Question

I recently started programming in PHP. For exercise I’d like to build my own PHP text strategy game. One technical aspect needs some thinking.

In my game every player must have the ability to gain resources, for example iron and grain. With these resources a player is able to recruit soldiers or build buildings. The resources are stored in a kind of warehouse.

The resources will be gain in a period of time. In example you gain 100 grain a hour and that grain is stored in the warehouse. This means that every 0.6 minute, 1 grain has to be added. I have been looking to cron jobs but that is not the best answer to my problem because is takes too much system resource. The problem is that I’d like to be able to update my resources in my warehouse every minute. Does anyone have an idea for my problem?

Answer 1

Rather than trying to solve this by updating state, you could look at trying to solve it in a functional programming way. E.g. write a function that can calculate the amount of resources, given known conditions (Such as when production was started). Very simplified:

state based model:

class Gold {
  public $amount = 0;
}

class GoldDigger {
  public $amount_per_second = 1;
}

$player_gold = new Gold();
$player_worker = new GoldDigger();
while (true) {
  $player_gold->amount += $player_worker->amount_per_second;
  sleep(1);
  echo "Player has {$player_gold->amount} gold pieces\n";
}

functional based model:

class Gold {
  public $workers = array();
  function getAmount() {
    $total = 0;
    foreach ($this->workers as $worker) {
      $total += $worker->getAmount();
    }
    return $total;
  }
}

class GoldDigger {
  public $amount_per_second = 1;
  public $started = 0;
  function __construct() {
    $this->started = time();
  }
  function getAmount() {
    return $this->amount_per_second * (time() - $this->started);
  }
}

$player_gold = new Gold();
$player_gold->workers[] = new GoldDigger();

while (true) {
  sleep(1);
  echo "Player has {$player_gold->getAmount()} gold pieces\n";
}

Both these examples are a bit contrived – you would likely store the data in a database or similar, which complicates matters a bit, but I hope it illustrates the difference between the two strategies.