A17 Brainstorming - How to Name Yearly Quarters?

[DariusWolfe]

Limdood makes a solid point, but suggestions by The Man with No Name and ymc are evocative enough that I'm changing my vote.

Although, Secundus Borealis/Australis seem kind of lengthy; My only complaint.

[Tynan]

Aprimay has a definite connotation that anyone on earth already understands...northern hemisphere folks intrinsically understand "spring" and southern intrinsically understand "fall"

"April", "May", "Aprimay", and "Maypril" all work just fine.  EVERYONE understands that they're referring to the times of year corresponding to april and may on earth.  Earthlike planets would have conditions similar to earth at that time.

"1st quarter", "Primus", or "Gobbledyguck" don't have that intrinsic understanding built in.

I argue that the comfort and familiarity is a big help for the "Aprimay" system.  I ALSO argue that the possibility of "Aprimay" to be jarringly wrong (you settled in the southern hemisphere of an earthlike planet while you live in earth's northern hemisphere IRL, so spring is fall now) HELPS enrich the game, and gives you that moment of "Oh! i get it now! thats cool!"

I would be fine with Tynan keeping Aprimay, or changing it to April or May, but would be disappointed to see the quadrums receive nonsense names or names with no current real world association that naturally comes to mind (the impersonal "1st quarter...")

That's pretty much where I ended up too (after going through the same chain of reasoning as this discussion privately :p).

[Neotic]

I second the use of naming the seasons their Latin counterparts

vêr                   spring
aestâs           summer
autumnum   fall
hiems           winter

This would make "Autumnun" Springtime in the southern hemisphere.  I think the idea was to find names that are hemisphere-neutral.

okay if the problem is Autumnun is to similar to Autumn how about it's replaced with the latin word for change "mutatio" since summer to winter is a change. so it would be
vêr                   spring
aestâs           summer
mutatio         (change)fall
hiems           winter

[ymc]

I think we have a winner.

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[Boston]

These names sound incredibly foolish, bordering on the absurd. My 3 year old niece would look askance at these mish-mashed words.

What, pray tell, is 'wrong" with Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter?

[Tynan]

These names sound incredibly foolish, bordering on the absurd. My 3 year old niece would look askance at these mish-mashed words.

What, pray tell, is 'wrong" with Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter?

Could you please read the thread? These words are totally unusable as a global date system, and the reason why has been explained.

[FrozenSnowFox]

I think the Decembary thing sounds a bit silly.  I'm not all that hung up on the naming though.  What I want to know at a glance without mousing over a tooltip or trying to remember which hemisphere my base is in is what season it is.  So something like this Quarter 1 - Summer.  The season should be specific to the current base.  So While it shows Quarter 1 - Summer for my southern base it'll show Quarter 1 - Winter for my northern base.

[Tynan]

Yeah, maybe we'll start showing season by default. We'll see. It'd require another line though. Usually season is pretty obvious just from looking at the map though. Plus there are the "season starting" messages. But it might get added. Probably not in A17 though.

[ArguedPiano]

I appreciate your efforts on a seemingly small complaint. Surely there are more important things you could be focusing your efforts on. I think it's great you actively listen to and interact with the community you've created. Keep up the good work!

[Tynan]

Thanks Piano.

[O Negative]

Looking back on this, I think the issue is rather trivial. I guess it's just one of those immersive small details that got broken for me.

If I might make a small suggestion, to allow the modding community to easily change the <label> of each quadrum's name in some kind of (.xml) def file.
Can't say I know if it's possible via .dll, but even letting novice modders in on the opportunity would be great.

I feel like this might offer you a greater insight as to which names people are and are not fond of with respect to naming.
You could use the Steam Workshop numbers and even your own forum(s) as a powerful tool for data collection.
The best part of it all is that you wouldn't have to waste your focus on this issue for a while (A18, perhaps?)

For now, I think the changes you've made to the UI (shared by ymc) are more than sufficient for most of us.

