Time Manager Readme
v1.21

by Tekuromoto

Download at http://bit.ly/13Z3Rp

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Introduction
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Time Manager is a multi-function suite of time-related functions, including Variable Timescale, Immersive Waiting, Timed Training and Timed Menus, Clock Display featuring an immersive timekeeping option, and a Realtime Alarm Clock.

I was inspired to make Time Manager after trying a bunch of different mods with time-related features; either they didn't do all that I wanted, or they were bundled with a bunch of features I didn't need, or I simply felt I could improve upon their implementation. Thus Time Manager was born.

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Requirements
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Oblivion Script Extender version 17. Get the latest version here: http://obse.silverlock.org/

Pluggy version 126. Get the latest version here: http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=23979

You MUST have OBSE v17 and Pluggy v126 to use all of the features of this mod. If you for some inexplicable reason do not want to install Pluggy v126, you still be able to use most of the features of the mod, but the Realtime Alarm will not work and you will not be given the Alarm config item. If Time Manages doesn't work as expected, please ensure that you have the latest versions of OBSE and Pluggy installed before reporting any bugs.

Time Manager was developed with Oblivion 1.2.0416, OBSE v17a, Pluggy v126, and over 200 mods of all sorts installed (Fran's, MMM, COBL, body replacers, Race Balancing Project, LAME, All Natural, Better Cities, Unique Landscapes, quests, you name it). I haven't tested it with Shivering Isles or any DLCs (because I don't have them), but it _should_ work just fine with any setup.

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Installation
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Time Manager comes packaged in omod-ready format. If you use OBMM, simply select "create" to make a new omod, "add archive" and select the .zip file you downloaded, import the included omod conversion data, and hit "create omod". Once it's finished (it should be lightning fast since there are no textures or anything fancy), double-click the new omod in your list.

If you prefer to install manually, simply unzip the contents of the archive to your Oblivion\data\ directory. You can delete the "omod conversion data" folder, but it won't hurt anything if you leave it alone.

If you installed manually, you will have to activate the mod using either the Oblivion Launcher or Wrye Bash. OBMM/omod installation automatically activates the .esp file when you activate the .omod.

Once the files are in place and the .esp is activated, simply fire up Oblivion (with the OBSE launcher, of course).

Load order should not matter: everything in the mod is new, and no vanilla items are changed - all of the scripts and objects are original. Even if you have a mod active that sets the timescale, such as one of the Fran's Timescale/Respawn mini-mods, it shouldn't matter because TM changes the timescale on-the-fly (assuming you use the Variable Timescale function).

Upgrading
---------
No special steps are required to upgrade to v1.2 of Time Manager, however it is always a good idea to make a backup of your saved game before installing, upgrading, or removing any mod.

If you're upgrading from v1.0, note that there is a new configuration file with several new settings as of v1.1, so you will need to edit the new file with your preferences after installing the new version. It would be best to backup your v1.0 ini file before overwriting it with the new one if you made lots of changes to it.

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Customization
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Time Manager features six separate optional modules, each of which is fully customizable via the included file "DS Time Manager.ini". This file is located in \Oblivion\data\, but if you prefer to tidy your Data directory the mod will also look in \Oblivion\data\ini\ for the config file.

By default, the mod is usable out-of-the-box with the values in the ini file, but you can open the file with Notepad or something similar and adjust the values to your liking. Any of the modules can be turned on or off (via the ini file) at any time without affecting the other functions of the mod.

Variable Timescale
------------------
This function allows you to set the time in the game to pass at different rates depending upon where you are and what your are doing in the game. The default timescale for Oblivion is 30; this means that for every minute that passes in real life, 30 pass in the game. If you play for an hour, almost a day-and-a-half go by in the game. While this may feel realistic when traveling from city to city, it's not very realistic to finish a battle with a couple of opponents and look up to find that the sun has travelled half way across the sky since you started fighting. Conversely, setting the timescale to a lower value - some people even play with the timescale set to 1! - can make the gameworld feel very compressed: with a low timescale, it's possible to walk the length and breadth of Cyrodiil in a couple of game hours, the opposite of the combat problem above.

