auto update

[wiebe81]

*WHAT I HAVE*

CREATE TABLE Players
(
Person varchar(12)
Policy char(12)
Tax int(2)
)

INSERT INTO Players (Person,Policy,Tax)
VALUES (Adam,domestic,9)
VALUES (Burt,military,8)
VALUES (Carol,agricultural,7)

CREATE TABLE Towns
(
Owner
Place
Population
Building
)

INSERT INTO Towns (Owner,Place,Population,Building)
VALUES (Adam,London,15000,Cathedral)
VALUES (Burt,York,5000,Chapel)
VALUES (Carol,Norwich,6000,Church)

*WHAT I WANT TO DO*

I want to automatically update this each day, where one day is equal
to one year.

If the policy is domestic, growth is 3%
If the policy is agricultural, growth is 2%
If the policy is military, growth is 1%

plus

If a cathedral is present, growth is an additional 10%
If a cathedral is present, growth is an additional 5%
If a cathedral is present, growth is an additional 2%

minus

If the tax is 1, then growth is decreased by 1%
(the maximum tax is 20)
Now for example in year 1, I have a population of 15000 in London.
In year 2 this ought to be a population of 15600.

*THE PROBLEM*

I know how to do the population growth calculation with PHP, that's the easy part. Unfortunately since I'm quite new at this, I have no clue, on how to make the tables automatically update the population figure daily. This has to happen each day, wether the user logs in or not. As the reader understands by now, I want to use this in a small multiplayer game I'm trying to create.

So how do I do this? Any help will be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

[wiebe81]

I've been hearing elsewhere that's not possible to do it automatically, but that can be done when people upload a page with a timestamp. I tried looking at some tutorial, but I can't seem to make head or tails with this one on how that is stored in a database.

So suppose:

UPDATE t
SET Population = Population * CASE p.Policy
WHEN 'domestic' THEN 1.03
WHEN 'agricultural' THEN 1.02
WHEN 'military' THEN 1.01
END
FROM Towns t JOIN Players p ON (t.Owner = p.Person);

ok so then if stored

INSERT test_timestamp DEFAULT VALUES

how then does one go about changing it, would that be as simple as t+1 or something?

[Xnuiem]

use cron to run your script each morning.

[wiebe81]

ok thanks, but you wouldn't know of one for windows, now would you?

[Xnuiem]

*points to his signature* Get a real webserver......

Ok, got that out of my system....I think there is a cron service for Windows. (Cron) M$ may have something native, but I dont know what that is for the previously mentioned reason.

[Silver]

The native tool for scheduling process execution in Windows is the Scheduled Tasks that you can find in the Control Panel. I'd recommend using it more than Cron.

Windows is not a bad server OS.

Hope this helps.