Idea for realtime book reading

[imsobadatnicknames]

I love the idea of time passing while the player reads a book, although I always assumed it could be hard to implement because there could probably be a lot of problems with keeping the gameworld being simulated in the background while the player had the book window open (esp maybe related to enemy behavior and all that).
However, I think I just had an idea for a way that realtime book reading could be convincingly "faked" without needing to keep the gameworld being simulated in the background:
1. When the player has a book open, track how long the book remains open for.
2. Multiply this time by the game's current timescale value (or maybe allow the player to define a multiplier from the mod config menu)
3. When the player closes the book, add the result from step 2 to the current in-game time.

I still don't have a lot of modding ability but I'm just tossing the idea out there in case it sounds interesting to anyone else.

[Alderwood]

I'd say reading in real or accelerated time is in the realm of possibility. It sounds like what Travel Options does, except you're not moving anywhere and the interface is the book. It would be pretty neat if you could read while traveling to give you something to do on those long journeys.

[tmsbrg]

If you don't care about the issues of the world still being simulated in the background while reading, then just not pausing would be an option. The Ironman Module Pack mod has an option to disable all pausing in the game (though the mod isn't compatible to the newest DFU). I guess there should be a way to code the same just for book reading.

[Utankung]

I was thinking along the same lines, but I thought that it would have been neat if it wasn't real-time, but rather a system like when you train something; a chunk of time passes when you do something.

What I was imagining was that each time I click a Conversation topic 5 minutes pass, each time I eat or drink some time passes, and each time I flip the page of a book a small amount of time passes. In short, I would love a mod that adds the passing of time when doing mundane things (including the creation of spells, etc.).

I hope someone else feels like this would be an interesting project, I would be very up to the task of discussing specific design ideas around this concept if anyone would like to do that.

EDIT 1: The same idea apparently also was floated around a while back in another thread: viewtopic.php?t=3908&start=10.

EDIT 2: Apparently I had made a post in 2019 about the same thing, haha, had forgotten about the idea until I had it again apparently. viewtopic.php?t=3054