I was just on the main site and i saw something saying In-game status with a time and heart beat thing under it and i was just wondering what that is?
I was wondering when someone was going to notice that haha.
The time is the in-world time. The time in the game world is sped up so that 24 hours in the game world go by in just 5 hours in our time. So that means if you played for 5 hours straight you would experience the full day-night cycle from sunrise to daytime to sunset to night time to sunrise again.
The heartbeat shows how many people are currently in-game. So if you see it above 0 then you’re seeing us playing on the ‘real’ server haha.
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Some additional minutia we’ve teased out:
- Daytime lasts from 6 AM to 9 PM
- CSS classes have names like “wi-day-sunny” and “wi-night-clear.” Are you working on adding weather systems, Riley??
- The Orbus calendar is interesting; I don’t understand it yet. Consider the following server response from the other day:
{"percentThroughDay":0.0345715,"dayNumber":82834,"yearNumber":730,"monthOfYear":2,"dayOfMonth":4,"dayOfYear":34,"hour":0,"minutes":49,"seconds":46,"time":"00:49","playersOnline":0}
If it’s been 82834 days in the world so far, and we’re in the 34th day of this year, then in 730 years there were 82800 days, right? Which is 113.42465… days per year? Was the world not started at midnight, or are there leap years or some other kind of irregularity? Further, with only 113 days in a year, we know that 34 days puts you in the 4th day of the 2nd month. So there are like 3 1/2 months in the year? Hmmm… - Redwalljp in the community discord points out that if the Orbus calendar is like the Gregorian calendar, then we should be reading it as 729 years having passed, not 730, which changes the days-per-year math, though not in a way that produces an even number. However, I think there’s an argument to be made that the calendar in Orbus in zero-indexed, and that we’re currently in the 731st year there. Only the gods know for sure.
- Equally possible is that I’ve made some basic math mistakes or smuggled in some bad assumptions.
Plenty of fodder here for the cosmologists and mystics of Orbus to debate. Or, you know, Riley could tweak the server at any time and nullify all of this. What really matters is that, whatever happens with the planetary cycles in Orbus, here on earth we’re less than three weeks out until the next playtest! 
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Ignore the “dayNumber” variable haha. It’s misleading.
The Year, Month, and Day of Month are accurate, though. Of course like any calendar it’s influenced by the people who made it, and they may have their own agendas for deciding the year or what the epoch of the calendar is…
And of course other than the current time in the game world at this exact moment, all of this is super subject to change 
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Man, I was neck deep in some really heavy math trying to make sense of all of that and without an accurate dayNumber there’s really no way to figure it out quickly.
Ha! Well nevertheless, credit goes to Damage_Da_Mage for pointing out in discord chat that “epoch time” is indeed very likely a factor here 
So, to clarify: we noticed in the last stress test that the day-and-night cycle wasn’t synced between clients; some people experienced night while others experienced day. Does this new clock mean that in the future, clients will be synced so that everyone sees simultaneous sunsets?
Yes that’s the whole reason that it exists on the site now. What time it is in-game is now synced for everyone. So if when the Alpha test starts it says it is 13:00 on the website, when everyone logs in it will be daytime for everyone. And everyone will experience sunset at the same time so you can all collectively bask in it together 
We decided to do the “5 hours real-time = 24 hours in-game” thing so that if you (for example) always play in the evenings from 7 - 9 PM, you won’t always get the same time of day. Instead you’ll get a variety.
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Oh I realy like that. Since I’m going to have relatively small windows of time to play it will be nice to not always be playing while it’s night time or day time.
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