Setting day and night schedule for sim.

[Jo Yardley]

I asked this before on the old fora but I thought I'd migrate it to the new forum as well.

I run a roleplay sim, 1920s Berlin.

Here I would like to have the sim the same time as RL Berlin, not the clock time but the time of day.

So when it is midnight in RL Berlin I want it to be dark in SL Berlin and when the sun goes up in RL Berlin I want it to do so in SL Berlin.

I can't believe it is so difficult to set this for a sim in SL.

You either follow official SL settings or you have to go online and manually set the sim to day or night!

Or is there an automatic way?

[Ceera Murakami]

What you want can not be done with the standard SL configuration. SL just doesn't support that option.

You could force the same rough effect using a scripted bot, where the bot account has Estate Manager rights. The bot would have to log in every hour or half hour or whatever, and change sim time to a specific fixed time. So from 2 AM to 3 AM Berlin time, the sim sun time would be locked at 2 AM, then at 3 AM it would jump to the 3 AM position, and stay there until 4 AM, etc. . If you did that every 15 minutes, it would appear fairly smooth to most visitors.

Hopefully someone else can add further information on how to set up the bot for that. I don't use scripted bots myself, so I can't fill in that part in detail.

[Peewee Musytari]

It depends where the sim is on the Grid, as far as I know the SL sun moves across the grid like the RL sun moves across the world.

 

Edit: I just checked and that is still the way it works, it is 5.56pm on my sim and if I TP to one way over to the West it is 11.20am

So if you really wanted to you could find the Grid location that matches RL Berlin and request your sim be moved there. I think there is a charge to move a sim and obviously if its mainland you can`t move it

Edit (again): Thanks Rolig, I forgot SL days aren`t 24 hours long hehe

[Rolig Loon]

I remember when you asked this question before, Jo.  The answer's still going to be the same, though.  The SL day is 3 hours long, followed by a 1 hour night.  There's no way to change that cycle, and since a full RL day is 24 hours, there's no way to match RL and SL.  Even designing a bot, as Ceera suggests, would be a hopelessly dificult job because the number of daylight hours changes all the time.  Your only decent solution is to get a corps of vounteers who are willing to reset the sim's fixed sun manually a couple of times a day.  Even then you'll only match sunup and sundown. 

[Peewee Musytari]

haha thats a good point, I forgot we have a ton of SL days to each RL day, so moving the sim would still only be right a couple of times a day lol

[Jo Yardley]

I can't believe SL is making this so difficult for us.

Well, I can.

Anyway, it does seem like this is the only way.

I'll look into it.

[Jo Yardley]

It is insane that they make this what seems to be, or should be so basic, so difficult for us.

Maybe something like a scripted bot that changes the time now and then, it seems that is the only solution so far.

Lets hope one day a Linden notices us wondering about this and realises how easy it would be to make this a handy SL option we could actually use!

[Rolig Loon]

Handy, yes, although I have to wonder how many people worry about whether SL and RL are on the same sun cycle. Personally, I always treat my time in world as if I had teleported to another spot on the RL globe that happened to be in a different time zone. It rarely occurs to me that the RL sun shouldn't be up while my own is down. The only thing that's mildly annoying is the length of the day, but I've become accustomed even to that.

 

As for "easy" ..... I'm not sure that it would be possible to change the 4-hour SL day to a 24-hour one for one sim at a time. Too many scripted functions (like llGetWallclock or llGetTimeOfDay, which drive many SL timekeeping scripts) depend on the "standard" definition of time.

[Jo Yardley]

Generally it doesn't matter what time it is in a sim, but when you run a Historical Roleplay sim based on a real city and real past, it can be very handy and part of the experience.

We have our daily happy hour at a night club at 11 at night... in RL.

That is 2 pm in SL and if you don't live in Europe you may mistake our bar happy hour with tea time.

Also for roleplay it can be important to know you're walking around a city at midnight, especially in the bad side of town

 

In may we are re-enacting a historical events; riots.

There will be a cerfew, streets will be blocked off, police armed.

All based on RL events.

Then too, it will be handy for visitors to know what time of day it is there.

 

When you want realism, having a real time of day is just another little detail.

Personally I'd love to visit a sim and realise it is midnight in that part of the world now while it is day where I am in RL.

[Ceera Murakami]

RE Rollig's comment, I just checked, and the Estate controls for fixed sun do cover an equal day/night range of possibilities. My suggestion wouldn't have the day cycle in use at all - it would force a specific fixed time 24 or more times per real 24 hours, based on your PC's clock, not on SL time and SL's 3 hours daylight + 1 hour night schedule.

BUT... the Estate slider for fixed sun position doesn't show you a specific time of day, like the Windlight day cycle choices do. So the bot would have to position the slider based on a relative position left to right. Probably best if it first moves the control all the way left, then moves it a fixed distance for that time choice to the right, then applies it. But since that action is not a numeric entry field, making a bot move the slider to the position you choose could be a real pain.

[Jo Yardley]

Right now I'd be extremely happy with just being able to have a bot set the sim to midnight or noon now and then, adding details is extra