Real-time action ala games??

modulatum

What would be a proper solution for automated decision making in a PHP script, like a game? That is, without an external application, or any human input. For example, any random event that happens when the player is away from the game. How would one go about implementing that?

drew010

you would have to use an external application, a task scheduler to run at certain times calling a php script and having that make some decision as to make things happen to people.
on linux, cron is the way to go. you can set up multiple jobs to run scripts at different times of the day to do random things to random users.
on windows, it is possible to set up the windows task scheduler to run php scripts.

_theworks

What would be a proper solution for automated decision making in a PHP script, like a game? That is, without an external application, or any human input. For example, any random event that happens when the player is away from the game. How would one go about implementing that?

Well... the only way i know of executing a script when it hasnt been requested (thats what php does it executes scripts on request) is the almighty CRON and i think the smallest time frame a cron can do is every 5 minutes.

modulatum

There's no way for php to do so by itself?

For Windows, would php.exe have to be called?

Thanks much.

drew010

yes on windows the task scheduler would run php.exe and pass the script to run as an argument. so it would call the program like
"C:/php/php.exe -f C:/webserver/files/yourscript.php"

modulatum

Thanks much 🙂

Weedpacket

Both Un*x and Windows have an "at" command for scheduling one-off events. This may be more appropriate for some situations than cron (after doing whatever it was supposed to do, the program decides when it will next do something, and registers an at job).