TM's Variable Timescale function lets you set different timescales for combat, while sneaking (whether or not your character is detected), or while in interiors, towns, Oblivion realms, or the wide world in general. Setting the world timescale to the default of 30 (or even higher) lets you feel like time is actually passing while you're travelling from place to place, while setting the combat timescale to, say, 5, makes time seem to slow down in combat. Note that this only affects how fast time passes in the game - how many game minutes pass in a real minute - and is not a slow motion sort of effect. It is also fully compatible with "bullet-time" type effects from mods like Deadly Reflex.

There are two modes for the "fallout behaviour" of Variable Timescale. The first, mode 0 (the default), checks for your character's location or situation in the following order: is in combat --> is sneaking --> is in an interior (including dungeons, shops, Oblvion dungeons, etc) --> is outside in Tamriel (the regular world) --> is outside in an Oblivion plane.
The first parameter that tests true for your character is what your timescale is set to. If all of the checks fail, the Town timescale is used.

The second, mode 1, always uses the lowest applicable timescale. For example, if you're sneaking and in combat in a dungeon, the lower of CombatTimescale, SneakingTimescale and InteriorTimescale will be used.

If you dislike the idea of abrupt timescale changes when you change from one location or situation to another, you can ativate the SlowTimescaleChange option. Setting this to anything over 0 will cause the timescale to tick downwards towards the new timescale at a rate of once every number of seconds you choose, and tick upwards half as fast. That is, setting it to 1 will cause the timescale to tick downwards one unit (30 to 29 to 28...) every 1 second, and upwards one unit every 2 seconds. I recommend not setting this much higher than 5 or so, or it can take an awfully long time to adjust from (for example) a low Interior timescale to a high World timescale. Even when using this option, the timescale will change instantly when entering combat or when toggling in or out of sneaking mode (assuming you're using values other than 0 for these timescale options).

Configuring Variable Timescale in the ini file is simple: enable the function and select the values you'd like to use for each of the timescale settings, select the fallout mode you wish to use, and adjust the SlowTimescaleChange setting to suit your tastes.

Immersive Waiting
-----------------
This function replaces the standard Oblivion waiting count-down messagebox with an immersive, real-time view of the world passing by as you wait. Pressing the wait key (T by default) will bring up a menu asking how long you'd like to wait, or if you'd like to wait indefinitely. Once you begin waiting, you can press the wait key again to stop waiting at any time, or you will automatically stop waiting when the time you've chosen has elapsed or if someone (or something) hostile approaches.

While waiting, the timescale is turned waaay up - by default, to 60 times the normal speed. This makes a single game hour go by in 2 realworld seconds. To compensate for this accelerated time all nearby actors are sped up considerably to help them get where they need to be on time, according to their AI packages. Sometimes they get a little confused though, especially if you adjust the timescale even higher. They may get confused and start standing about looking lost, but they will regain their senses once you stop waiting and will get on with their lives after an hour or two pass. Actors are also prevented from talking to eachother or to the player to help preserve the illusion of time zipping by.

One caveat for Immersive Waiting concerns the so-called "survival" mods: those that give you character the requirement to eat, drink, and/or sleep. Depending on how the particular survival mod functions, changing the timescale may adversely affect its function. You may also be subject to massive message spam as your character gets hunger/thirst/sleep messages while you're waiting. I know that Vim & Vigor Advanced in particular does not play nice with timescale changes due to the nature of the mod. This would be especially true if you used the purge magic effects option (see configuration, below) because the meals in VVA are essentially long-duration potion effects.

