English weight option

[Injured Muffalo]

English weight is that used in the United States, referring to pounds and ounces. So if you're not from there, you already have an intelligible weight readout. I've heard the comments before; thank you and goodbye. But for me (or us perhaps) it is a bit hazy.

What I suggest is a menu option for that. If you wanted, you could just switch the label. But surely we can do better than that; the amounts would be silly. Or you could do a direct conversion, which FYI is 2.2lb/kg. I still feel the amounts would be silly (because of uneven amounts). I suggest a rounding internally in which a kg = 2lb. That is plausible and rounded. A colonist can carry 70lb, your club is 4lb and so forth.

If we wanted to be thorough, please note, in a pound there are 16 ounces; 1 ounce = .0625lb. But with rounding I have a feeling it isn't important; I don't know of items that weigh so little. If we wanted to make a deal with the devil, we could decimalize it.

Also, since the subject is inevitable, I fear, this isn't about "what the colonists on a rimworld would use." Who knows; maybe thousands of years from now some other system will be in use. This idea is simply about the interface for those of us from the U.S. so we know what we're looking at on our caravans.

[AileTheAlien]

Approximating with 1 kg -> 2 lbs would be good enough, simple, and leave the rest of the UI and game looking pretty reasonable.

[Lemonater47]

English weight option? ?

You mean American weight option lol. Since the United States is quite literally the only English speaking nation that doesn't use the metric system. America instead uses the original imperial system.

[AileTheAlien]

According to this map on Wikipedia, England's also not 100% metric. However we could actually avoid this whole debate, by just using imaginary units. The months and month lengths in the game are already made-up. Why not just use something like "stone" if your starting faction is tribal, "bars" if you're industrial, or "standards" if your starting faction is spacer-level.

[Songleaves]

English weight option? ?

You mean American weight option lol. Since the United States is quite literally the only English speaking nation that doesn't use the metric system. America instead uses the original imperial system.

See: English units and English Engineering units

[Dargaron]

According to this map on Wikipedia, England's also not 100% metric. However we could actually avoid this whole debate, by just using imaginary units. The months and month lengths in the game are already made-up. Why not just use something like "stone" if your starting faction is tribal, "bars" if you're industrial, or "standards" if your starting faction is spacer-level.

All weapons should be measured in killy-grams...

On-topic: I'm not sure metric vs. imperial are quite as important to translate as Celsius vs. Fahrenheit, since with temperature, since the only occasion when weight comes up in gameplay (IIRC) is during caravan formation, where you've got a fairly convenient piece of UI telling you exactly how much space is left and how much each unit weighs. Temperature, on the other hand, has certain objective points that you need to watch out for (IIRC, plants don't grow below zero C or 32 F), in addition to the colonist-to-colonist temperature tolerance. 

[SpaceDorf]

I would say this is an excellent opportunity for our american friends to learn something through gaming something about  how the rest of the World works.

[Songleaves]

I would say this is an excellent opportunity for our american friends to learn something through gaming something about  how the rest of the World works.

More like an opportunity to mislead Americans on how much things weigh in kg. Look at the rats, an adult one weighs 10.5 kg in Rimworld!

[Lemonater47]

I would say this is an excellent opportunity for our american friends to learn something through gaming something about  how the rest of the World works.

More like an opportunity to mislead Americans on how much things weigh in kg. Look at the rats, an adult one weighs 10.5 kg in Rimworld!

Didn't notice that lol. A large city rat is 1/10th of that. Some species of pet rats which have been overfed have been up to 4kg. But even that is an extremely obese rat. Not the weight of a healthy rat.

[lancar]

I would say this is an excellent opportunity for our american friends to learn something through gaming something about  how the rest of the World works.

More like an opportunity to mislead Americans on how much things weigh in kg. Look at the rats, an adult one weighs 10.5 kg in Rimworld!

Didn't notice that lol. A large city rat is 1/10th of that. Some species of pet rats which have been overfed have been up to 4kg. But even that is an extremely obese rat. Not the weight of a healthy rat.

It's probably a genetically engineered killer rat. From space.

[marten]

I use myself metric because I am Dutch. I have the same expertise when I play games in Imperial I feel aliened. And I am lazy I will not learn a complete system that makes no sense I my head. Because I play a game for fun not for learning a new system. So I feel for you US, Liberia and Myanmar.

And that is why I am for imperial option in Rim.

[BlackSmokeDMax]

Not sure why the system matters. You have a weight and a weight limit in numbers. This could be a totally made up system and it wouldn't matter, as long as your total weight doesn't exceed the weight limit, you don't have a problem. Whether that is labeled in lbs., kg, or some madeup ZQR scale, either the numbers added up are either under, at, or over the weight limit.

Hell, you could just mod the game to change the labels from kg to lbs.

Is there some reason I am not thinking of where you would need to know the system being used?

[BlackSmokeDMax]

I would say this is an excellent opportunity for our american friends to learn something through gaming something about  how the rest of the World works.

Not sure what they are teaching now, but having went through American public schools in the 70's and 80's we were all taught the metric system. Now, the conversion factors weren't necessarily beat into our heads.

Being in the machining field I use both interchangeably, well in length measuring that is, not so much the weight or temps. So, changing from inches to mm, and the opposite, is done almost everyday in our shop. Not really any advantages with either in that regard. You don't really worry about changing scale at all, meaning we don't go from inches to feet, anymore than we go from mm to m, so the metric advantage is lost there.

With temps, if you just leave the game in C, you do learn pretty quickly what the numbers other than 0 are pretty quickly. I leave out 0 because that one is so obvious. Prior to this game I really had no frame of reference for other temps like room temp, or really hot days in C. I have known the conversion for that in my head for a long time now though. Not sure why I learned that, other than just being interested and whenever seeing it somewhere, mentally doing the conversion. Just probably hadn't done it enough to get a real feel for it. Like that innate feeling you know the warmth by hearing the number that we as Americans have for the Fahrenheit numbers, and of course most of the world knows when they hear Celsius (centigrade) numbers.

Speaking of Celsius and Centigrade, which of these two does most of the world use? Is that something that changes around the world? I know they are the same, but which name is used mostly?

[niklas7737]

Speaking of Celsius and Centrigrade, which of these two does most of the world use? Is that something that changes around the world? I know they are the same, but which name is used mostly?

In Germany, we say "Grad Celsius" which translates directly to "degrees Celsius". You will therefore virtually never hear a person speaking German as a first language use "centigrade" when speaking about temperatures in English.

[Injured Muffalo]

Not sure why the system matters.

It doesn't. But where do you draw the line? Why is almost all life from earth? (Was each rimworld terraformed from a dead world?) Why isn't the gravity different each game? Why is silver the currency? Why doesn't the game simply use generic decimalized units? It may in the future - so for instance a man can carry 100 units of whatever name. That won't change the likeness of mass to that on Earth, as long as we are discussing Earth lifeforms doing their necessary stuff. Exempli gratia, a hat weighs what it weighs.

However, for whatever reasons, probably helping us to empathize with the setting and the people in it, there is a lot of earthly convention in the game. Earthly weather, and items, I mean, the goal here isn't alien game with alien goals. It's people game with people goals. So I see an attraction to having authentic measurement systems in the game even if they aren't an integral part of it.