[Zhentar]

Modders can change any text in the game using xml files, through the translation system.

Yeah, maybe we'll start showing season by default. We'll see. It'd require another line though. Usually season is pretty obvious just from looking at the map though. Plus there are the "season starting" messages. But it might get added. Probably not in A17 though.

When I'm on an extreme cold or hot map, I can't identify the season by looking at the map and I don't get the "season has begun" message (because the seasons are deemed not meaningful). But I do still care about the season - specifically, I care about whether it's currently getting colder or hotter, and how close I am to the peak temperature days

[O Negative]

Modders can change any text in the game using xml files, through the translation system.

Welp, you're absolutely right! The file path is: .../RimWorld/Mods/Core/Languages/English/Keyed/Time.xml

That's my own ignorance at work. Thanks for letting me know though! I'll probably tinker with this on my own free time & in my own playthroughs.

[Omega_K2]

I may still rename the quadrums, but my sense of it is that it's going to end up being 4 quadrums (with whatever names).

The key advantage of the month-mashed names is that you can tell what they correspond to in real life. Names like "Teritus" are totally abstract and don't leverage any pre-existing knowledge the player may have. When is Jugust? North-hemisphere summer, obviously. When is Secundus? Heck if I know.

That said I think the Latin names sound cooler in a way. They're nicer aesthetically but worse informationally IMO.

Regarding seasons, I think that communicating the date is a different problem from communicating the season. These things can't both be solved in one system. So the latest update of the game communicates season more prominently on the date tooltip, and I'll be checking to ensure the "season X has begun" messages are firing correctly. But the real takeaway is that there isn't a way to make one system that communicates both date and season.

I think having two systems, one for dating and one for giving information about climate would be best solution.

I don't think re-using our calendar is a good idea, it's based on the earth and conveys too much extra information depending on where people live they might expect the months to mean anything when they're just portioning the rim world year into sections.

It might be good to plan ahead for potentially allowing variance in the length of a year when naming things. For some strange reason every rimworld is the same currently, but considering it's an alien planet it would make sense if there was some variance - for example, on some rim worlds a year could take 120 days, on some 60 like now, on others only 30. Not sure if this planned to be added in the future, but I think it would be a nice touch and make for interesting game play. (longer or shorter hot/cold seasons).

For that reason I would not use the word "quadrum" as a replacement for month as it always implies having fourth sections. Not sure what a good replacement would be though, perhaps month would/do still, but it still has the same problem that people associate our current date system with it. Though some more educated people might know that there actually are different types of months.

Latin ordinal names (OP's option 5 here) might be good solution for the name of quadrums/months/etc since you could extend them as needed and they don't have much extra meaning attached to them other then being first, the second, etc. Or just numbers instead of names.


As for climate, I would add a separate tool tip/section below the date that denotes the current climate(s). Something like hot season/cold season/growing season/rain season/summer/winter/etc. I think the advantage here would be that you can always specifically show the current climate(s) the player is in depending on the location of the player and how long they'd last. So people could see that they have a very long cold season in Boreal Forest, and only a relatively short warm season.
Overall this adds more flexibility to the system as well. For example if there was be an option for a rotation locked planet (one side faces always the sun) in the future, it would always be hot (always day) on side of the planet and cold on the other side (always night), resulting in mostly year-round seasons.
 
I specifically mentioned multiple seasons in case there might be some interesting overlaps. For example climate-cycle enabled stories, it could show the planet is currently going through a cold/warming up/hot/cooling down period in addition to the regular seasons.

[Ouroboros]

Personally, I think the change from Spring, Sunmer, Fall, and Winter to Primus, Secundus, Tertius, and Quartus is more intuitive than the mashed up month names. But I could be in the minority (I usually am. Lol)

Also, how is Secundus any less informational than Quadrum? Lol

I actually like this one the most. It is easy to understand, sounds good and fits the sci fi theme.