Developer's Tip - Clock Building

Howdy Peeps

Ok, let's hear it, Gand is in the house, Gand is in the house :)

Today I am going to cover some clock building techniques. Quite a few of you have asked about the clocks in awgate, and how to make them for your own worlds.
The first step to creating a clock is to create the hands for the clock. These could be the traditional type as seen on the large clock face in awgate, or the drum style that can also be seen in the same world. The style is entirely up to you.

What is important when creating these objects is the starting positions of the actual objects prior to applying any animation or rotate commands to them. The minute and second hands always have 0 rotations on them. For a traditional clock face this would mean the 2 hands are vertical (pointing at 12 o'clock). The hour hand how ever is different. In order to have the hand synchronized with VRT time it must have a starting rotation of -55 degrees (10 o'clock) (see fig 1.1)

A drum clock is different. The starting position of the hour drum is 55 degrees. You will see in 2.2 that the hour showing is 10 o'clock. This drum rotates anti clockwise (the hours rotate from top to bottom) If yours rotates clockwise then the actual rotation on the drum would again be -55 degrees as with the traditional clock.
(See fig 2.2 and 2.3)

Once the objects have been made it's a simple matter of applying the rotation commands to them.

*Note. This particular drum clock has 12 faces on the seconds drum. In essence it only has to rotate at half the speed to that of the traditional one. Each face represents 10 seconds. 12 x 10 is equal to 2 minutes. You could always have the faces incremented by 5 seconds which would then require 1 full rotation per minute as with the traditional one. 5 x 12 is equal to 60 seconds.

Traditional Clock.
Hours:- create rotate 0 0 -0.00138888888 sync
Minutes:- create rotate 0 0 -0.01666666668 sync
Seconds:- create rotate 0 0 -1 sync

Drum Clock
Hours:- create rotate 0 0 0.00138888888888 sync
Minutes:- create rotate 0 0 0.016666666666667 sync
Seconds:- create rotate 0 0 0.5 sync

Try altering the angle of the hour hand to produce different time zones. Using this method you could create the effect seen at a place like the stock market with a series of clocks displaying various time from around the world. Remember -55 degrees on the traditional clock face represents VRT time.

Have fun.

Gand