The title is my question, basically.

The waiting/sleeping process is INFURIATINGLY slow.
After all, the WHOLE POINT of waiting or sleeping is that I don't need to wait actual game-time for an event to occur...
And yet I have to sit through the painfully slow process, hour by hour ...

It's all-right once or twice, but if I am waiting say 2 days at at a time for several in-game weeks for merchants to restock (or something along those lines), I would really appreciate it if I could make it faster.
And I'm sure others would too.

It appears as if there is some constant time that the game takes to "pass" each hour. I understand that it probably needs to give some time for the scripts to run, but it still seems to me that the waiting takes far more time than is necessary. At the very least, I DON'T need to see the blurry scene with different lighting conditions each hour. I'd prefer to just skip near-instantly to the time that I want.


So, does anyone know:
1. If I can change the speed of "waiting" in the CK?
2. If it can be changed through an interface mod (I know there are mods that allow you to wait more hours at a time, but AFAIK they don't speed the process up)
3. If it's something that SKSE might be looking into?
4. Heck, can I HEX EDIT something into my executable to change this ... ??? I'll settle for that!!!

I think the reason it clicks through doing one hour at a time, is because it has to calculate what about 3000 NPC's do in that gamehour. This calculation is quick, but it must still do it. Your other choice would be to have the screen go black for 15 seconds, instead of showing each hour as it passes.

Then again this is just an educated guess.

Doesn't it take the same amount of time if you type "tai" in the console? If your theory is correct, wouldn't that make it take less time?

I would assume that they set a limit on how fast it could go to keep it consistant and prevent problems. That said, perhaps you can edit that limit to make it go as fast as possible...

I'd like to know how to do that as well if that's the case. If I find out I'll post here.

Edit: For the thread starter, if I'm impatient or have to wait for more than a day, what I do is type "set timescale to 20000" and then set it back when the amount of time has passed that I want to wait. It's faster. I think this is more evidence that the NPCs' actions over the course of a the day aren't actually processed in real-time if you're waiting...

Ehh, I think it is. Another reason it goes hour by hour is so that the player can cancel at any time. Instead of saying 'Wait 20 hours' then being screwed and there's no going back, it goes 1 at a time and if you made a mistake you can cancel. I've done that before plenty.

Now let's look at that. Does it recalculate all NPC's packages at each step?

If it doesn't: It slowly goes by the hours, then once it hits the last hour, it would have to pause and calculate everything. It would be brief on a good PC, but slower on consoles, and very slow on old PC's. Or, if the player hits cancel at any point, it would do this.

If it does: It quickly runs through each hour, so that when you're done, the menu fades out instantly and the game resumes. No pause. Or if the player hit's cancel, it finishes the current hour, then backs out of the menu quickly.

The think with 'Set Timescale 10000' is that hte game only manages the NPC's packages every 10 or so seconds. If it did it constantly it would severely bog down the game. So lets say you set 10000 then count to 20, then set 20 again. Like 4 days have passed, but the NPC's haven't teleported or dissapeared. That's because it only managed their packages every 10 seconds, or twice during that period. The NPC's will now slowly filter off to where they should be at that time.

I think it does. And also, I would then think that this is all hardcoded, and not even managed by an ini or anything.

Maybe you're right then. In either case, setting the timescale to 10000+ is still a faster way to wait than using the wait menu.

Which MEANS that there is no practical reason why the wait menu could not be accelerated ... (besides it being irrevocably hardcoded)

At the very least, perhaps an interface mod could be made that, instead of waiting, actually changes the timescale temporarily?

Yeah, that would be easy to make. I can write a script for it later/tomorrow if I feel like it.

Edit: Err, well, it wouldn't be an interface mod but it would be a spell you could cast or item you could equip that would give you the option to wait for as long as you want (or maybe limited to something like... one month?) and would disable your controls and set timescale to something very high until the time you set. Maybe I could add an imagespace modifier and some effects to make it fit into the game as a time travel spell instead of just being a spell that fixes something.

I -might- be able to do it as an interface mod eventually, since the flash files are available, but I haven't done anything with those yet so it would take a while and a lot of testing to understand how exactly they work. And it still might not be possible, because you might not be able to change global variables from the interface, which is required to set the timescale.