More Awesome Than You!

is there a hack or mod to change the military time (esp., 21:00) to standard time (esp., 1:00 AM)? i'm pretty bad in military times.

in the sims 2 is military [my own game]
in the sims 2 university is standard [my own game]
in the sims 2 nightlife is military [my own game] (but i've seen screenshots online that the time is standard)

Learn military time, you loser!   ;D

but why is my game in military time while in the screenshots are in standard. PANIC ???

One of JM's hacks changes time to military or 24 hour clock. 24 hour clocks are not only military - I think Germany uses a 24 hr clock?

If you've installed a whole buch of hacks - maybe from the directors cut, you might have picked that one up. I don't know which hack it is offhand, you might have to hunt around.

It's not neccessarily a hack - I think it has to do with what language version one installs. US English uses standard (it did in my original install), but UK uses 24 hour (which it did when I installed Uni because I had since moved overseas).

I had the same problem when I first installed NL.  Not wanting to have to deal with military time doesn't make you a loser.  :P  I had to deal with military time all the time at my previous job.  When I'm playing, I wan't it to be fun, not work!  Here is a utility from MTS2 that will allow you to switch between 24 and 12 hour time.  I used it, and it worked great.

http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=91189

Thank you very much rainbow your life will be colorful as a rainbow!

Gee, thanks.  Glad I could help.  :)

Well, I personally think the 24 hour clock is simpler, you don't have to keep checking for AM or PM, so you can't forget and send your sim to bed one hour before he's due to go to work!

It's really not that hard.  Besides, that's what the sleep clock is for.  :P  I guess it really depends on what you are used to.  But you shouldn't criticize someone for doing things differently than you do.

If your game is installed in EN_US, you will get AM/PM times, if your game is EN_UK for the latest expansion, you will get military times.

I don't know why I got UK times then, because I didn't have a choice between UK English and US English.  I had a choice of different languages, but only one choice was English.

Rainbow, I wasn't intending to criticize anyone - I did say it worked better for me personally!

I think we use the 24 hour clock more here in the UK, so it's perhaps more familiar to us - Germany isn't the only european country to use it (it's a French thing actually - like metric measures, all from Napoleon's era) but it's used for most official things like bus and train timetables, though not radio and TV programmes - at least not in the UK - but conversational time is almost always 12 hour clock in any country in europe, I think.


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I'm so used to the 24-hour clock now that I don't even know what my game is in - I think it's military, but I'm not sure.  It would seem that kids are taught military time at UK schools now because my 9-year-old son still can't tell the time properly from a normal clock, but he can convert one time to the other in a split second and has been able to for years.  When I say he can't tell the time from a normal clock, he can but he converts it.  If the clock says 8.10 pm for instance, he won't say "10 past 8" as I would, he'll say "2010".  I know instantly that 2010 is 10 past 8, but I read it as 10 past 8 regardless of what clock the time is in, I would never say 2010, but that's no doubt down to my age, it was all am/pm when I was a kid.

Oddly enough, I do have my computer clock showing the military time.  Takes up less space and it's easier somehow.  Current time:  1703.

I can never remember what 12:00AM is... 00:00 or 12:00?

Conversationally everyone here uses a 12-hour clock, but time is 24 hours in all other cases. I think most of Europe uses this. Just like we use the SI instead of medieaval illlogical measurements.

http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/ffs/engrish.zip is a quick way to switch between the en_us and the en_uk locale. Be aware though that there are quite a few object and hack creators who lazily clone objects and thus the text will display wrong for  en_uk (or other language) players.

And if you're anal about spelling... I have a 'proper' en_uk translation mod (AKA the most useless mod for TS2 ever) available at http://members.chello.nl/b.kroonspecker/games/ .

As I said, most of europe does use the 24-hour clock, but I think generally it's not used in ordinary conversation.  Strange thing about measures - the French often still refer to "un livre" (a pound) even though they've been officially metric for over a century - probably nearer two!  You obviously can't force people to talk the way you want them to!)

I think 12-00 AM would be midnight, and 12-00PM would be noon,  but really, both AM and PM are meaningless in that context.  It is either midnight or it is noon, it is neither after midnight or before midnight, nor is it after noon or before noon.

