I’d like the date shown at the start of my game to be the player’s ‘tomorrow’- that is, one day later than the system date. I have searched quite a bit, but ‘date’ is a hard thing to search for! I’m doubting it’s possible, but I’d love to be proven wrong.
No, there’s no way to find out the current date or time from within Z-code (or Glulx, for that matter).
Out of curiosity, if it were possible to get the system time, what would your game do if the player took more than one day to play it? I could see either 1) maintain the same date, which would rapidly cease to be the future, or 2) continue to bump the date into just-slightly-the-future; these would both be somewhat jarring.
Anyway, you could always just state the date as “Tomorrow,” or try to pull something clever where you pick a date which you hope the players have played the game before; for a Comp game you could pick the day after the end of the judging period, for example.
I was suspecting that, oh well.
My first thought was to use ‘tomorrow’, but that seemed too ‘meta’ and jarring. The game is indeed for the IFComp, so I might just set it to after the voting period.
…actually! The date is only used once, at the very beginning, to show when a meeting is taking place. I’ll proably just completely omit it, it would make no difference. Thanks for the help, anyway!
@tove: As I said, it’s only used at the start and never mentioned again, so you could just assume that time is passing as normal (the character is unlikely to be tired, given his predicament). The game is quite short.
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maybe you can update your game each day?