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When I first started making my campaigns long ago, I stumbled upon Irony Games' calendar maker. It was a god sent with Moon phases and other astronomical events for my custom world. The site has been down for years now and I have a dire need of it again. :(
http://web.archive.org/web/20080318180003/http://www.irony.com/mkcal.html
Has anyone find a worthy replacement for it?
The only close thing has been Masterplan ( http://www.habitualindolence.net/masterplan/ ) but it doesn't let me export the whole calendar (only by month).
whoa, deja vu. :D
I could imagine doing this as an app, if you dare outlining your requirements.
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Oh boy... here we go.
I would have to inupt:
Days per year
Days per month
Days per week
Number of moons
Number of seasons
(Continue...)
On the next form, it would ask you to input the following:
Name of each month
Name of each day of the week
Name of moons
Name of seasons
(Continue...)
Day of the week the calendar will start on
Duration of each moon's cycle
Day of the year for the first full moon for each moon
(FINISH)
The result would be something like this: http://pastebin.com/YtGLsAr7 This is the only example I have left from before Irony Games went out.
The output was on text format like that, but I guess a table to export to excel or a save function would be also nice. The two columns with symbols show the phases of each moon. As you can see the last column had random celestial events (shooting stars, eclipses, auroras, etc). Anything else you need to know?
OK, I will start to work on this in the coming days.
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i've also taken a crack at this, though at the moment its still missing a couple of things (seasons, first full moon).
I have a Kickstarter going for this! :D
I realize that you are trying to form a company, but $75,000 seems a couple of orders of magnitude too high for the product this campaign is actually offering. I wonder if you would do better to instead focus your company around crowd-funding individual projects at the cost of contract work rather than what it would take to hire someone long-term. Also, you may want to correct the spelling in the title of your campaign to ensure search results are more accurate.
Regarding the original topic, a few years ago I made a MediaWiki-based template that could output the dual moon phases and longer year of my own world. If any of you use MediaWiki and are interested in borrowing my source code, you should be able to view source on the following example, copy the templates at the bottom of the page, and then modify them to suit your campaign.
Note you'll need parser functions, and a few other extensions, but they're all freely available. I can post the ones I'm using if anyone is interested.
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OK, it took a while, but here is my first take on a calendar generator: http://heldenhaufen.de/Ca
I just uploaded a new version that supports saving to PDF.
The moon symbols in the PDF are not looking that good viewed on a screen, but printed they seem OK.
Thalassogen: Just tried out your calendar generator with my world's system, and the calculations seem match up with my own script perfectly (example).
With that said, there a couple modifications I'd like to suggest for ease-of-use, monitor compatibility, and readability.
- Since the date formats in various areas of the world differ, it might be a good idea to break-up the reference date fields into separate fields for month, day, and year. While I myself prefer year-month-day, in the USA the format is month-day-year, and in Europe there are still other standards. Breaking-up and labeling the required input could help to eliminate confusion.
- The gridlines on the preview and in the PDF don't appear consistently, possibly because they are so light in color. I'd suggest darkening them up a good deal lest those running their monitors in multimedia or gaming modes see only a jumble of numbers and moons all mashed together. ;)
- Aligning the moon phases and dates in diagonally opposite corners takes up space that might otherwise be used to jot down notes. Additionally, when the gridlines fail to show, that arrangement also makes the layout extremely difficult to read. I'd suggest a top-left justification (with the date preceding the moon phases) to maximize the space within each cell.
Thanks for making available such a handy app!
Laithoron: I just updated the website with your suggestions, implementing them as optional settings. Please let me know if the resulting PDF is now better to view and use.
Thalassogen: Just tested a couple years with the changes and it works and looks perfect now! Thanks so much for adding those options. I've got a couple friends who will be eager to see your work. :)
Thanks, Laithoron!
On another forum I asked how about getting this app offline on phones and tablets, especially: What platform do you prefer?
Android, iOS, Windows, Windows Phone
Hmm, campaign calendars seem like the sort of thing I'd be more apt to use when running a PbP or doing my GM prep work, rather than something I'd reference at-the-table. In that sense, I myself would prefer something that can be run on my laptop or desktop...
What about a Java-based app? That would cover Windows, iOS, and Linux at once.
If you do go the route of making a standalone app, one feature that would be really cool is the ability to save/load the basic settings for a given world (i.e. moons, month/day names, week start offset, etc.). Then we'd be able to just tell it what month/year we want to look at without having to specify those details again. (This could probably be accomplish in the web version via cookies.)
As far as mobile devices specifically, iOS and Android have the biggest install base, and it you make it for one, you'll probably find the users of the other wanting it as well. While I myself prefer Android, it can be a bit easier to develop for iOS since there's fewer system configurations to contend with. I use more than a few apps that were first developed for iOS and then later released on Android for this very reason (Combat Manager and TheBrain being prime examples).
I guess you mean my site showing that error... It is fixed now and thanks for pointing that out.
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Thalassogen, I love your calendar generator. I do have a suggestion based upon what was originally said about Golarion in one of the Forums.
I do not have time to look for it, but it basically said a year on Golarion was 364 days with 30 days in each month and there were exactly 52 weeks with 7 days a week. That left four extra days in a year.
I had proposed those 4 extra days were the solstices and equinoxes and they come after the 30th day of the 3rd, 6th, 9th and 12th months and be special days of the year and alwasy fall on Sunday.
This is a sample of what my calander looks like:
Abadias
MO TO WE OA FI ST SU
01 02 03 04 05 06 07
08 09 10 11 12 13 14
15 16 17 18 19 20 21
22 23 24 25 26 27 28
29 30 XX XX XX XX XX
Calistril
XX XX 01 02 03 04 05
06 07 08 09 10 11 12
13 14 15 16 17 18 19
20 21 22 23 24 25 26
27 28 29 30 XX XX XX
Pharast
XX XX XX XX 01 02 03
04 05 06 07 08 09 10
11 12 13 14 15 16 17
18 19 20 21 22 23 24
25 26 27 28 29 30 VE <<-- Vernal Equinox
Gozran
01 02 03 04 05 06 07...
Anyway, my proposal for your calendar generator is instead of having to add a month with only 1 day is to have the ability to add a special day that would tack it into the day after the last day of the previous month when the calendar is generated.
Currently you can only define 30 months each containing 45 days with 9-day long weeks.
To be able to add seasons I would have to extend the calendar tool.
Does Thalassogen's generator still exist? The link doesn't seem to go anywhere. :(
The calendar tool still exists, but I had to take it offline due to the restrictive legislation in the EU and Germany concerning web presences. I am currently reworking several sites to conform to the law.
Please e-mail me at support@jochenlinnemann.de and I will provide you with a temporary link to the old version of the tool.