help you convert between a system supported by the app (preferably the Gregorian calendar) and your own. So if you can program scripts that can inscribe your own date/time information as additional properties of the events, virtually all options are open to you. Of course, this also solves the problem of multiple calendars in parallel.

These days, we are having a discussion in another thread of this forum about the Indian lunar calendar, which has a system of intercalary months that probably cannot be modeled with Aeon.
I have suggested a solution that has worked for me for years with moon phases. I am sure that the method is also suitable for all the problems mentioned here, provided you are not afraid of a little programming.

Here is a screenshot with AT2 and the moon phases, which my tool automatically calculated and entered for me. A floating point “star date” or something else could also be displayed in their place.

moonphases

#5

Well, I don’t know, just adding non-integer hours-in-a-day and days-in-a-year would work, and is also consistent with proposed approaches for Martian calendars; see Darian calendar - Wikipedia

What’s there already is ALMOST right. If the Darian calendar can be modelled, then a few other parameter tweaks would work well for almost any other planetary system.

However, yes, if there was a plugin system that let people code up their own calendars that would be fine too. But as for converting to and from the Gregorian calendar: ugh. That thing is a mess. In my spreadsheet I ignore it and convert to and from seconds-from-some-epoch-moment.

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#6

Unfortunately, Aeon Timeline does not have a plugin system, macros, or command line API. Access for automation lies in the export and import of CSV files. Fortunately, these are easy to handle. Python has a standard module for this, and other scripting languages may have one as well.

The workflow consists of CSV export, drag/drop onto the script, and reimport. If that is acceptable, then anything for which there is a reasonable algorithm is possible. By the way, I still use AT2 myself because I can write and read its file format directly, which eliminates the need for CSV. But unfortunately, I haven’t been able to do that with AT3.

My programming language is Python, and I have now provided a script skeleton for CSV processing, where you only need to enter your algorithm.

For the Darian calendar, I found conversion programs in Ruby on GitHub. Maybe I’ll feel like rewriting the corresponding module in Python sometime.

The Python standard library can convert dates from the Gregorian calendar to timestamps in seconds since January 1, 0001, 00:00h. This could be helpful for further conversion.

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#7

Well, your system looks tricky. In your story, if I’m not mistaken, it is made up by colonists from Earth. They keep the second as the base unit, and define the days and years by the planetary cycles. But isn’t the resulting system in fractional hours and days with hours of varying lengths too complicated to build clocks? I would assume that every planetary system would introduce a system of measuring time based on integer subdivisions of astronomical cycles. Just like on Earth, where everything was derived from twelve, as far as possible.

If a planet’s orbit around the central star does not result in an integer multiple of rotations around its own axis, leap cycles come into play.
We must note that the effect is different from trying to compensate for this by distributing the compensatory time evenly across each individual day. The intercalary cycles also allow for fluctuations in the revolutionary period, which are likely to occur in every planetary system.

If I had a story about technologically advanced colonists on an alien planet, I would have them invent an easy-to-use local time system that is as recognizable as possible. If it corresponded to our 12-hour day, I would actually consider adjusting the length of the second. Conversions between local time and Earth time would then be possible using the Seconds timestamp and a linear factor.

Update:
Of course, it could also be a social model in which the current time information cannot be determined independently due to its complexity, but must be retrieved from a central server belonging to a priestly caste or a monopolistic company. These monopolists are then in a position to control the entire interaction of society.

#8

I added a “Decimal Time” property to the event type and performed the workflow as described above.
The decimal time is formatted like this:

intervals:minims:ticks

This is the result with AT2:

decimal_time
decimal_time797×277 21.1 KB

In my example, it’s just the start date. It would also be possible to provide the end date or the duration in decimal format.

Here is the python script: