Game time or why the heck cant i understand it

[Teorias]

Hey guys, for the past few days ive been messing around with mods, and after searching the forums AND reading the wiki the concept of time ingame (ticks) is still somewhat alien to me.

1. 1sec(realtime) = 60sec(ingame)

2. 1 tick = 2 seconds(ingame)

Does this mean 1s(rt) = 30tick's?

Oh...just figured it out...doh
Oh well, this would have been easier if the info about ticks and game time wasnt hidden in a remote part of the forum.
By the way, can i assume all game items (weapons,shields,etc) work in ticks?

[Atarlost]

Weapon firerates work in seconds instead of ticks. It has to do with roundoff when the value is modified by an enhancement or AI properties. Maneuver is weird. I think everything else is ticks.

[Teorias]

Thanks Atarlost. Still cant completely wrap my head around game time but, its a start.

[robotarozum]

From what I have seen, the base reality works as:

Weapons have a property called "firerate", and interval between activations goes as 1/firerate. Thus, the ubiquitous "3.7 per second" is from 60/16 = 3.75, truncated to the tenths place. I suspect that the weapon optimizer rom works as 80% * firerate, so a 3 (60/20) weapon goes to 3.7 (60/16) and a 12 (60/5) weapon goes to 15 (60/4).

They also have a property called "lifetime", which explains why some fast projectiles don't go as far as some slow projectiles; for instance the laser cannon (1 * 30 = 30) vs. the Mk 5 howitzer (.5 * 120 = 60). Note that each value is in double light-seconds, which is why the howitzer can be used to bombard targets up to 120 ls away.

Shield regeneration is considerably more complicated, judging both by this post on the wiki and personal experience: surely we've all seen odd hiccups in shield regen.

[Teorias]

I didn't want to waddle trough the source code yet , its been years since i last coded or went trough code.
Thanks for the link though .

[sun1404]

It's just some feature to spice up the game, I think. When you normally declare the regen rate of a shield, it will regenerate in bursts, not linearly. The time it needs to regen from zero to full is equal to the time that can be calculated from the code, just that while it's in the regen burst, it'll regen faster than said in code, then stop for a while, then do it again till full. There are ways to stop this, and make the regen linear. PM has done it in his ItemPack912, I think.

Alternately, you can take the burst thing to another level, declaring your own burst rate (this would be the time between each bursts) and HP regained for each burst. This can be used to make a shield that, for example, regen half it's HP five seconds after it collapse, and regen to full after another five seconds.

[PM]

Use the Lazarus as a base if you want to define non-standard shield regeneration. I do not think it applies to armor. For that, some values are steady while others cause variable regeneration, toggling between faster and none.