Time in the game

Yes, of course! :slight_smile:

1 Like

Honestly, if three real-world seconds are supposed to be one minute, we’re looking at 60 Minutes being 3 hours for us… Is that correct? If that’s the case, then perhaps make it to where seasons are shifted a bit in scale to that?

No it’s really not correct(!). You’re thinking about it the wrong way I think.

One minute in game is simulated in three seconds.
One hour in game is hence simulated in three minutes (60 mins x 3s/min=180s=3mins)
One day in the game is 72 minutes real time.

As today’s DevLog confirmed, there will be time controls so if your fledgling airport has no traffic overnight, you’ll be able to fast forward.

2 Likes

I think you converted it better than I can lol

72 minutes per day sounds like a lot of time to me as standard. 1.2h playtime for a single day in a singeplayer game?

A full day should be done in half an hour or so. Feels more “doable” but I stand corrected if we get the first time to experience the time by ourselves and how the speed up shortens the time a day passes.

So let’s see how this plays out. Maybe it’s perfect. Only God and the devs know. :smiley:

1 Like

The problem is that we are dealing with an impossible universe and an impossible relation between the objects that we simulate and the time that passes. The issue is that objects are simulated in real time, meaning that the time it takes for a truck to move 20 meters reflects the time it would take in real life, but that we then have the game time passing a lot quicker than normal in relation to the simulation.

This effectively means that if we were to slow down the game time to real world time, and keep the ratio between simulated object time and game time, the objects would move extremely slow. Time is an extremely important aspect of simulating airports given the amount of actions that can take place within a single minute. The quicker the game time passes, the lesser actions (like landing and takeoffs) we’ll be able to simulate as one can only fit a finite amount of real time into the game time, and the longer the game time minute is the more real time we can fit.

We’ll have to find a great balance between being able to simulate a realistic amount of actions “per minute” and the game not feeling tedious as the day passes. This is why I’m playing with the idea of having a dynamic minute range system, so that the game time minute length would adapt to the number of things that’s going on… but then again, would probably not be that great from a gameplay perspective even though it could solve this “problem”.

Hope that explains it a little bit better, time is complicated.

5 Likes

@alpha, if it is that speed, time would be way too fast and you would have to start 1930s. If 72 minutes is one day, 7 hours and 18 minutes is a week, meaning that over 3 weeks could be finished in less than a day. If there are 52 weeks in a year, it would be around 17 days to finish one year. This means one real year would be 21 years game time. Again, it is complicated and can be changed, so I think that it would just be a repeating cycle, with no actual years, so it would say: 1:41 PM November 2, instead of it being story mode with real years. I would support a mode where you start at 1930 and go to present day, but it is very hard to implement. Until later, keep years out of the game.

1 Like

If time goes by when you are not THERE, playing the game, keep that. If it does not, make it 1s=
1m

You say this, but of course this is play time. People might only play the game for an hour or two in a day which gives a couple of game days to go by. I think 72 minutes per game day is roughly around the correct length as you can get two or three days into a game session which would allow simulating all aspects but not be long enough to effect long term progress.

I think creating a story mode and years incremented has been suggested and is not going to be in the game due to the level of effort it would require. I think it’s all going to be in the modern era as we have it now although i’m sure some people will make a mod for going through the years.

I need to know, will there be time passing when you are not on? :unamused:If there is, you should keeps the current rate of time. If there is not, time should be sped up.

I don’t think that the game/time will continue ‘running’ while you’re not playing it. :slight_smile: (If this is what you mean)

Yes, that is what I meant. Good info, should be less than 3s=3m then.

No reply since Feb 20 and I was wondering are there any progresses on in-game-time. Because as deveoper said, The time is way more important than details models etc…

I counted it in the video, 3s = 1m

3 Likes

Sounds about right. This is actually ridiculously easy to adjust if it will feel odd, as it is just one variable that controls the length of a minute which we can play with to find the right balance.

2 Likes

We’ve been discussing a few time related aspects this and the previous week in the team in regards to how to pass the time over longer periods, i.e. year and have reached a few conclusions that we can bring up in the next devlog. Our ambition is to simulate seasons, but first we need a working time scale that doesn’t screw up the weekdays so that scheduled flights work as expected… more on this tomorrow.

4 Likes

I wouldn’t mind if time passed more slowly.
Make 1 career take 6 months.
There are so many games that take so little time to explore everything then you get bored with them.
I see this game keeping people involved.

There are also so few games out there I’m looking to spend my money on.
The longer the game time. The longer I don’t have to look around for another game to spend my money on 30 minutes of game play.

Then again. Sometimes I just want a quick game. Say a quick game over the weekend.
What if you give the player the option to change it at startup of a career.
Have a suggested time frame already in.
When the player starts a new career or sandbox.
They can slow it down to 1 game minute to 3 seconds or 1 game day to 3 seconds.

In regards to seasons, if the seasons will be simulated like in real life, then seasons will pass really slow, so how about making the seasons pass in shorter time, for example 1 season = 1 month.

That will make it so 1 season = 1 month = 4 weeks = 28 days = 33.6 hours of gameplay.
Or maybe even shorter: 1 season = 2 weeks = 14 days = 16.8 hours.

I think time should play a big role in the game in terms of operation and people movement. It would be nice to see a day/night cycle in the game(which I think there is as seen during pictures and then video game plays).

The problem I have with a game like Cities Skylines is that while the city building simulation part of the game is great, the time feels so weird. It takes a day for a civ to go from one block to the next block in the road. It doesn’t properly feature a day/night cycle, where Simcity does(yes I still play Simcity). In sim city it was great to have the people wake up in the morning and see them have daily tasks like go to work in the morning, then after work they go shopping and other tasks then go home during the night. It was great to see some structure in the Simms day. Not so in the case of cities skylines. There’s no flow to the sims. While it’s nice to have traffic problems and figure out how to improve it - the time doesn’t feel right. Sometimes it’ll take weeks for traffic to get from one place to another.

Now, with a game like Airport CEO, maybe it could be a good thing to have a fast moving time sim so that we can quickly build up our airport and get new and better contracts. I really hope that that doesn’t happen. I would like it to be a slow paced, day-by-day career where there’s some structure in the sim’s day to go from the bus, to the gate, and it takes an hourish or two, not days to get to the gate. It just doesn’t feel right. It’d be much better to have to focus on the tasks for the day and for construction to take weeks/months, not in a matter of seconds.

Just my $0.02

3 Likes

May I suggest the rush hour mod for Cities Skylines.

I agree, I think managing demand through the day would be an interesting and challenging issue. People have suggested events like Christmas and Easter holidays that increase the demand level significantly, it would be nice to have to deal with the daytime fluctuations too.

However it would be nice for it to start off quite easy as every time you start off you’re more than likely to be going through the same rough steps which would get very old very quickly. Take a game like Factorio, I love the late game, playing with trains and robots and rockets. However the early game has become so tedious that I can’t even start a new game and stay long enough to get to the end game.

On that subject, if you have world settings like time progression and difficulty it would be very nice if you could change that as the game progresses such that you can get the tedious bits out the way and get on with the fun challenges.

1 Like