Immersive Waiting has a number of options that you can configure in the ini file. You can set the timescale you want to wait at (see the notes in the ini file). Setting the timescale really high (over 4800 or so) is neat for just watching the sun and stars wheel by but tends to really confuse NPCs, and will possibly play havok with any survival mods you may be running. You can toggle the display of timekeeping messages while waiting, as well as select the format for the messages (see Clock Display, below, for more on the clock formats). The messages are timed to try to reduce message spam: they only appear every 3 seconds, no matter how many hours are passing per second. You can also toggle a visual blur effect while waiting, and select whether or not the game will save before waiting starts. Finally, you can opt to have any timed effects (ie, potion or spell effects) dispelled when waiting starts. This option exists because the duration for spell effects is in real world seconds; passing 10 game hours in 20 seconds and still having your Night Eye or Fire Shield in effect isn't very realistic. Unfortunately there is no option to adjust the duration of active effects at this time. Perhaps this feature will be in OBSE v18, but for now the only option is to remove them or ignore the timekeeping inconsistency.

Timed Training
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This feature allows you to specify an amount of time that you want to have pass every time you use a trainer to train one of your skills. Simply change the setting in the ini file to the number of hours you want to have the clock adjusted by for each skill level you gain. Be careful not to set this too high and then train a bunch of times in a row if you're using a survival mod, or you may exit the training menu to find that you're debilitated by hunger or some such.

Timed Menus
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Normally, whenever you have a menu open the game is on pause. No time passes in the game when you are in your inventory or checking your stats, or mixing potions or buying equipment, or even just talking to the locals. The Timed Menus function of Time Manager aims to solve this problem. What TM does not - and cannot - do is make the game world carry on while the menu is open. This cannot be achieved with the game engine. The game is on pause when any kind of menu is open. Timed Menus simply records the elapsed time and adds it to gametime once the menu is closed.

There are 6 different menu types that you can configure the realtime to gametime ratio for: the character menus (stats, inventory, etc), interaction menus (barter, dialog, etc), containers (any non-barter containers), books, lockpicking, and repairing/crafting (repair, alchemy, spellmaking, etc). By default each realtime second in the menu is converted to a gametime second and added to the game clock when you exit the menu.

You can also opt to set a timescale multiple for each menu type. The way it works is simple: With TimescaleMult set to 0, one minute in menus adds one minute to gametime (realtime spent in the menu times the menu factor). This is contrary to the usual realtime/gametime ratio, and adding a few seconds to gametime is really very trival when you consider that at the default timescale of 30 there are 30 seconds passing in game for every realtime second. Setting TimescaleMult to anything more than 0 makes the time that passes in menu relative to both the realtime spent in the menu and the current game timescale (realtime x factor x timescale x TimescaleMult).

Finally, it is also possible to specify a TimescaleCap for each menu type; if set, this cap will limit the value that is used for the timescale calculation detailed above. If set to 0, the current timescale will always be used. This allows you to have the full timed menu effect but mitigate it slightly so that, for example, transactions with merchants are always done at no higher than timescale 15.

Here are some examples, using variables and settings from the ini file:
Seconds spent in character menu = 60
Timescale = 30
CharacterFactor = 1
CharTimescaleMult = 0
The calculation is seconds x factor (timescale is disregarded), so:
60 x 1 = 60 seconds = 1 game minute passes because the timescale is not considered.

Seconds spent in character menu = 60
Timescale = 30
CharacterFactor = 1
CharTimescaleMult = 1
The calculation this time is seconds x factor x timescale x multiple, so:
60 x 1 x 30 x 1 = 1800 seconds (or 30 minutes) pass in game, which is exactly how much time would pass in game if you spent 60 seconds doing something non-menu-related.

Seconds spent in alchemy menu = 60
Timescale = 10 (say we're indoors in our alchemy lab, or we've set RepairTimescaleCap to 10)
RepairCreateFactor = 25 (we've decided it takes longer in-game to craft potions than it does for us to just click the buttons in real life)
RepairTimescaleMult = 1
60 x 25 x 10 x 1 = 15000 seconds (250 minutes, or a little over 4 hours) have elapsed in the game - imagine stumbling out from the lab and rubbing your eyes to find the afternoon has passed you by while you brewed those healing potions - and your stomach is grumbling, too! (Thanks to that survival mod you're using.)

