Date Time Diff Issue GMT

[JoeP]

I have a daily game competition page for possible participants in any GMT zone. I set the current day's game active at 12:01 AM GMT on my server's GMT zone; therefore, a game could become active at say 2:01PM in the applicable GMT zone they may be in, 4:01 AM in another player's GMT etc. It works fine.

As part of the scoring process, I would like to award bonus points to the member that plays the current day's game first that day. I don't want any advantage to when the game becomes available in a certain GMT. It would be unfair to players in my GMT to try and play a game at midnight, when someone in Australia got the game at 9:01 AM.

For starters my ISP GMT is -7. What I am looking for is the formula to subtract the actual player's GMT to adjust it to their 12:01 AM time so their start time could be calculated from their own ISP's server's time as if they had access to the game at 12:01 their time.

I understand how to update a player's record with SQL etc. in MS Access 2000. So if I could nail that variable down when I capture the correct adjusted time lapse I would have it.

Any suggestions, ideas etc. would certainly be appreciated, and of course I will elaborate on any area if any questions to what I am trying to do.

PART II

Now all that said and done, my exisiting member configurations allow users to adjust their local time settings to reflect current time n their machines based on my -7 GMT so their time displays correctly.

I will have to allow for users to elect to set their machines for the time they want the game to be available to them. The game runs Mon-Fri so I could allow them to change elections on Sat-Sun etc. By this I mean, A grave yard worker would have advantage in my GMT as the game is available at 12:01 AM The office worker would not usually see it til say 9:00AM. So that user may elect to have access at 9:00 AM local GMT as compared to 12:01 AM so He or She would have same chance to play game first.

Hey If It Was Easy, I would ask our IS Department

TIA For Anything!

[raf]

I don't understand it. Since the users can adjust their timezone, they can simply set it to whatever timezone they like to trick you. I think the most '''''''''''reliable'''''''''' easy way to catch the timezone is using clientsided javascript. (but the clientsided sais it all --> easy to change)
An alternative is that you grab their IP and run it agains an IP lookup-tool that returns the timezone of that IP's provider. To trick you then, they would need to spoof their IP which isn't likely, just to fool a gamecompetition. I think i have an Access db at home with IP's and related timezones (not sure i still have it). Just post back if you want me to look for it this evening (or google for something like that)

So you could run each new login against that table. This off cours implies that your users shouldn't be allowed to change their timezone any longer (no need for anyway).


About your lifestyle-variation problem. Well, that's life.

But i frankly don't understand all this. If you make sure that you can uniquely identify each player, then you can just check if it's the first or x'ed time that they play the game today, and base your bonusses on the number of runs they need to achieve whatever score. I don't immedeately see the relevance between being the first to start the game and getting bonus-points. In real life, the first one that seps in an examination room, doesn't get bonus points either. But people that complete a test within a specified timelimit do get bonusses sometimes. So you could just give a bonus to the player withe highest score on his first run. Or to the player that needst the leastruns to achieve level X or whatever.

Anyway, the IP based lookup will probably deliver what you need.