Very hard "timing" question...

Eryqu

Hay,

I need help, my problem is, i need to intergrade "turns" every hour. (thats very general lol let me explain)

Example:

in a table i have 3 colums, |id|username|turns|
I have 10 "players"
each player starts with 0 turns...
after 1 hour...
everyone's turn goes to 1...
after 2 hours... everyone has 2 turns...
after 3... (you get the idea)

but if some one uses 1 of there turns..
so i have 9 people with 3 turns... and 1 person with 2 turns..
i still need them to be incramented...
so after the 4th hour...
9 people would have 4 hrs... and 1 person would have 3 hours...

Please tell me of something ( i know not php) that will do this...

oviously i need it to me server time not client time, otherwize people would cheat lol...

This is a hard question,
So thanks for anything,
Erik~~~

eoghain

You will need to setup a cron job to run every hour that will run some SQL against your table that looks something like this:

UPDATE table
   SET turns = turns + 1;

If you have PHP installed as a command line interpreter you can write the code as a shell script.

Eryqu

how do i set up a "corn job"??
(sorry i guess im a little new)

stolzyboy

go to yahoo and search for "running a php page with cron", there are some nice tut's out there, you will need to install lynx browser to do this unless you have php installed as a cgi, which you probably don't, then you could just do a shell script and have cron run that, good luck, i have done this cron crap before and it works very well and isn't taxing on the server at all

eoghain

Cron is a deamon that runs on all Unix operating systems and kicks off processes at given times. It gives you a lot of control over when you want your process to run. Type man crontab at the command prompt of any Unix box and you'll get a good description of what it is and how to use it.

Also stolzyboy is correct if you haven't got PHP compiled to run from the command line then you will need to use lynx to run this script. And you also probably want to add security to the script so that someone won't be able to run it from there web browser whenever they want.

Eryqu

So is that the only way to do it?

Because it sounds rather difficult...

NSH

yep, it's about the only way I know to do it.

you can't have php execute itself... it only runs when someone calls the page, therefore someone/something has to call the php script everytime you want it to perform an action.

eoghain

It's not that difficult at all. It just seems that way. If you build a page that does what you want then you can automate it using cron and lynx. Or you could compile PHP as a command line interpreter (Check the manual for instructions) and then you just need cron to automate the process.