Romance timers

regular_doppelganger

I suspect romance progresses too fast. I once read that the new lovetalk happens every 5-7 days. In my game it happens once a day.
For example, EE Keeper shows in my last save VICONIAROMANCE=3337743, but within the minute since i load that save, Viconia continues the story about her home (the romance is not commited yet, I'm in chapter 2).

Perhaps the problem is that once I kicked her out of the group (I didn't know it would break the romance), and after that I changed the variable VICONIAROMANCEACTIVE in EE Keeper from 3 to 1. Although since then the romance has moved on as if nothing had happened.

jmerry

Whatever you "once read", that's nonsense. Most of the romance timers work on real time, not game time. Viconia's standard wait is TEN_HOURS, which translates to fifty minutes.

Also, VICONIAROMANCE is that timer variable for her. Those are absolute numbers, and the clock counts up; once time catches up to that number, it's considered expired and the action goes through. They're also very big, because the unit they're counting is less than a second.

You can remove romanced characters from the party briefly - I play "hide the drow" for shopping purposes - but if they're out for very long it ends the romance.

regular_doppelganger

Thanks for the answer!

jmerry wrote: »

Most of the romance timers work on real time, not game time

I know that one second is 15 ticks. Let's take a number from my save as an example: 3337743.
Divide by fifteen: 222516 seconds.
Divide by sixty: 3709 minutes.
Divide by sixty: ~62 real hours? Sounds weird. In my game Viconia speaks to me every 20 minutes.
Not a game day goes by when she starts a conversation - this is very fast, and I'm afraid I'll run out of all the lovetalks without even getting to the middle of the game.
That's why I started this topic - I can't see the connection between the variables and the real time of the lovetalks.
I have a feeling she initiates a lovetalk when the game tries to initiate a regular banter between members of the group.

jmerry

"62 real hours". Sounds about right ... for how much time you've played the game, including all the pauses.

While all timers use the same base units, some are game-time timers that pause when you pause and jump ahead when you travel or rest. Others, like the romance talk timers, are real-time timers that advance whenever you've got the game running based on your computer's clock.

And the number you see in the variable is "when this timer expires". Not always terribly informative.

WatchForWolves

Wait, the "real time" romance timer ticks down even when the game is paused?

jmerry

Yes. Or even minimized. I've had sessions where I went through a chain of those timers by checking in on the game and unpausing every hour or so, while I did other things on the computer.