Multiple Calendar Types?

Q & A
#1

Hello, I used Aeon Timeline 2 a lot in the past and love it, so I just upgraded to Aeon Timeline 3 to sync with Scrivener. I’ve been out of the loop for a while and pretty much forgot how to do everything so I apologize if this is an easy question. I did try to search for it but couldn’t find the exact situation I was looking for.

So I just synced my book, and I ran into an issue right away that I didn’t think of before this. My book has parallel worlds with two different Calendars running side by side. A simple way to explain it is both worlds have the same number of days each year but different number of months and names for said months. Is there any way to have two timelines with different calendars? So like Month 3 Day 20 in timeline one an earthquake occurs causing MC#1 to react (event), same earthquake is felt in the parallel world causing MC#2 to react (event) but it’s Month 4 Day 6 for them. But it’s technically the same day on the timeline.

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#2

My understanding is that AT3 does not have the capability of two or more timelines. I’ve seen others request it here, but there has been no indication that the developers are pursuing this feature.

#3

Thank you for your response. I have see that alternative timeline exists, so Ill probably have to do that and kind of just do math for each date. I wish I didn’t have to do that math, but I can’t exactly sync the book to two different time lines, I don’t think?

#4

If there’s an exact matching of days, then it’s possible for every day in the timeline to carry both names - eg Month 3 Day 20; Month 4 Day 6. Clumsy but would work.

But wouldn’t address what I imagine would be a more common situation of worlds with different numbers of days.

#5

This demand appears here with reliable regularity. Just as reliably, nobody gets involved in a discussion about what this should look like in practice.

If there is more than one calendar, they must be synchronised using an algorithm. This algorithm must come from the user and somehow be introduced into Aeon via a user interface. And as I have seen in the past, this is not always trivial (shouldn’t it be about the cycles of a Jupiter moon in relation to Mars time?). If such an argument is put forward, the corresponding thread dies. That’s why I don’t see too much of a chance here, although there are certainly solutions.

A feasible but somewhat awkward approach is to define alternative dates as event properties and calculate them outside of AT. This is not too difficult with AT2 because you can read and write its file format. So I once wrote a Python script that enters and updates the moon phase for each event. This effectively gives me the lunar calendar as a second calendar. With AT3 it is a bit more cumbersome because you would have to do it via csv export and reimport.

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Brainstorming multiple calendars
#6

Thank you for all that information that was incredibly insightful and for taking the time to explain how it would work. Though sad that there isn’t much of a chance to make it easier for people to have access to.

So, I was doing one world with a solar calendar (like the gregorian calendar) and one world with a lunisolar calendar (like the Chinese Calendar) just with different names for months, etc. but essentially the same way both function. I was using AT3 because I needed it to sync with Scrivener so I could match up my timeline to the book’s events as they were happening. Before when I was using AT2 and manually transferring every event it became to cumbersome that I stopped using it.

#7

What you can do in any case: Define an event property, e.g. “parallel world date”, which you can fill in manually as long as you don’t have a helper program. If it’s just a few key events that affect both of your worlds, that should work just fine.

For the conversion, you can make a reference table or, if you can program a little, a small program that converts the given date into a timestamp, adds the necessary offset and converts it back using the other day/month names.

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#8

It might be possible to ask an AI to make the conversion. I found it useful, for example, in telling me in what part of the sky the moon appeared on a certain day at a certain time in a certain location. Perhaps it would work to convert a date/time from one calendar system to another.

#9

This could work, but requires a cumbersome textual description of your calendar system, over and over again. It also means that a huge amount of computing power and electrical energy is required.
In my humble opinion, this is out of all proportion to a few lines of Basic or Python. Don’t they teach that in school nowadays?

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#10

Point well taken. I have dabbled in coding on and off for decades (mostly javascript and PHP, but I have some knowledge of C++ and perl and, weirdly, I spent a few years in various .NET languages when I was building some Windows programs and running my own Windows server at home). I suppose I would enjoy writing a program to do this work, as I do love to problem-solve.

Or, I could work on my novel series and leverage AI to get me the quick answer I need to keep writing. :slight_smile:

#11

Point well taken. I’ve offered an idea here.