incrementing a variable every hour

[interpim]

I am in the process of teaching myself PHP and have used this site to do some of my learning.

 

I was inspired by the MMORPG contest, and I know it is over now, but have been attempting to build a fairly simple one for my first project to learn with.  I want to prevent users from spamming the attack script to bump up their stats/level so my plan was to implement a limit on how many turns they could use per hour.

 

The thing is, Say I want to give 1 turn every 10 minutes, or 6 turns an hour... If the user isn't online I still want to increment their turn count up while they are offline.  This I have seen on some other websites, but I honestly don't have a clue where to start on this.

 

I know basics, but am still learning, so if anyone could explain the process behind this it would be greatly appreciated.

[sspoke]

if you are making a rpg with php you would use something for storage like txt based or SQL u can store the time of last attack and just check in php script if time is close etc.

[interpim]

Im just curious if that would work...

 

for instance... on account creation, I want to give each player 20 turns... so

 

$turns=20;

 

now, for every hour on the hour, I want to add 6 turns.

Do i need to add a time since last turn field to my database?  (Using mysql btw)

 

the time() function in php really confuses me LOL.  I have tried working with it before, but I usually mess it up especially when trying to do math with the returned value.

 

are you saying,

when a user loads the page, i should check $turns and time since last turn?  then find the difference between current time and that time to add however many turns they should get?

 

Could you also point me in the direction of a good tutorial on date/time functions in PHP?

[sspoke]

well

 

you make a function like

 

function CheckTurns($playerID){

//sql stuff

//get sql last turn time

//do some sql math formula to check if the time is way too old to calulate how much turns to add not really that much of a math person

 

if($dunno)

return False;

 

return True;

}

 

and everytime the player refreshes the page it would check turns..

 

ya ermm  time is really confusing

[sspoke]

actually time is extremely easy

 

its just a unix timestamp which started in 1970 from 1 and every second it goes by 1 number

 

so

 

$total = sql timestamp - time();  would give how much seconds past last turn

 

than u add a checker if its less than 60 so its only seconds if more than 60 than its a minute + etc..

u just do like $total > 5000 or something add to SQL $turns++; or something. u figure out the best number of seconds..

 

http://us2.php.net/time  has some nice functions people posted in comments which fits what you want to do like this one

 

<?php
   function ago($timestamp){
       $difference = time() - $timestamp;

       if($difference < 60)
           return $difference." seconds ago";
       else{
           $difference = round($difference / 60);
           if($difference < 60)
               return $difference." minutes ago";
           else{
               $difference = round($difference / 60);
               if($difference < 24)
                   return $difference." hours ago";
               else{
                   $difference = round($difference / 24);
                   if($difference < 7)
                       return $difference." days ago";
                   else{
                       $difference = round($difference / 7);
                       return $difference." weeks ago";
                   }
               }
           }
       }
   }
?> 

[interpim]

cool... thank you for the link and info