Please allow Era "count offset" to be any number rather than 0 and 1
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Please allow Era "count offset" to be any number rather than 0 and 1
User Interface (UI) / User Experience (UX) · Timelines · Created by Recon777
accepted
timeline era eras
What functionality is missing? What is unsatisfying with the current situation?
When making a brief timeline spanning only part of a lengthy era, there is a huge gap between the era marker and the first event, reducing the usefulness of the scrolling "minimap" for the timeline.How does this feature request address the current situation?
If you wanted to make a timeline of the history of the iPhone, the events would span from 2007 to 2024. To display the correct event years, the Era called "Anno Domini" needs to be added to the timeline. As soon as you put "0" in the count offset of the Era, the iPhone events will all show their correct dates rather than their UTD year.Currently, the only offset options are 0 and 1. This results in a timeline that is 2024 years long and almost entirely empty except for a flurry of activity at the end. The scrolling scale becomes useless with enormous amounts of empty space.
If we could put the era "Anno Domini" into the timeline and set its offset to 2007 (rather than 0), we could set the era's start date to the same UTD as the first event. This would make the entire timeline only 17 years long and display the correct dates for all the events.
What are other uses for this feature request?
This feature would allow for a huge variety of partial-era timelines that tightens up the scroll range to only the relevant portion of the era, rather than the entire era, consisting of potentially thousands of years of irrelevant time.Timeline functionality would become far more usable for things like the history of a company or a war or a voyage or major events of one character's life, or any number of things that do not span thousands of years. It would allow the time-slice window of the minimap to not always be a sliver of time due to the vast expanse between the era marker and the relevant events of the timeline.
Follow up
To clarify a point: Assume that UTD is not "0" for the timeline's era. If you have many eras and timelines, UTD is going to be unrelated to the era's start.
The Team's Response
Thanks for your suggestion! The next version of timelines will include a truncation system that will make it possible to "skip" years in a timeline. Please note that the count offset does not refer to where the timeline begins, but to how the people in your world count years, which is why we won't make it a free-form field. For the example you mentioned in your suggestion, you wouldn't need an era in the timeline; if you use the time settings in your world configuration to set your main eras, the timeline will pull your time data from there. If you do need an era, though, you could "cheat the system" by having your Anno Domini era start in the wrong place (such as year 2000) and then use the alternative display date to override the year indication to year 0.
Current score
14/300 Votes · +3601 points
Votes Cast
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+300
by yeti1069
on 2024-03-26 20:20My primary timeline has 1300+ years of dead space. Very irritating to scroll through!
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+100
by MrShiny
on 2024-03-18 23:17 -
+100
by grinningsatyr
on 2024-03-16 17:02 -
+300
by Emperor.Nero
on 2024-03-14 18:45 -
+300
by yeho8
on 2024-03-13 23:11I had this problem with my own timeline, as I mentioned some sporadic natural events important to the lore before the bulk of history began to happen. It could also be really helpful to be able to change the scale used for the timeline (i.e have it go by 100 years per instance, or 50 years per instance instead of fixed singular year scroll)
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+1
by Rilameth
on 2024-03-13 14:48 -
+300
by Amancham
on 2024-03-12 22:37 -
+300
by Wobbix
on 2024-03-11 16:19 -
+300
by Kittymonster
on 2024-03-11 07:36 -
+300
by Goose80
on 2024-03-10 20:39 -
+300
by A Rambunctious Elf
on 2024-03-10 20:29For the types of stories I write, if I actually wanted to include dates, I would need this feature. I know the timelines are meant for worldbuilding and not for the actual timeline of only your stories, but as a writer first and worldbuilder second, I really, seriously, do not timelines that span so long. I want to track only the events that affect a specific story or the stories that are relevant in a world, not all of history...
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+300
by JoellaKay
on 2024-03-10 17:46 -
+100
by Ratha
on 2024-03-10 16:02 -
+300
by SoulLink
on 2024-03-10 15:27 -
+300
by Recon777
on 2024-03-10 15:25
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