Personally I do not like the production times on the stations in in-game time now and rather would like to see it in real time seconds again.
I can understand some people like to see the in-game time for it so maybe having an option in the menu that allows you to switch from what time is shows on the stations.
I find it easier to calculate to build an efficient factory with real time, compared to in-game time.
yeah, I think real time is more practical for trying to math out a design
Really? There was a lot of mention that the real-time was confusing, and I admit that I wondered if it made sense, but now I’ve got used to the switch it does seem to be perfectly cool now. I’m interested to know how many other players would like this as an option?
well my thinking is if I only have so much time to play and I want to estimate how low it will take to make so much money then I need to play for at least this amount of time before I can upgrade things.
I would think it would be good for anyone trying to play around a schedule, like youtubers making videos.
of course income will not be as predictable once the economy is overhauled but I still think it would be useful for some things.
I think that the problem isn’t actually the time being displayed in minutes but rather the time formatting… that it is displayed in minutes AND seconds… and that’s a bit overkill because it should only be using decimal formatting/notation.
So in my opinion it would be enough to display the time just in minutes using decimal notation (using the positions after the decimal point to display the seconds, rather than using the [fraction*60] and [fraction/60] conversions to go back and forth between split minutes and split seconds)…
So for example “Time: 2m 48s” should always be displayed in “Time: 2.80m” instead.
Problem solved. Nothing complicated to calculate/convert about that for those who do.
Even if it is pretty common to use in-game time for all games using time warps where the time in-game progresses a lot faster than in real life… I almost predicted that some people might have an attitude problem with stuff being in-game time.
Back when I suggested that the slot timings should be synchronized with the in-game clock instead I only did that because of how slots timings HAVE TO work synchronized with the in-game clock so that production/efficiency/financial statistics and other things that depend on time frames actually make at least any sense at all in relation to one another. (and they really didn’t before the change… so production/hour or income and whatnot didn’t really match up at all).
But I also think that there could also be another possibility… which would be to remove the displayed units of measurement entirely… No “m”/“minutes” or “sec”/“seconds” or whatever… just a unit-less, plain decimal number (just like the power demand is actually a unit-less decimal number and not displayed in [kW] or something)…
Then there would only be displayed “Time: 2.80” … with no unit.
That would have the advantage that nobody should be able to complain that the timings the slots are using are in fact synchronized with the in-game clock… because then there is no real confusion if something is actually in-game time or real-time.
I mean if you are going to do 2.8 minutes you might as well break everything down into milliseconds and just say 2800 ms for those who like whole numbers or do some crazy notation like 2.8e3 ms. the thing for me is I just want to avoid spending a few hours making a spreadsheet, so any of these options are appealing really