Ambrosia Software Web Board: A Matter of Time - Ambrosia Software Web Board

I have finished two more Cythera webpages; since they both have to do with time, I thought it would be most appropriate to discuss them together.

First, an updated timeline. It is based on dusk's topic and the new date's given in the Cythera Hintbook. There's not much more to say about this except that I tried to add some more detail for each event. Additionally, I went through the complete dialogues and tried to find any references to time that were in context of the game's time (wording like "a couple of years ago," etc.). These non-specific timeframes are detailed at the bottom under the "Notes" section.

I suppose I do have a couple of points to make about it. Taking into account what Hadrian says about his deceased mother, Andra, and what Metopes says about when the plague started, I think that the game must be set in the early to middle months of 918 A.T. Using that date, quite a few of the other dates can be narrowed down. Unfortunately, Cythera's time works differently than Earth's, so there is still a lot of uncertainty. For instance, we don't know how long people usually live in Cythera, just that it's longer than they used to live on Earth. Also, the years are shorter.

One date that stuck out to me was that Anisa says the Sapphire Book of Foundation was traded to an Earth spirit nearly 750 years ago. That would be sometime around 168 A.T. I think this year makes it most likely that one of the early mages traded the book.

Interestingly, although it's nothing new, is that Canachus of House Comana was murdered by his sons three years before the game. Hector says that the suffering in Cythera would have been "unthinkable just a few scant years ago." This suggests that the trouble in Cythera began shortly after Canachus died, which was nearly a year after the Undine had killed and replaced Pelagon.

Second, I've been studying Cythera's in-game time. It started as an effort to save all the location graphics that appear in the lower right corner when you go to a different place. Then I thought that I should include the background as well. It looked to be an easy task at first, and as far as I can tell, the sky's color and the sun's position are the same each day at the same times. The only important observation is that they change four times each hour, in equal 15 minute intervals (15 minutes in-game, about 43 seconds in reality).

However, the moons are just too complex for me to follow. They go through different phases, either by month, week, or year, for all I know. The small, red moon is always the same graphic, but it's position changes between days at the same time. The large, white moon goes through phases much like our Moon, in addition to changing position. In the end, I thought it was too difficult to figure out for something so trivial, so I omitted the moons. The page should work for displaying the place and the time, but only the sun and the sky.

I am curious if anyone knows the pattern the moons follow? In addition to that, I haven't found anything about them in the game, so I'm wondering: are we given the names of Cythera's moons anywhere?

One last note: The time slider on the time and location page uses an HTML5 element that is currently unsupported by a lot of browsers. As far as I know, the desktop version of Safari and Chrome will render it correctly. I am not sure about the latest versions of Firefox and Opera. I would have liked to keep more backwards-compatability, but this was the best way I could figure out to implement a slider functionality like I wanted. There are probably better ways, but I'm not an advanced enough web-designer to do them. If you can't get Safari or Chrome, you can manually input the time you want to see using the system described on the page.

The Wizard, on 08 June 2011 - 05:32 PM, said:

Do you have samples of the positions of moons over time? Bear in mind, gandreas is quite familiar with the motions of heavenly bodies.

I never would have thought of collecting that. It's pretty though, thank you! I think it complements your map collection quite well ^_^

Nice work, Wizard .