As you can see, leaving TimescaleMult at 1 makes the time spent in the menus seem more "realistic", especially in conjunction with different menufactors for the various menus, but the option exists to disable it if it's playing havok with your survival mod (see Immersive Waiting, above) or you find some other incompatibility. You can also disable it per menu type, in case you don't like the idea of many minutes passing by in the game while you read your latest quest entry or something.

If you are using the Clock Display's interval feature, the clock will display if enough gametime is added to tick past your next time interval.

As with Immersive Waiting, Timed Menus has the potential to confuse other time-sensitive mods like survival mods. This is especially so because when you return from a menu the intervening time doesn't really take place; instead, its skipped over. It's sort of anologous to setting your watch ahead an hour. If another mod is waiting until it's 12:00 to do something, and Timed Menus sets the time ahead from 11:29 to 12:05, the other mod may get confused. The other mod _should_ be set up such that it does its thing as soon as the time is past 12:00, but if it's not written that way then TM's Timed Menus function may make it act strangely.

One last thing to mention for Timed Menus: if you're in the habit of opening your inventory or some other menu to pause the game while you get a soda or answer the phone, you'll have to start using the escape key or something instead to avoid wasting a ton of game time while you're of attending to real life. With the default ini settings, the following menus are timed: all four character menus and their submenus (F1 through F4 pages), all containers, all interaction menus except training (dialog, persuasion, barter, haggle, spell purchase), reading books and scrolls, the lockpicking menu, all repair and creation menus (repair including NPCs repairing for you, alchemy, spellmaking, enchanting, recharging, sigil stones). All other menus (including the console, the [ESC] options menu, and "make a selection" message boxes from activating items etc.) are disregarded for timekeeping purposes and are safe to use to pause the game.

Clock Display
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This feature of Time Manager is fairly self-explanatory. It can be configured to display the time at regular intervals and/or when you press a key (Y by default), and you can select the format for the display: time only, time and day of the week, or time and full date including month and year. You can select to use a 12-hour or 24-hour clock, or to have the time immersively displayed; instead of being told "it's 2:37 pm on Morndas", you only know "it's the afternoon of Morndas". This is an excellent complement to WillieSea's outstanding Clocks of Cyrodiil mod (unsolicited plug: http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=11778) - use the sun and stars to gauge the time in the wilderness, or get the "correct" time at your nearest pub or mage's guild.

On a technical note, using the immersive clock display will tell you when it's sunrise and sunset, based on the times set up in the current climate. This means it's compatible with any weather- or climate-changing mod; you won't see a message like "It's near dawn" when the sun's already been up for two hours.

If you define an interval (anything over 0) in the ini file, the clock will be displayed whenever the minutes of the gametime are a multiple of the interval; that is, if you have the interval set to 15, the clock will display on the hour, at quarter-past, at half-past, and at quarter-to the hour. With an interval of 60 the clock will display once per hour on the hour. The function actually coverts the time into "minutes past midnight" so any interval (well, any interval less than 60 x 24 = 1440) will work, but anything that's not either a multiple of 60 or an even divisor of 60 (2, 3, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, etc) will yield strange results. Small multiples also run the risk of annoying message spam and lag, especially at higher timescales.

While using the clock display option of the Immersive Wait function the clock will only display at hourly intervals or every 3 seconds, whichever is longer, to help avoid message spam.

You can also set the key you want to press to display the clock. The default key is Y - see the ini file for details on changing the key.

Realtime Alarm
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The last feature of Time Manager doesn't deal with gametime but with realtime. The Realtime Alarm is a countdown timer that you can set to alert you when a certain amount of time has elapsed in the so-called Real World. When you're totally engaged in killing monsters and finishing quests, sometimes you can forget commitments like picking up your wife after work. Not that this has ever happened to me, no....

When you first start the mod an item called "Realtime Alarm Settings" will be added to your inventory. Clicking it will bring up a menu where you can set the duration - in realtime minutes - for the timer; the maximum duration is 24 hours. Once the timer is running it will track elapsed time and chime when the time is up. Like any good alarm clock it lets you hit snooze, as many times as you want in fact. You can customize the snooze duration in the ini file. While either the regular timer or snooze timer is running you can activate the settings item again to see how many minutes are remaining until the alarm goes off, and opt to stop or reset the timer if you choose. Loading a saved game (that was saved with the alarm already running, of course) will not interfere with the timer since it checks the computer's system clock, but you will be prompted to confirm that you wish to keep the timer running. This is so that the alarm doesn't harrass you if you're loading a game a day or two later and the alarm is no longer valid.

There isn't anything to customize in the ini file for Realtime Alarm except the snooze time duration. If you don't want to use the Realtime Alarm function at all you can toggle the setting in the ini file, or simply toss away the settings item if you decide later that you don't need the feature. If you lose the settings item and need to replace it, open the console (press ~) and enter "set dstm.doonce to 0"

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Uninstallation
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To uninstall Time Manager, simply disable it in the Oblivion Launcher/WryeBash/OBMM. If you installed manually, you can delete these files from your Oblivion\data folder:

DS Time Manager.esp
DS Time Manager.ini
DS Time Manager readme.txt
and two sound files, found in sound\fx\DS\DSTM: clock.wav and alarm.wav

If you use a mod that sets the timescale then it should return to the value set by that mod when you reload a game without Variable Timescale active. If you use Cobl, it features an option in the Cobl Options menu to set the timescale. Failing that, you can open the console by pressing ~ and enter "set timescale to ", where is the timescale you want; the default Vanilla Oblivion timescale is 30.

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Known Bugs and Incompatibilites
-------------------------------

While TM's Clock Display isn't incompatible per-se with the Clock function of Cobl, it is redundant: if both are actively reporting the time at intervals you'll get annoying message spam. This also goes for the Cobl's clock display while using Immersive Wait. The best option, if using either module from Time Manager, would be to turn off the Cobl clock via the Cobl Options menu.

Any mod that sets the timescale will have its setting dynamically overridden if you use TM's Variable Timescale function. Any mod that relies on the timescale being at a certain static value will be adversely affected by Variable Timescale; the only mod that I know of for certain that gets messed up with timescale changes is Vim and Vigor in all of its incarnations (VV, VV Overhauled, VV Advanced). There may be others - if you know of one please let me know so that I can warn other users.

TM's Immersive Waiting feature has the highest chance of causing problems, in two ways. First off, NPCs check their 'AI packages' every hour to see what they should be doing next: waiting, eating, sleeping, going to a location, etc. Sometimes the NPCs get a little confused when the passage of time is sped up during immersive waiting. Once the waiting stops they will sort themselves out, though it may take a game hour or more for them to check their AI package to see what they should be doing at the moment.

Second, as mentioned above, both Immersive Waiting and Timed Menus have the potential to cause problems with other mods that check the time frequently, particularly survival (eat/sleep) type mods. Please let me know if you find any wierdness with your survival mod so I can try to make TM compatible.

Given that I do not own Shivering Isles, and due to the way I determine whether the player is in a town worldspace, the Tamriel worldspace, or an Oblivion worldspace, all of the Shivering Isles worldspaces will default to using the town timescale as defined in the ini file. The same is true for any mod-added worldspaces. I hope to change this in the future, but I have no great impetus given that I don't use any non-Vanilla worldspaces at this time.

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Changelog
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1.21 - Fixed a bug where loading a game with a Realtime Alarm timer running would interrupt and possibly break scripts that initialize in the first few seconds of the game.
- Pluggy version now detected properly.

1.2 - Fixed bug with Immersive Wait not stopping after set number of hours.
- Fixed bug with timescale not returning to normal if using Immersive Wait but not Variable Timescale.
- Improved the blur feature of Immersive Wait.
- Added checks for OBSE and Pluggy versions.
- Various minor optimizations.

1.1 - Added Variable Timescale options for sneaking and Oblivion realms
- Added alternate fallout behaviour for Variable Timescale
- Added slow timescale change option for Variable Timescale
- Added Timed Training
- Added Timed Menu timescale caps for each menu type
- Added full Greater Power compatibility for all Time Manager functions that adjust either timescale or game time
- BIG thanks to tejon for pointing me towards the simple, elegant solution I'm now using
- Added support for moving the ini file to the \data\ini\ directory
- Reworked the Realtime Alarm to use the computer's system time (this is what requires Pluggy v126, thanks haama!)
- Improved error-checking upon loading the config file settings
- Added support in Timed Menus for tejon's Birthsigns Expanded version 3 (http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=12149)
- there is one sign that has an "instant spellmaking" greater power; this fix prevents time from passing while using the ability
- Fixed a copy and paste error that was making all the Timed Menus use the CharacterFactor for calculations
- 16 Jun 09

1.0 - Initial release
- 15 May 09

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Future Plans
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- Refine the worldspace checks for Variable Timescale to include Shivering Isles and perhaps other mod-added worldspaces. I have to get SI first, though.
(- Work with survival mod authors to make Immersive Waiting/Timed Menus not interfere with eat/sleep requirements.) Done. Or at least, no big bugs reported yet...
(- Get Greater Powers to play nice with Immersive Waiting and Timed Menus.) Done!

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Legal and Contact
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I made it, it's mine. That being said, go ahead and do whatever you want with it so long as I get some credit for the work that I've done. Thanks!

If you need to contact me for whatever reason, you can PM me on the official Elder Scrolls forums, where my handle is Tekuromoto.
You can also visit the RELz thread here: http://www.gamesas.com/bgsforums/index.php?showtopic=995682
And of course, this is the TESNexus download link: http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=24677

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Credits and Thanks
------------------

Daeron for "More Immersive Waiting" (aka, the Waiting Stool), one of the first mods I ever used and source of one code snippet in this mod.
kuertee for "Combat Timescale" and "Auto-save and Time", inspiration for the Variable Timescale function.
Valik for "Menu Time", a different take on timed menus.
Wrye and the Cobl team for the simple code for clock display at intervals and the 'tick tock' clock display sound.
tejon for the Greater Power epiphany. Facepalm, indeed.
TheNiceOne for some good Variable Timescale improvement suggestions.
user acclivity on freesound.org for the 'ping' alarm sound.
The OBSE team for, well, OBSE. This is one of many, many mods that wouldn't exist without it.
Elys for Pluggy, and haama for continuing to improve and update it
Bethseda for providing the tools to improve their awesomely open-ended game.
The folks on the gamesas forums for being overwhelmingly supportive, both of me and modders in general.
And finally my wife, for accepting my video game habit even if she doesn't quite understand it.

Looks great! I really like the waiting time thing; more like morrowind - if you blackened the screen it would be exactly like morrowind's waiting, the possibility of being interrupted half healed by a daedroth was always fun.
(Wow I think this may be the first time I get in first post to a relz!)
Pacific Morrowind

Looks brilliant. Lets just hope it works with Realistic Hunger and Thirst.

JAwesome, I was hoping for something like this!

Heheh, yay :3

edit: What's the keycode for \? Whatever system oblivion uses, it doesn't seem to correspond to ascii or raw hex

EDIT: Apparently whoever wrote that bit of the wiki decided to be search-unfriendly and wrong backslash, oh well :D:D

excellent, tekuromoto.
hey how does your real time clock deal with loading different games?
does it use the "saved" time in the game or does it continue with its previous data?

in my Auto-save and time mod, i had to use pluggy to save INI accumulated time values to get my alarm clock to work over the whole oblivion game session - regardless of how many games you load.

Never happened to me either... Which is exactly why I'm going to download this mod right now.

Thanks!

I hadn't notice that your Auto-save and time mod had an alarm clock; I only used it for the timescale functions, after you told me Combat Timescale was borked.

I actually bailed on the whole question of tracking real-time over loaded games:


I thought of using pluggy but 1) didn't want to add it as a requirement and 2) haven't read up enough on it to be comfortable using it. I'm also hoping OBSE will come out with file output functions some day.

I felt resetting the timer was okay because I didn't want yesterday's alarm going off ten minutes into today's loaded game, but the more I think about it the more I see that there's a good chance you'll load a game during the same playing session. I'll wait and see what user comments are like on the alarm feature; it was sort of an afterthought when I had the rest of the mod working and could probably use a little tweaking.

Thanks for sharing and the linky, will add this to the list ! ! ! ! !

This sounds pretty cool! I may start using some of this on my next playthrough. Good job!

Looks great :thumbsup: Keep up with the bad work, as always ! Just a suggestion : Cobl-aware survival mods can be "paused" during waiting if desired. You could create a COBL patch to do that - Just need to set a global (cobNoEatSleep or something) to 1.

The alarm feature could be very usefull... I may have to get this mod just for that.

pluggy was the only way i found so that i can keep track (albeit accurate only to the minute or two - without counting the actual load times) of total time spent during a play session - regardless of how many games you load or start new.
obse with file-saving functions would be good.

i think pluggy had gotten a bad rap over nothing.
i mean. larger and more popular mods has had a more destructive effect in my game than pluggy.
but the spotlight has not been glaring on them as much as it has on pluggy. (poor ely.)
this is likely because finding the problems in those mods would be a lot harder than finding the problem with pluggy.
so, in this respect, pluggy is actually a much better oblivion extra than some of the mods.
i'm happy that haama has continued on the work with pluggy.

cheers, tekuromoto!

It boggles my mind to see real improvements to this game after this many years since release. Thank you for doing this Tekuromoto, and thank you OBSE team. :clap:

Thanks for all the kind words, folks! :wub:


Well, no complaints yet so maybe I was just being paranoid about other mods being overly sensitive about time adjustments. I've been playing with Skycaptain's Simple Essentials and it works the way I think a survival mod should: when Time Manager bumps the time up, if I cross a hunger "threshold" I'm notified about it immediately. Seems to work just fine.


Yep, seeing that haama (& co?) has continued with pluggy and work continues to make it more stable makes me more confident about using it; the hud elements cafuffle made a bunch of people leery I think. I also read up on using the INI file and it looks pretty straight forward. A little different from OBSE in the string assignment syntax and whatnot, but I'm sure I can cope. (Syntax seems to by my arch-nemesis in the CS... I'm always mucking up the OBSE commands for some reason.)

Anyhow, I think I'll add it as an option: if you've got pluggy installed, your alarm will carry over when you load from a save and if you start a new session with an alarm active it'll ask you if you want to reset it or whatever. Without pluggy the timer will function the same.

A fellow on Nexus left a comment about making time pass for training sessions; easy to add and I'll include that with an update.

OBSE 17 will do arrays, for those that don't want to use pluggy.....

I have a request for an other time adjustment if possible.

Oblivion realms (Deadric): reason is that at least I tend to take my time when I am in the Oblivion realms and as such I need to really bring a big backpack with food and water just to make sure I'll not starve to death

I saw that Real sleep Extended had options for dynamic times for: inside, fighting and sneaking. Makes me wonder how other immersion mods (hunger, thirst) checks time :unsure:

Gah, still installing game and checking compatibility - second week now....

The mod looks interesting, Tekuromoto, and I will probably install it when I get a bit more play time.

I have a couple of comments about the Variable Timescale part of your mod, as the modder behind Real Sleep Extended with Automatic Timescale.

Most important, the two mods are fully compatible - the player must just make sure to disable the timescale component in one of the mods. But both mods have the capability of disabling the timescale component, so it will be easy to pick preferred one and disable the other.

The Sleep component of Real Sleep Extended should be fully compatible will all parts of your time manager mod. It has no problem with timescale changes, and can easily be configured to work well with short or long timescales.


As for comparision of the dynamic timescale component in the two mods - yours have one advantage: that it differs between wilderness and cities - while mine have three advantages (IMHO) of course:

* It has a separate setting for sneaking (when not running)

* It can set any of the cases to "ignore" - i.e. set combatTimescale to 0 (ignore), and the mod doesn't care whether the player is in combat or not, and determines the timescale by the other factors instead (inside, outside, etc.)

