i am thinking about creating a sort of text based mmorpg game, i have a fair amount of experience in designing and building websites. I see that a lot of text based games use ticks as a sort of time frame for completeing tasks etc… I was wondering if there was an alternative to this, so that the game could constantly be running live, where players didn’t have to wait till the end of the tick to complete a task. For example they could the game might involve the player building a house, the system for a tick based game might say your house will be ready in 3 ticks, i want a system where it might say your house will be ready in 3 minutes. Is there anyway to do this? I just need ideas at this stage, so i can continue doing a bit more planning and researching.
Sorry if this is a bit confusing
Thanks
do you mean round-based games when talking about ticks?
for the implementation of the minutes-based thing, i suggest to create an event table containing the timestamp, when an event should take place and some information on what to do. when the user visits your game after some time, you can look up which events should have happened since his last visit and execute them. if the execution of the event produced following events, execute them or insert them into the event table.
if a user never visits your game, nothing will be calculated and you won’t need any background service like cron jobs.