Question

I’m making a leveling system based on experience you have on the site. I already have all the experience stuff figured out, and how I want to do the leveling, but I need a more efficient way to do it. I know this would probably would be achieved using an array, but I don’t really know how to go about doing that. Enough blabbering, though, this is what I’m trying to do…

Level 1 will be anything under 150 experience
Then I’m going to multiply that by 1.5, so
Level 2 will be anything under 225
Level 3 will be anything under 337.5 and so on. This is the inefficient way that I was going to do.

if($xp < 150){
$level = "1";
}elseif($xp < 225){
$level = "2";
}elseif($xp < 337.5){
$level = "3";
}

I could use a variable for the number and multiple by 1.5 ($number*1.5), but like I said before I don’t really know how that’d work.

*Some more info..
I have a session file included on every page and I have queries that would check every time there is new experience earned and this code would be used to update the level on the database automatically.

Answer 1

Try

$level = min(max((int)(log($xp / 100, 1.5) + 1), 1), $maxLevel);

That takes the logarithm base 1.5 of xp/100 (i.e. the number of times you’d have to multiply 100 by to get $xp), then adds one (since log($x, 1.5) is less than one if $x is less than 1.5). The min(max(..., minLevel), maxLevel) construct lets you clamp the level to lie between 1 and $maxLevel, also avoiding any issues with negative levels (if $xp is sufficiently less than 150).