* It doesn't have a hardcoded order of precedence for the things it checks. In my mod, a player may set a lower timescale when inside than in combat (I actually do), or a lower in combat than inside - and the mod will always choose the lowest setting when more than one apply. With your mod, if the player sets interior timescale to 2 and combat timescale to 4, 2 will be used when being inside - until combat is initiated in which the timescale will increase to 4. That is IMHO counterintuitive.

Now, I'm not writing this trying to get players to use mine instead of yours. Rather I mean the above as suggestions for your mod as well, as I think the two last advantages of my mod is very important. So if you think it is a good idea, feel free to look at and copy what you want from my mod.

Hmm, not sure how arrays would help. The problem is being able to track a variable (in this case, elapsed time) between loaded game. For instance, if I save my game and the load it ten minutes later, the alarm needs to know that ten minutes have elapsed, and not to use the variable as it is stored in the saved game. I think kuertee's got it right about having to use Pluggy - just write the variable to a file every minute or whatever and read it when a game is loaded. I'll try to implement such a feature with the next update.


Sure, that should be easy enough to do.


Again, easy enough to implement.


Both good ideas. I meant to do a 0 = disable for timescale modes but I obviously forgot; I know I put a check for 0 settings when loading the ini, but I forget offhand what I did exactly. As far as the precedence, I hadn't thought of it that way; I'll update my code when I update.

Thanks!

Hm, I still can't get the clock to work right. How would I get it to pop up on \?

Sounds great, any chance of adding a real world clock too? I could always put a clock on my table, but as I rarely look away from my monitor when playing Oblivion it may not help

So far, I'm extremely pleased with the results. I've not had the issues with the combat timescale as I've had with the independent mod of the same name. That, and this works so fluidly, I can't even find a way to tell when my timescale's changed.

Perfect. Five stars, ten of ten, what you will. It's perfect.

From the ini:

set DSTM.ClockKey to 21			 ; (21 = Y) Key to press to check the time, set to 0 to disable time check (ie, to use interval display only)									;		  For a list of keys, go to http://cs.elderscrolls.com/constwiki/index.php/IsKeyPressed3

If you change it to 43, that should do the trick


I'd love to be able to access the PC's internal clock. Maybe the OBSE guys can help out. I'll go ask. It would solve the problem mentioned earlier about the real-time timer/alarm.


Gosh, thanks.

"set DSTM.ClockKey to 43 ; (21 = Y) Key to press to check the time, set to 0 to disable time check (ie, to use interval display only)"
Is the full line, alas. COBL's worked, perhaps the wiki made a typo?

Does this mod utilize functions from OBSE that are still in beta?

I ask because I've noticed a lot of mods being released lately that say they require the latest beta version of OBSE. It's my understanding that the OBSE team has requested that no one release mods that use beta functions because it causes the team all sorts of headaches.

Great mod by the way and i'm not tryng to throw a monkey wrench in your gears, just curious is all.

TFS,

Worm

I'm not sure I follow you, sorry.

Are you saying that's the way the line reads in your ini, and it's not working? Do you have the Cobl clock display disabled? If you have them set to the same key, it's possible that the message from Cobl's clock is causing message spam and preventing my message from appearing...

[edit] I just checked it out and setting it to 43 works fine for me: the \ key shows me the clock display from my mod (of course, I have the cobl clock disabled in my game).
[edit2] checked a little more and found that having both clock displays set for the same key gives you both messages, though the order they appear in seems to vary. Assuming that you have not turned off the clock display (set DSTM.ClockDisplay to 0 = disabled), Phoshi, I dunno what the problem could be other than possibly some other mod grabbing the \ key...


Nope. I have a bit of v17 code (at least one while/loop) in there but I commented it out and used older, less efficient code (label/goto). I'll revamp it when v17's actually out, but for now it's 100% v16 compliant.