Replace Character Age w/ Birthdate

[Carver]

Per the title. I'm forgetful and can barely keep track of the birthday and therefore age of more than 3 characters, leading me to just aging everyone up on the same day each day (and then later in the year wondering if I did so or not). I'd rather not need to keep external reminders of this; given the game has a system tracking the day, I figured why not suggest an option to let people pick a birthdate for their character on the creation menu and leave it to the game itself to calculate their age - negating the need for someone to age up their characters annually.

To avoid misinterpretation; This isn't for records, this is for the character creation menus - leaving it so the game auto-calculates your character age for you and ages your character without needing further player input.

[greenjoe]

I remember world server having a system like this, perhaps it is port-able

[EJJ]

I think this would be cool. Having a bit more IC push to have characters remember each other's birthdays and stuff would be fun.

[Confused rock]

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE math is so hard

[Desven]

How would we limit character ages? Certain species have age restrictions. Not to mention how messy it would get with Vaurcae.

[Carver]

1 hour ago, Desven said:

How would we limit character ages? Certain species have age restrictions. Not to mention how messy it would get with Vaurcae.

In theory, reset the age/birthdate to the default if someone inputs a birthdate that results in an invalid age number after calculation.

[greenjoe]

2 hours ago, Carver said:

In theory, reset the age/birthdate to the default if someone inputs a birthdate that results in an invalid age number after calculation.

I think what they mean is

Say someone has a character very close to the limit

Time passes and the character's birthdate now is past the limit. What happens then?

Resetting their age to the default does not seem the best option 

[Carver]

1 hour ago, greenjoe said:

I think what they mean is

Say someone has a character very close to the limit

Time passes and the character's birthdate now is past the limit. What happens then?

Resetting their age to the default does not seem the best option 

I'm not especially sure. This example already runs into a wall with the current system (you can't really exceed age limits as it were without asking for staff assistance), but in most cases I imagine it would be rare as few people are making characters near the limits. I'm no coder, but I would wager that one should do a single 'legality check' upon input while having it so further updates don't check for legality. If someone's breaking the system in some absurd way, you'd probably just report it to staff as one would with most character irregularities.

[Owen]

Bumping this because I still think it’s a good idea

[Tomixcomics]

Honestly, +1. This sounds like a good idea to me.

[Butterrobber202]

please add this I can't keep track of all these birthdays HELP

[Ricky_the_banshee]

Birthdays sound cool. If devs can feasibly accomplish this system, I'm all for it. +1

[wowzewow]

It's going to make it much harder for staff to keep track of age, species and job age restrictions.

 

Unless this is properly coded with all of the loopholes patched up I'm feeling a strong no, even though I think it's quite alright as an idea.

[Carver]

15 hours ago, wowzewow said:

It's going to make it much harder for staff to keep track of age, species and job age restrictions.

 

Unless this is properly coded with all of the loopholes patched up I'm feeling a strong no, even though I think it's quite alright as an idea.

This shouldn’t in any way affect checking character age via view variables, at least in theory.
 

Ideally it would be something that exists predominantly in character setup, and I suppose a lazier and safe implementation would be inputting birthday and it only calculating age (against the server’s date) on that initial input whilst saving the input for you to recalculate it at any time you desire - a softer reminder that doesn’t stress the server with repeated calculation on every round.

[lilahnovi]

Or maybe just a box where you an input the character's birthday, without the year? Like, under age in the character set up, we stick in-- March 3! Or whatever. At least then we have some idea of people's birthdays and it's not something the server has to recalculate.

[Carver]

5 hours ago, lilahnovi said:

Or maybe just a box where you an input the character's birthday, without the year? Like, under age in the character set up, we stick in-- March 3! Or whatever. At least then we have some idea of people's birthdays and it's not something the server has to recalculate.

To be truthful, the year is the part most valuable to me when making this suggestion. A calculation that only repeats on manual/user input shouldn't be unreasonable, at least conceptually.