Now that've we've shipped the Import/Export update, which allows you to easily bring data in and out of LegendKeeper, we've turned our attention to the big daddy of features. This feature is the top-voted, most demanded LegendKeeper feature EVER.

That's right... Timelines.

But why has it taken us so long to get here? A few years back, we envisioned LK having four core pillars of creation: Maps, Wiki Pages, Boards, and Timelines. To us, these were the ultimate ways one might interact with their story-worlds. Maps to present geography, wiki pages to capture knowledge, boards to capture scratch ideas and diagrams, and timelines to present causality on a grand scale.

But timelines is a feature unlike the other three. A tool strives to solve problems, and the complexity of those problems influences the complexity of the solution. Sometimes we get lucky, and a complex problem can be boiled down to a simple solution... but sometimes we don't get lucky.

The History of History

The first recorded drawing comes to use from 73,000 years ago, when a prehistoric human scrawled something from their mind's eye on a cave wall in Southern Africa.

The first recorded writing comes to us from a Mesopotamian scribe ~5400 years ago, recording transactions and contracts for agricultural commerce.

The Imago Mundi, the first known map of the world, was charted some ~2600 years ago.

And the first timeline was dreamed up by Joseph Priestly, "The Chart of Biography", only 260 years ago.

Uh-oh. Why did that take so long?

To make a drawing, you draw. To make a map, you measure and draw. To make a piece of lore, you write. To make a timeline, you could put things in an ordered list, but that's not interesting to us. We want to see SCALE. We want to know exactly how many days did Event A take place after Event B. We want to see the span of time between two great wars and ponder on the time between them. We want to see the sobering speck of a human's lifetime in the grand scope of Earth's.

Crunch Time

Time is rooted in culture and tradition, and those are shaped by material reality and the scientific method used to measure it. An earth year is not 365 days, it's  365.2422. A lunar month isn't 30 days, it' 27.3. A leap year occurs every 4 years, except every 100, except except every 400. This is starting to seem a bit complicated.

Now, replace the real solar system with a fictional one. Throw the rules out the window; anything goes. For a year that's 501.38 days long, if we say the year length is 501 days long for sanity's sake, we can add 2 leap days every 5 years to get us somewhat back on track. But wait... By year 50, we're one day ahead! Okay, so the rule is... Every 5 years, we add two leap days, except every 50 years we only add 1. And that's just one way to tackle it. We could've done 19 leap days every 50th year, or 1 leap day every 2 years and 0 every 50.

While it's only arithmetic, this is still crunchy and not exactly where I want my head to be during a creative exercise. But this math needs to be done if we are to have a functioning date system where dates can be compared. For a Gregorian calendar to work in relative-timeline form in LK, we need to do the math. Sure, we could use an existing earth timeline solution someone else has made, but then that timeline wouldn't work for the Calendar of Harptos or any other calendars our worlds use. So it seems like we need to do all the math.

So there's the rub. Timelines are rooted in sociocultural and scientific rules that must be satisfied to actually be a timeline. Yes, we could've taken the easy path and put everything in an ordered list, but to us... That's not a timeline, that's a wiki article; you can do that yourself.

Limitations

Thankfully, we've solved the hard problems above by implementing a time system that can be translated into arbitrary calendars. Now we're designing the interactions and making it pretty. We're set on timeline and calendar being different view modes on the same tool, because what is a calendar but a timeline with word-wrap turned on?

Will LK's timeline visualization be able to do anything and everything? Will it solve the three body problem? Probably not, but if your fantasy world has an earth-like calendar with years, months, and days, then I think you'll be happy. (Just want to rename Monday to Florpsday? Three tendays in your Calendar of Harptos? Different month and year lengths? 14 months? We got you.)

If your world uses a plain ol' Earth calendar, you'll be even happier because you won't have to touch the default settings at all. You might be able to turn off the calendar layer entirely and use numeric stardates, which could be fun for a sci-fi setting. Projects will support multiple calendar systems, so element's representing different planets could have their own time systems.

Most users will be happy with Earth time, or something tweaked a bit, like the calendar of Harptos or Tamriel's Morndas, Tirdas, Middas, etc. For those that want to dig deeper, timelines will accomodate.