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In Illyriad all the basic resources have an hourly rate, and food consumption is also on an hourly scale. How often and when does this tick actually occur?

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Illyriad is realtime - but in practical terms I believe the devs said this means the server ticks every second, and the game keeps track of every increasing/decreasing resource to many decimal places, rolling over (visibly to the player) when it crosses an integer.

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I can't find the dev post on the Illy forum, but as I remember it's a bit more complicated than I've described. The server only calculates resources for a particular town when it needs to know the numbers, because (eg) a player is logged in, or a building completes whilst a player is logged out, or hostile thieves arrive (or whatever). At this point, the server works out what the new resource levels are, based on an hourly rate of increase (resource generation amount) and the time since it last checked the number. I remember GM Stormcrow describing this as all a bit "Schrodinger" :) – bunnyness Jan 17 '11 at 10:40
^^ That is usually the way processes based on time are calculated in programs. It avoids having a virtual "clock" that needs a massive calculation every second or so. Method as described by bunnyness in his comment is very common and efficient. – dtech Jan 17 '11 at 11:28
^^^ Good to know, thanks dtech. As a non-techie (but mathematics/physics inclined) I lol'd at the (inaccurate but funny) Schrodinger reference from the devs. – bunnyness Jan 17 '11 at 11:59
@dtech A lot of the older MMO strategy games had hard ticks, either nightly or hourly. – C. Ross Jan 17 '11 at 13:40

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