Trouble creating countdown correctly

kathy7012

I am running out of ideas!

I am pretty new to php and I think I am making it harder than it probably is. Sorry!

I am having difficulty figuring out how to make a countdown timer that will count down from 30 minutes to 0 and then having it continually repeat the countdown by starting over every time it goes to zero. (And actually it does start counting over as it stands, but I know that I am doing incorrectly). Once it reaches 0 I need to do an update to the rest of my page.

I am using this for a project so if I can figure it out for one of the timers I should be able to handle the others.

I have this configured in my functions page and am using an include in another page to call the function.

This one works fine for a one hour update, but can't figure out how to use it for 30 minute update.

This timer is used to update other parts of my project so I don't want to use an event date.

I think my logic has disappeared!! Am I thinking about this incorrectly?

function countdown ($online){
global $time;

$difference=$time-$online;
$num = $difference/86400;
$days = intval($num);
$num2 = ($num - $days)*24;
$hours = intval($num2);
$num3 = ($num2 - $hours)*60;
$mins = intval($num3);
$num4 = ($num3 - $mins)*60;
$secs = intval($num4);

//if($days != 0){echo"$days days, ";}
//if($hours != 0){echo"$hours hours, ";}
if($mins != 0){echo"$mins mins, ";}
echo"$secs secs";
}

Any suggestions would be wonderful.

paulnaj

Hi Kathy,

Not 100% sure of exactly what you want but ...

// $old_time has been set 
// somehow, sessions, cookies or whatever.

// Get the current time
$current_time = time();

// Get the difference in secs
$diff_secs = $current_time - $old_time;

// Get the (whole) number of mins
$num_mins = floor($diff_secs/60);

// Get the balance of secs
$num_secs = $diff_secs % 60;

echo 'current - old = ['.$num_mins.':'.$num_secs.']';

if($num_mins == 30){
	echo '<h1>Bong!</h1>';
}

Paul 😉

kathy7012

I am not still kind of confused.

I am sorry I didn't explain it very well I don't think.

This is the scenerio I need to code.

I need to set a timer counter that starts somewhere, like cur_time, and then constantly counts down to 0, (When it reaches 0, I will have to code an update to my database to add turns to a players info). But at the same time the counter needs to repeatedly start over from 30 minutes and again back down to 0.

What this timer is for is to do rank updates of a game, and at the same time update their turns by 4 so they are constantly getting updates and they are constantly receiving turns.

I hope that is a better explanation.

If it would be better to let you get into my server and look, let me know, and we can exchange that information by email if that would be safer. I hope you don't mind I don't want to post my server info online.

Again thank you for such a quick response!

TheDefender

You'd need to do this in JavaScript and DHTML probably... PHP is a server-side script, so it is parsed on the server, and then sent to the browser, whereas JavaScript is client-side, and can do more "real-time" updates... Dynamicdrive.com may have something you can use or manipulate for your needs.