Tying game progression/date to real world time passage

[Darinth]

I'm curious if there's a way (either within a setting, which I doubt, or if the modding API is strong enough to do it) to decouple the day/night cycle from the in-game 'date' and instead tying it to real world time passage. Example: Tying each in-game date change to real world date change, without affecting day-night cycle. The game would still cycle through day and night normally (60 real world minutes to 1 day) but it would repeat 'day 1' until 1 real world day has passed, at which point it would continue on to day 2 until a full real-world day has passed, etc...

My goal is to give players more incentive to want to spend time playing the game and not to have to limit play time to when most players are able to play so that we're not wasting the precious in-game clock between blood moons. So that people can log in and play as much as they want, and should generally be rewarded for doing so, knowing that say every tuesday... we're going to have hordes to survive. And I'm fine (in fact think it'd be really cool and interesting) if literally every night on the real world tuesday we had to deal with a blood moon.

I can, probably, do most if not all of this by manually doing things like changing the blood moon frequency on tuesday to be 'every day' and otherwise turning it off and resetting the time from time occasionally. I might even be able to automate it by writing a program that will connect to the telnet port, and change the game parameters at appropriate real world times. I seem to recall running into an issue with the game not liking the idea of repeating blood moons that have already been passed (so once the day 7 blood moon has occured, it can't occure again even if I reset the time to day 7 at 20:00 and wait for it to continue on to 22:00)

Does anybody else have good ideas to make a setup like this work?

 

[AuroraGiggleFairy]

Hmmm... This is a really interesting idea! I like the server side of this. People can know exactly when the next blood moons are supposedly. My other thought is this:

1.) Make it to where time in the server keeps going even without players in it.

2.) Then you can change the blood moon frequency to occur on the particular nights you'd like!

Any ideas on that first part? lol. I'll look too. I like this concept.

 

[Darinth]

A good bit of luck manually using commands from the console to enable-disable blood moons on demand. We had our first set of back-to-back blood moons today. 2 in a row. A minor glitch that I think at least in 1 case was the AI glitching out. Console showed all 40 zombies (5 of us, 8 zombies each) were spawned... but nothing was assaulting us the second blood moon. Reset time, zombies unloaded, and when the blood moon came around again we were gold.

The only major issue I've ran into is that since I'm not always around and am currently manually reseting the date from time to time, the trader restock date is actually a week+ into the futurebecause that's how far the clock had gotten. Don't know how to resolve the restock date issue. Also, trader jen has fallen into the floor. But that's a different unrelated issue. lol.

 

[Darinth]

Week 2 of multiple blood moons very successful. No issues with the blood moons themselves. It's pretty easy to turn them on and off. 

Issues with the game in general:

If the game moves forward to x day and you move back to y day, many of the spawn mechanics can get @%$*#!ed up until you make it back to day x. No supply drops. We had little-to-no zombies spawning just roaming around. Screamers and hordes stopped spawning in response to heat. It was a little disheartening. The trader inventory can be refreshed manually be switching into debug mode and using the admin option to force a restock, but that's at best tedious. It's mostly acceptable... but I'd really like to have a way to fix these issues, which at this point means looking further into the modding API.

 

[Laz Man]

On our server we don't mess with the time.  Doing so can mess spawning so I refrain from touching it.

Since people all have different real life schedules we do bloodmoons when we want them (e.g. enable BM everyday then turn off after event).

This allows those who like to play more the freedom to do so without worry of eating up the clock until the next blood moon.

However, The big draw back to this is it removes the need to manage your time wisely since BMs are off until we say so.  We are a more casual bunch that likes questing/exploring/building so this works for us.

 

[Darinth]

And after doing a little more research and looking through the XML , I've realized that the reason I had behind manipulating the time isn't actually valid. I thought that gamestage was based on world time partially. So my goal was to keep the world time from going too far forward. Now that I know (per the xml) exactly how it's calculated, I've realized that I can just safely leave the time alone and turn blood moons on/off as I want (for my group, that's likely to be a set schedule. We like the impending doom that is an upcoming event that if we don't take time to prep for will murder us, but we also like to be able to log on and play whenever).

Given that... most of this topic actually seems kinda silly now.