Get Today's Real Date?

[velox-resurrected]

I see example libaries, and I even have a working Date/Time system, but I can't seem to to find working JS.Eval or already included methods of retriving, and using the current date.

For example, during certain holidays having nice messages or descriptions or having an happy holidays message.

Thank you in advance.

[KVonGit]

The "easiest" way to use the actual current time and date from Quest code is this function (which returns an integer): CurrentDateUTC()

At this time (while typing this), that returns 1764668741. (CurrentDateUTC() in Quest should return the same value as Math.floor((new Date()).getTime() / 1000) in JavaScript.)

---

https://docs.textadventures.co.uk/quest/functions/currentDateUTC.html

[angelwedge]

Two options.
If you use Javascript, you can use the internal Date functions to get different parts of the day; but you'd need to use a function to pass the data back. So there will be some delay.

So you could do something like:

JS.eval("var d = new Date();ASLEvent('HandleDate',d.getFullYear(),d.getMonth()+1,d.getDate(),d.getDay());")

Which will then (after a small delay) call a Quest function which could look like this:

<function name="HandleDate" parameters="year,month,date,dayofweek">
  if (month = 12 and date = 25) {
    msg ("Merry Christmas!")
  }
  if (date = 15 and month = 8 and year = 1969) {
    msg ("Why are you playing video games when you could be at Woodstock?")
  }
  if (month = 12 and date = 3) {
    msg ("Happy birthday Angel!")
  }
  if (year % 4 = 0) {
    msg ("It's a leap year!")
  }
  if (dayofweek = 1) {
    msg ("I don't like Mondays")
  }
</function>

(Note: I added +1 to the month, because that's more human-readable. Because April = 4 is what most people would expect. Numbering days doesn't have such a convenient single way of numbering, so I left dayofweek the way JS does it by default. I believe the number is from 0 (sunday) to 6 (saturday). )

While this code is somewhat more human readable, it will be slower than using a native Quest function; the HandleDate function will be called a short time (up to a couple of seconds) after the code block containing the JS.eval line finishes.

Alternatively, if the delay is a problem for you
In native Quest code, you can use the function CurrentDateUTC() which will give you the number of non-leap seconds since the start of 1970. You can do some maths with that to get the current date. But because you need to account for stuff like leap years yourself, this is an easy place for mistakes to creep in.

Off the top of my head, it would look something like this:
(EDIT: Off by one! I think)

date = CurrentDateUTC() / 60 / 60 / 24 + 1
// our day 1, Jan 1st 1970, was a thursday; so add 3
dayofweek = (date + 3) % 7
year = 1970
daysinyear = 365
while (date > daysinyear) {
  year = year + 1
  date = date - daysinyear
  if (year % 4 = 0) {
    if ((year % 400 = 0) or not (year % 100 = 0)) {
      daysinyear = 366
    }
  }
  else {
    daysinyear = 365
  }
}
// we already worked out if it's a leap year
if (daysinyear = 366) {
  daysinmonth = Split("0;31;29;31;30;31;30;31;31;30;31;30;31")
}
else {
  daysinmonth = Split("0;31;28;31;30;31;30;31;31;30;31;30;31")
}
month = 1
while (date > ToInt (StringListItem (daysinmonth, month))) {
  date = date - ToInt (StringListItem (daysinmonth, month))
  month = month + 1
}

// Now the variables `date`, `dayofweek`, `month`, and `year` should be right
// so you can use them as in the JS example
if (month = 12 and date = 25) {
  msg ("Merry Christmas!")
}
if (month = 4 and date = 1) {
  msg ("April Fools!")
}

I think that's right. But I already posted this wrong and then edited it. This stuff is one of the easiest places to make careless errors in all of programming; which is why just about every programmer will use a pre-written function for it if there is one.

Also, the function name suggests that this is UTC - so it will tell you what the date would be in the UK if we didn't have daylight saving, not in the player's timezone. The Javascript version uses the clock on the player's computer, so it could be wrong (and potentially allows the player to cheat, if you hide big rewards behind it) - but you know that for most people, it will match the time they want to use.

In most cases, I recommend the JS.

[velox-resurrected]

This worked perfectly. Thank you! Only modification I made was storing the month and day result inside the game object as game.todaysdate and game.todaysmonth so I can also use the month or day for changing the scenery for rooms.