There are two clocks in the IE:

1. Real clock that tracks real time the player has spent with the game running (hereafter referred to as CREAL)
2. In-game clock that tracks in-game time - (i.e. time displayed in lower left corner of the game screen) (hereafter referred to as CINGAME)

Time is tracked in ticks; by default there are 15 in a second. In BG2 there are 100 ticks in a combat round. A BG round lasts 6, IWD 7 and PST 5 seconds.

When the game starts, both clocks start from 0. When resting, CINGAME is incremented by the time spent resting (usually 8 hours). CREAL is incremented by a the few seconds while the rest movie is played. This puts CINGAME at a higher value than CREAL.

Timers relating to both clocks can be set through scripting:

When this is done, the game takes the values the relevant clocks, adds the specified number (e.g. 3600) and stores the result in a global variable (TINGAME or TREAL), e.g.

• CINGAME = 7,195,874
• CINGAME + 3600 = 7,199,474
• CREAL = 2,395,858
• CREAL + 3600 = 2,399,458

It should be noticed that TINGAME is higher than TREAL.

Timers can be checked by two commands in scripting:

To detemine whether timers have expired, the engine subtracts the current clock value from the time value. A negative result means the timer has expired (this is why a timer set 1 will expire instantly). As an example, using GlobalTimerExpired("TREAL","GLOBAL") the engine will subtract 2,399,458 (the value of TREAL) from 7,195,874 (the value of CINGAME) and return a negative number - hence an expired timer.