Fix Server Time to be actual server time

[Wade]

I have noticed this but does it really matter what the server time is?

This thread has several reasons why it's beneficial to change. It all boils down to something really simple though: "we do X at Y ST", where X is raid, dungeon, roulettes, FC event, whatever. The point is if you say we do it at, let's say 17:00 ST then everyone can check their clocks and check the game ST and go "OK, that's 6pm for me" or "7pm for me" etc. Right now you simply can't do that, ST is not a constant and therefore is unreliable.


On the topic of server load and issues with queries. Someone mentioned an easy solution to this which I can clarify: append to unix timestamp of the server time to packets from the server. It doesn't have to be every packet and it doesn't really need to be the unix timestamp either. If it were a timestamp it'd be 4 bytes, but we don't really need that for this (it's easier and 100% reliable but this is informative so let's go with another option). Ideally we just need a day of the year and the hour of that day, day of year is 0-365 (1 to 366) and hour is 0-23. That's 14 bits, you'd probably have to round it up to 16 bits and use 2 bytes.

In that situation the client does not ask the server anything, the server merely (ap/pre)pends the servers timestamp (or day + hour) to the packet thus increasing the size by 2 or 4 bytes. Even if this was done at login only it would help, but it could be done once per minute or once per hour or once every x packets...the point is, even for SE and their server infrastructure this is not a big change. If you use the 2 byte approach you get a packet and if it has 2 bytes at the end and the first 2 bits are 10, 01, 11...any really, you know the remaining 14 bits are a day and hour from the servers time (UTC based). Chances are their packets are flagged with a type though so they could just bitshift to say "this is an X packet but it has a timestamp at the end"...so many options with very little overhead.

[Evangela]

Yeah, I just noticed how wrong it is when I was reporting something to GM this morning. Shouldn't it be Montreal time?

[Sicno]

EDIT: Just ignore all this stuff.

Original post:

Ok, so I can testify that even the LOCAL time can be wrong. Here in Chile we switched out of DST a couple of weeks ago and now what the game displays as my "local" time is 1 hour ahead of the actual time. It used to be ok before we moved out of DST, of course.

So it may be that the times aren't calculated after all. Now my guess is that they're synced from a server after all but said server is unreliable and prone to getting the DST changes wrong. Seems to happen a lot with online time sync services.

[Naria]

The local time is taken from your device. So you need to change the time on your computer or playstation.

[Sicno]

The local time is taken from your device. So you need to change the time on your computer or playstation.

No, it's displaying a different time than the one on my computer. I already made the changes to the time on my computer when the switch happened. I'm very familiar with this situation because every online time sync service on the planet gets the Chilean DST changes wrong. Phones, windows, websites, etc. get the wrong time because said services can't be bothered to keep track of DST changes on all regions and whenever the online services mess it up it's on TV news all over the country here. So we're very familiar with online sync services and how unreliable they can be.

My point is that if even the local time may be different from my system's then the whole situation is even weirder.

[Naria]

Weird, I just changed my computer's timezone and tried my timezone but with DST sync turned off and both times the game's local time reflected my computer's clock, so the client definitely seems to be pulling time from my machine. Not sure what is happening then.

[Sicno]

Ok, I think I got it. On my pc changing the time manually doesn't affect the time displayed by the game, but changing the time zone does. It changes the local time and the server time.

Edit: nvm, it's not matching either the actual clock time nor the time zone. And after trying with different time zones... I don't know how it happened, but at some point it started showing the time 2 hours ahead instead of 1 o_O and it's stuck there. No matter to what different time zones I try, it's not changing. I have no idea what's going on.

Edit 2: ok, now I got it for real. The local time in-game doesn't update until you restart the game (and it's still based on the time zone you assign, not your actual clock time) but the "server time" changes as soon as you change your time zone, even while the game is running. So much weird stuff going on. Anyway, there's no reason at all for the server time to change if you change your time zone.

[Raqrie_Tohka]

Bump, just missed a raid because of daylight savings and server time not being server time. Please fix.