Another approach to the change of passing of time

[Arie-]

I was thinking about the idea of "adjusting the speed of time" in OTTD, and thought of a different approach then currently existing patches. Though I do not know OTTD specifics, I think this one -although ugly- could be rather easy to implement.
As I understand it, changing time introduces issues because some things are fixed on specific days or months while others are looking only at the number of ticks. Making changes to either one skews things in the OTTD universe. The approach I thought of would be, instead of changing time, repeating time. Could it be a feasible approach to e.g. to make time pass twice as slow by repeating a month? This would e.g. mean a year consists of 24 in game months: January(0); January(1); February(0); February(1); March(0); etc... While this is perhaps an ugly approach, this is still a game and not real life.

[Alberth]

I have not studied daylength problems at all, but the first question that arises for me is how to handle new vehicle introduction, and vehicle and model lifetime?

[Tafidis]

Even better, you can repeat a year. Kind of how it was done in original TTD at 2050, IIRC. Time would stop going forward, but would loop around, staying constantly at that year. However, that was at the end of the game, no more vehicles/railtypes to introduce anymore, no other sideeffects (that I can remember, at least).

[moki]

So basically the same as using the cheat to turn back time every year?
Adding a function to automatically trigger this cheat at the beginning of each year would be pretty easy... Think "Groundhog Day" for OpenTTD.

Vehicle aging is not influenced by this. Engines will get old after 15 or 20 years, even if it's the same year all the time. Of course, there wouldn't be any new vehicles, but old ones would also not expire. There'd still be problems, though. The finances windows doesn't work very well (never showing the past years, because there are none) and timetable starting dates are probably influenced. There are probably many other parts of the game that wouldn't exactly break but just not work as intended.

Repeating each day or months sounds way to complicated. When I want some time period to last longer, I prefer a daylength patch. Why would you want to play in April 1 and April 2 when you can just make the single April that actually exists last twice as long?

[YNM]

Wouldn't that put ticks and dates unsynchronized ?

I mean, I do know that ticks are calculated since you load the game (I'm not sure if the tick are saved) - I'm not so sure about pause, maybe it just freeze the tick and register anything happened in it under a single, same tick. Fast-forward now are just a way of "overclock"-ing the game's tick rate, it seems (as fast-forwarding on a slow device doesn't affect anything). Wouldn't this new approach to ticks also destroy scripts that are tick or time-based ?