Is there a way to update game clock to reflect clocks going forward?

[Dougie]

But regardless of whether DST is good, bad, should be the standard or discarded is not a discussion for here - tell your politicians. Meanwhile, its 11:59 here yet the game tells me its 10:59, this is pointlessly broken.

No nothing is broken, stubborn refusal to accept the use of a standard time is not "broken". If you are bothered by subtracting 1 from your local time (or adding 1 to the game time) just think about players in other time zones around the world, some of them even have to deal with half-hour increments.

On my desk are two clocks, one never changes all year. They don't cost very much and you can even label them if you need.

 

[zimms]

[...]
On my desk are two clocks, one never changes all year. [...]

Might have to change the battery.

 

[Ashnak]

On my desk are two clocks, one never changes all year. They don't cost very much and you can even label them if you need.

I really need to get around to program a microcontroller to display network time like this.

 

[Nosrik]

MMOs have used a standard server time for over 20 years. In a game that involves other people and being able to meet and coordinate groups for various content, it's really the only sensible solution.

I'm not sure if your argument is relevant, don't most MMOs have regional servers with an appropriate timezone ?

 

[Brieus]

Your semi-annual reminder that it isn't stupid that the clocks in Elite don't change, it's stupid that the clocks in reality do.

MMOs have used a standard server time for over 20 years. In a game that involves other people and being able to meet and coordinate groups for various content, it's really the only sensible solution.

In the 1980's I could get a cheap wristwatch that displayed multiple time zones at once. I guess they lost that technology in the 1000-ish years since then? There are tons of games that allow you to choose what time to display on your in-game dashboard. Fdev's adamant refusal to add an option for this continues to be baffling 10 years later.

 

[Koma Pahu]

In the 1980's I could get a cheap wristwatch that displayed multiple time zones at once. I guess they lost that technology in the 1000-ish years since then? There are tons of games that allow you to choose what time to display on your in-game dashboard. Fdev's adamant refusal to add an option for this continues to be baffling 10 years later.

I mean, it would make sense in universe to run on standard time. It’s hard enough doing clocks every night crossing the Atlantic to adjust to the destination timezone. Travelling between systems takes seconds, and then landing on a planetary base is only a few minutes to all your ship (and body clock) to local time.

It being a game might be a better argument, but the counter argument is it makes it easier to organise things with other players.

When I was playing at a dedicated computer desk, I had a clock under my monitor. Compared to the rest of my rig, a fiver for a clock seemed like a bargain.

 

[Ozric]

I'm not sure if your argument is relevant, don't most MMOs have regional servers with an appropriate timezone ?

I'm not sure if most have regional, but if they have an EU and NA then the server time will reflect the location of those servers regardless of where the user is. And there will only be one datacenter per region. Daily resets happen at the same time, but that would be two different server times.

Frontier's servers are in one location. One server time.

In the 1980's I could get a cheap wristwatch that displayed multiple time zones at once. I guess they lost that technology in the 1000-ish years since then? There are tons of games that allow you to choose what time to display on your in-game dashboard. Fdev's adamant refusal to add an option for this continues to be baffling 10 years later.

I think "adamant refusal" is exaggerating things a bit. Outside of FD it gets mentioned a couple of times twice a year, and then no one talks about it again. Worth doing something about debateable.
Some MMOs choose to do it, though I can only think of FFXIV and Diablo 3+4 if you want to be generous the vast majority don't because most people are happy enough working off of an in game time.

 

[Mr Lindsay]

In the 1980's I could get a cheap wristwatch that displayed multiple time zones at once. I guess they lost that technology in the 1000-ish years since then? There are tons of games that allow you to choose what time to display on your in-game dashboard. Fdev's adamant refusal to add an option for this continues to be baffling 10 years later.

And in the early 2000s, Phantasy Star Online ran on Swatch Internet Time, because that was the Future, then. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time

Consider yourself lucky.

 

[Iron Body]

I'm not sure if your argument is relevant, don't most MMOs have regional servers with an appropriate timezone ?

All servers have to be synchronised together - there is no option to use different timestamps depending on where you are.

 

[Stealthie]

Thing is, the clock in ED isn't really GMT.
It's the time in the ED universe so if the ED universe doesn't have BST, that's just the way it is.

