I have built an online game system that depends on a timer that records how long it took a player to complete a challenge. It needs to be accurate to the millisecond. Their time is stored in a SQL database.
The problem is that when I use the Timer class, some players are ending up getting scores in the database of less than a second. (which is impossible, as most challenges would take at least 11 seconds to complete even in a perfect situation.)
What I have found is that if a player has too many browser windows open, and/or a slow computer, the flash game slows down actually affecting the timer speed itself. The timer is ‘spinning’ on screen so you can physically see the numbers slowing down.
It is frustrating that I cannot just open a second thread or do something to allow flash to keep accurate time regardless of whatever else is going on in the program. Any ideas?
Timer is (in theory) independent of framerate, so hopefully should execute “on time” even if the player slows the framerate (in heavy display update cases). Of course, Timer is still dependent somewhat on CPU load and will have some marginal inaccuracies. 10+ second inaccuracies? I doubt it. I think either
a) You are using an incorrect number for the timer counts (timer runs on milliseconds, not seconds). If you ran it every 50ms, you could calculate total time based on the number of ticks it got through * 50ms
b) Your users are using something like Tamper Data to pause the request and change their “score”
c) You’ve got another bug in the game that’s causing the issue.
Impossible to tell without sample code. Got any?