Hey, those Medieval measurements were perfectly fine and logical: They were based on parts of the average person's body, environment, and things he might encounter, which made them easy to estimate.

SI, on the flipside, uses an arbitrary metric that nobody can really relate to, but is divided up into intervals of 10, which happens to be convenient for people who operate in base-10. Of course, operating in base 10 is just as arbitrary as anything else! If anything, we should operate in base-16 or other power of 2, since that's the way computers work, and thus everything would work out much nicer.

Of course, convincing people to adopt an entirely new counting base is even harder than convincing them to adopt a new system of measurement.

Ultimately, all systems to date are equally arbitrary, and it is simply an illusion as to which one is "better". A truly universal system would tell time based on half life of a proton, a very elementary particle that is abundant throughout the universe, and starting from the beginning of the universe, obviously, time zero. Everything else would thus be measured in units based on aforementioned proton. Since the REAL universe does not conveniently operate in base 10, or really, far as we can tell, ANY consistent base, NEITHER WOULD THIS SYSTEM!

JM you are quite right.  We operate in base 10 because the average human has eight fingers and two thumbs, (ten digits).  If we mostly had ten fingers and two thumbs, we'd use base twelve, and it would work in the same way, except with two more single numbers instead of ten and eleven (10 and 11 would be something else).

All medieval measures to me make far more sense - metric was invented in the Napoleonic era and was just one of the ways that Napoleon planned to dominate europe and eventually the world.  Unfortunately he was just as  successful with this dream as in building a tunnel under the channel to invade the UK - it may have taken over 150 years to accomplish, but it happened in the end!

Personally, it's always made perfect sense that 12:00 midnight = 12:00 AM and 12 noon = 12:00 PM.  Probably because I am used to digital time, and forever and always as far as I can remember, this is how the time is displayed.  If you want to get up at 12 noon, you set the clock for 12:00 PM.  I had a customer at my previous job argue with me because she wanted her call set up at 12 noon, and I explained to her as nicely as I could that that was the same as 12:00 PM, and that's how the computer would display it, because the information would be faxed to her, but she argued that there was no such thing.  She said it was 12:00 AM, and at 12:01, it changes to PM.  It's almost as bad as getting some people to understand time zones and how certain states (Indiana and Arizona) do not observe Daylight Savings Time!

Well, I suppose you could argue that by the time you've actually noticed that it is 12.00 noon, it's actually 12.00 noon and 1 second, and it's therefore PM, but how you can notice that it's 12.00 noon when there is still one second to go is hardly very exact, and therefore trying to say that it's 12.00AM is downright ridiculous!  (If you have to wait for Big Ben to finish striking the hour, it's probably already 12.01 PM before it's finished anyway!)

I would predict by this logic that any species which evolved with a number of digits that happened to be a power of 2 would have an early advantage in computers since it would feel very natural to them to operate in a powers-of-2 based system that computers run on.

Maybe so, but can you think of any other reason why we use base ten than that our fingers and thumbs were what we first used to count with?  And children still naturally use the same method.  If we only had one digit per hand, then maybe we would have operated in base 2, or maybe we would have invented the abacus much earlier, but I tend to think you are probably right that we would have operated in base 2.

But we'd beat them in typing ;)

So arachnids must think in Octal.  Which probably explains how they became such architectual experts.
Quiet a few angles to work out when building a web.

Or do they count with both their eyes and legs, and think in Hex?

Hey, legs and digits aren't the same!  Spiders don't have any digits!

I've never understood why anyone gets confused with the midnight/noon situation.  0000 is midnight, 1200 is noon, it's as simple as that.  0001 is 1 minute past midnight and 1201 is 1 minute past noon.  If you think of it as the day starting at midnight, it might be easier to remember - when it starts, it's at nothing (0000), by the time you get to noon the day is halfway through (1200).  Theoretically, midnight is also 2400, but that doesn't exist because by the time the clock reaches it, a new day has started.  This, of course, means that the previous day never really ends, which is why time is so peculiar.

I like that explanation, Ancient Sim.  I think I'll go with that. :)

Well, it's like New Year's Eve, isn't it - for 24 hours, somewhere around the world is celebrating the New Year!

And what about those people who get a double birthday because they fross the international dateline in the backward direction?  (But do they get two sets of presents?)