 

[Koma Pahu]

Thing is, the clock in ED isn't really GMT.
It's the time in the ED universe so if the ED universe doesn't have BST, that's just the way it is.

Even if it was GMT, GMT doesn’t change with BST either. We just change to using BST for half the year (despite it having no actual benefit).

 

[Born Free]

1. hold the clock button in for 5 seconds.
2. when the time begins to flash, use the hh & mm buttons to increase hours and minutes to the desired setting
3. press the clock button again

 

[GJ51]

Very strange

Every clock I have ever seen

Only moves forward...

 

[varonica]

In the 1980's I could get a cheap wristwatch that displayed multiple time zones at once. I guess they lost that technology in the 1000-ish years since then? There are tons of games that allow you to choose what time to display on your in-game dashboard. Fdev's adamant refusal to add an option for this continues to be baffling 10 years later.

There are over 10,000 stations in the bubble, nearly every one orbiting a planet with it's own period of rotation and day night cycle etc, planetary time is completely irrelevant to any activity that doesn't take place on said planet and having a watch that displays 10,000 different time zones would be pretty pointless because after every jump your entire schedule would need to be re-adjusted. You have local time right there in your house, on your computers task bar, on the microwave, why you would need it in game as well puzzles me immensely. That the ED galaxy works on a universal time standard seems entirely logical, that you work on your own time standard is also entirely logical, just look at your clock/microwave/taskbar/alarm clock to access local time!

 

[nemolomen]

Yes. It's still reality tho.

Only if you believe it...

 

[DjVortex]

No DST in the future!

(Besides, what do you need DST in space for anyways?)

 

[Neilski]

It does. With the stuttering thing every 5 minutes, I tried to set the PC clock back by 2 minutes to see if it has an effect but the game still shows the correct time.

Mmm, this does raise a question: did the stuttering then match the PC clock or the in-game clock? If the former, I'd conclude that it isn't triggered by the server...

 

[photomankc]

I'd settle for it using the same cloc for everything. Displays UTC. Gives chat and some other events in local time.

 

[Markov Chaney]

Your semi-annual reminder that it isn't stupid that the clocks in Elite don't change, it's stupid that the clocks in reality do.

Or, both are driven by a rational need to synchronise how you arrange your sleep cycles* versus what the sun happens to be doing. In mid-latitude cities on planets with a significant axial tilt (say, for example, about 23 degrees) the behaviour of the sun is a total pain in the neck.

When you are moving from sun to sun in an entirely artificial environment the solar time really is genuinely irrelevant.

* cycles plural; for example there's a good correlation between countries where it gets simply too hot to function mid-afternoon and countries that have a siesta, so it's not just day-night.

Also worth noting that even people living near Greenwich weren't tooooo bothered about GMT when it was a naval thing; ships only move at 20kts on a good day. The time became important for navigation, not the people on the ship or at either port.

It's only once London-Bristol rail got going properly that people started saying "yeah we can't have two noons in England, this is not helping."

 

[Markov Chaney]

In the 1980's I could get a cheap wristwatch that displayed multiple time zones at once.

Yeah, you need timezones on a 20th Century surface-dwelling civilisation limited to a single planet.

I guess they lost that technology in the 1000-ish years since then?

Nah, they lost the concept of timezones once they realised literally no other planets that had been settled happened to have a day of 23h 56m and 11s and an orbit of exactly one year. You need both for 24 time zones of one hour to be any use. (And as others have pointed out, they're not always much use anyway. Ask an American TV exec about scheduling peak times and sporting events; then again, India uses the opposite approach of trying to keep to 5 1/2 hours and farmers on both coasts hate it.)

The Federation was formed in the 2240s across multiple systems with multiple settled bodies. Timezones were dead at that point.

There are tons of games that allow you to choose what time to display on your in-game dashboard.

They are not games which simulate an interstellar economy. Y'all come on this forum and complain about immersion but then ask for the instrumentation to give you Earthbound timezones so you can tell the time in a way that the Federation abandoned the minute it was founded a thousand years earlier?

On Earth in 2025 the movement of cargo was still dictated by the speed of maritime logistics, but citizens did not measure time in ship's bells and nor did they get up with the sun or go to bed with the sun.

Fdev's adamant refusal to add an option for this continues to be baffling 10 years later.

What's baffling is why you're asking a simulator to simulate something that simply doesn't exist in the simulated universe.