In The World of Thedas Vol. 1 (p.23) it says, "The Tevinter calendar starts at the date the Imperium was founded and the first Archon was crowned, marked as 0 TE. Past history is counted back with negative numbers, much like the Chantry calendar."
That chart is correct in that is how the developers have written the events into the lore, but there should be NO YEAR ZERO. Year 0 does not exist, and the Tevinter Imperium should not be said to have been founded in 0 TE. When the first Archon was crowned it would have been day 1 of year 1, NOT day 1 of year 0.
If you think of the Imperial calendar like our own Gregorian calendar, we went from 1 BC to 1 AD. Yes, there is a dividing line, but there is no year padding between 1 BC and 1 AD. So, technically, everything after that mark on the chart is wrong by 1 year. For comparison, right next to it you have the FA calendar that starts at year 1, which is as it should be.
However, if both calendars had a year 0 built into them there would be no conversion issues, so therein lies your problem. The program you wrote is working correctly and computing the correct value as it should be, and would be, were this real life. But unfortunately this is a bit of a developer error, so you can't have a completely accurate conversion unless you account for the 1 year discrepancy in any year after -1 TE by writing in a further thing that subtracts a year to every value higher than -1, and the reverse (add a year) when converting in the opposite direction.
To further add to the problems, the Andrastian calendar is also borked in that all of the ages are not a full century. We start at year 1 (1:1 Divine) and then in year 99 the events of that year decide on the name for the following age, and then we start again with 1 (2:1 Glory), and so on for all of the ages we've had thus far.
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I will add that in a fictional setting that it would be acceptable for a writer or world builder to include a year 0 and have that listed in their fictional calendar. However, because Thedas historically has several calendars and cultures, I don't think this was a wise choice. Additionally, it is also an odd one when you consider that Tevinter borrows heavily from Ancient Rome and neither of their main calendars had a year 0. So I'm not quite sure why the developers would have it this way when pretty much everything would suggest otherwise.
Modifié par nightscrawl, 29 octobre 2015 - 09:44 .
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