Querying current game date / year in Lua

[SoftwareSimian]

Is it possible to query the current in-game year (or date) in Lua code?

The availability.yearFrom / yearTo in the .con file controls when something appears in the menu for building, but I want to differentiate behavior based on what year it is when you construct something.

[Dirkels]

+1 Would love to know that as well :-)

[SoftwareSimian]

Thanks to canophone for providing a link to the documentation[transportfever.com].

Answer:
game.interface.getGameTime() returns a 2-element table with "date" and "time".
"time" is a float, not sure offhand what the timescale is
"date" is a table with 3 entries: "year", "month", "day"

local gameInterfaceGetGameTime = game.interface.getGameTime()
print("* in-game date: " .. gameInterfaceGetGameTime["date"]["year"] .. "-" .. gameInterfaceGetGameTime["date"]["month"] .. "-" .. gameInterfaceGetGameTime["date"]["day"] .. " " .. math.round(gameInterfaceGetGameTime["time"]))

gives you something like:
in-game date: 1952-8-25 1755

[SoftwareSimian]

Caveat: when generating a new map, industries (probably everything else too) are placed before time starts, or even exists, and TpF will crash with "attemt to index field 'interface' (a nil value)" if you try to access game.interface.getGameTime() before time starts running. If you wrap a check around it you can avoid the crash:

if ((game ~= nil) and (game.interface ~= nil)) then
	local gameInterfaceGetGameTime = game.interface.getGameTime()
	print("* in-game date: " .. gameInterfaceGetGameTime["date"]["year"] .. "-" .. gameInterfaceGetGameTime["date"]["month"] .. "-" .. gameInterfaceGetGameTime["date"]["day"] .. " " .. math.round(gameInterfaceGetGameTime["time"]))
else
	print("* in-game date: not available (probably placing industries on a new map)")
end

[canophone]

Originally posted by SoftwareSimian:

Caveat: when generating a new map, industries (probably everything else too) are placed before time starts, or even exists, and TpF will crash with "attemt to index field 'interface' (a nil value)" if you try to access game.interface.getGameTime() before time starts running. If you wrap a check around it you can avoid the crash:

if ((game ~= nil) and (game.interface ~= nil)) then
	local gameInterfaceGetGameTime = game.interface.getGameTime()
	print("* in-game date: " .. gameInterfaceGetGameTime["date"]["year"] .. "-" .. gameInterfaceGetGameTime["date"]["month"] .. "-" .. gameInterfaceGetGameTime["date"]["day"] .. " " .. math.round(gameInterfaceGetGameTime["time"]))
else
	print("* in-game date: not available (probably placing industries on a new map)")
end

The planner mod uses the reference script functions, what I gather from there is that they must be placed in a script location.

[SoftwareSimian]

Originally posted by canophone:

The planner mod uses the reference script functions, what I gather from there is that they must be placed in a script location.

Not sure what you mean? My above code works fine (for my purposes anyways).

[canophone]

Originally posted by SoftwareSimian:

Originally posted by canophone:

The planner mod uses the reference script functions, what I gather from there is that they must be placed in a script location.

Not sure what you mean? My above code works fine (for my purposes anyways).

Maybe I'm overthinking its needs!