NYCPHP Meetup

[Michael Haszprunar]

Marcin Szkudlarek wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> I'm thinking about developing online game in php  like:
> http://games.swirve.com/utopia
> or
> http://ogame.org
> 
> Both of them are real-time strategy  games. This means that if you make 
> some action in this games, you have to wait for a certain amout of time to 
> see the result. For  example sending an army to attack another province 
> takes few hours of a real-world time.
> My question is , how can I update periodically these kind of data in the 
> database? I think I can do it using cron, updating game database every 
> hour for example. Is there any other way? Usually you don't have access 
> to tool like cron..
> 
> Marcin

Hi,

I'm just doing the same and had to do the same thinking. Our solution: 
Each dataset (for example the users credits) get a timestamp (last 
update). If a function manipulates this value, the timestamp gets 
updated. Every time another player accesses this value (for example he 
sends our a spy to see the opponents agent) the game has to check if the 
value is still correct (maybe tax were paid in the meantime and the user 
has not yet logged in to calculate) and if the value is outdated, the 
value has to be calculated correct, updated and a net timestamp is given.
The advantage is, that you don't have to calculate ALL new values at the 
same time (which can be very complex and long running, depending on the 
users), but you just calculate the new value on access. The second 
advantage is, that you don't need a cron, which is not availiable in any 
hosting environment.
The disadvantage is, that you need a more complex data storage and a 
on-access data consistency check.

We tried it and it works great (although the final test is still to come 
because our project is about 0.1% complete).
Hope you understand my point, my english is not very good ...

Michael from Germany