Starcraft – Blizzard Time

starcraft-2

I'm reading through the Reddit AMA Transcript (link to entire /r/IAmA) which was conducted a week prior to the release of Heart of the Swarm. Several of the questions and answers refer to Blizzard Time not being equal to Real Time. I am unfamiliar with Blizzard Time:

  • What is it?
  • How does it relate to Real Time?
  • Why do people want to switch to Real Time in place of Blizzard Time?

Best Answer

Blizzard Time refer to the clock that you can have display at your map, showing how long the game has been going on. The clock can be enabled by going to options, gameplay, and then enabling the in-game clock.

At normal speed there is a 1 to 1 relation between Real Time and Blizzard time. But since most games are played at "Faster" speed it is usually not the case.

From Liquipedia page on game speed:

A rough guide for the differences between speed is below. This was calculated using the 90 second MULE shut-down time.

Gamespeed   # seconds to shut down  % of standard time  x normal speed
Slower      150 s                   166%                0.599
Slow        112.5 s                 125%                0.83
Normal      90 s                    100%                1
Fast        74.5 s                  82.75%              1.21
Faster      65 s                    72.5%               1.38

However, due to the nature of deterministic synchronous game engines, the actual real-time values cannot be calculated exactly. The game attempts to keep constant 0.6x, 0.8x, 1.0x, 1.2x and 1.4x time modifiers according to the crash logs, but due to network and processing delays the actual observed time can easily shift 1-3% over a given time period.

I would say the reason people want it to show Real Time is because of the possible shift and more importantly it would be easier to keep out of game timers for abilities and construction if you could relate the tool tip to real time even at Faster speed.

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