I've been stuck on the problem of time advancement, weather, and how that would work with a multi-player internet game for some time. As I see it there are two basic approaches: The first option is to have the world time advance for everyone at the same rate. For instance, each ten minutes of real time would be one game turn. The first disadvantage is that each player would have to wait for those ten minutes to get his next turn. Given the 20 second internet rule, I doubt I'll attract many people to stay and play with this system. The advantage would be that weather and seasons then become practical to implement, as everyone is on the same time scale. The second option is to have each player drive his own personal "clock" to advance his time, which is separate from all the other clocks. Now, the seasons and weather for one player would be radically different than some other player. Would it make sense for your guys to be hunkered down in the middle of winter, and to be attacked by someone out campaigning in the middle of his summer? The advantage of this approach is that players can take as many turns as they want, making the whole experience better for the players. Has anyone else solved this problem in some way that works in a game, and is satisfying for it's realism? Any help or ideas are appreciated.

Not sure I understand... This is a turn based game where you just want players to come on for a few minutes a day? I think most just have a 'game time' and this dictates the date and season and such in game.

I expect to have some players (college kids with homework to do) who spend hours playing, and adults with jobs who spend a few minutes to an hour playing, maybe a few days a week. I don't want the casual gamers to sign on, only to find it the dead of winter when they can't do anything.

I'm taking the latter approach in my PHP-based game. Each player has 'time' variable (represented as a UNIX timestamp), which represents where in time the player is. Whenever an action is performed (opening doors, casting spells, eating caek) the time variable is incrimented. If the time is greater than the current time, no more actions can be taken.

In addition, the time is guarenteed not to be more than one week behind the real time. This prevents the massive seasonal difference you've described, unless one season in the game is less than a week's worth of real-time.

Finally, a distinction is made between events on the game timeplane and on the real one. Hooray for added plot devices to make things a little easier, I'd hate to have to gradually update the game based on where in time the player is.

But yeah, the key I think is to cap the amount of time a player can accumulate.

Having the player time lag, but not lag too much, is a great idea. That would move time along for everyone, but not leave the casual players completely out of it. (I don't really care about players who logon once a month!)