Preventing New Eras From Resetting Dates

Q & A
#1

I love the fact that eras can be used to divide large chunks of history into smaller segments, each with their own naming scheme and each resetting the year count to zero.

However, in addition to this it would be useful to have a secondary timeline accumulating the total passage of time across all eras.

The reason comes down to gauging the passage of time. Let’s say history is divided into ages. The first age begins with the year 1. A historian living 150 years later was say the world is 150 years old. Fine.

But lets say in the year 5,000 the second age begins. A historian living 150 years later would say the world is 5,150 years old. Again, fine.

The problem is that Aeon Timelines doesn’t track this. Instead, in order for me to arrive at the number the second historian references I have to add the total number of years in the preceding age to the number of elapsed years in the current age.

And if the historian lives in the 3rd, 4th, 5th, etc… age, I have to manually add all those ages’ years together, then add in the number of elapsed years in the current age. It gets really tedius.

I might be missing a function here – and if I am, great – but if I’m not then I would recommend adding an overall timeline that exists outside of the individual eras so that a writer can easily figure out how much time has passed between two moments across many eras, instead of having to trudge through all the numbers every time.

Thanks,
Bob

#2

You can do that by create a “main” event that you add all other sub events in…

e.g.

  • “All Eras”
    • “Era 1”
      • “Era 1 - Historian 1”
    • “Era 2”
      • “Era 2 - Historian 2”

You can have as many Sub-Events and Levels of sub-Events as you like under any Event…

You can also use relations to measure “distance”, see the link under here.

You can also use one of this two methods

or an combination of all above…

#3

Thanks. I’m using a combination of sub-events within larger events, with my ages (eras) being the root events containing all others. This does work and allows for a great deal of flexibility, but I have to admit it’s a real pain since I’m still juggling between two different timelines (the era timeline and the master timeline).

I still think it would be fantastic if the software would automatically track both in parallel so I don’t have to constantly do math to get my dates correct.

Thanks,
Bob