Unix Time stamp

Unity Engine
1

Hi guys,

I have come across this script in the Unify wiki that sets the position of the sun depending on the time of day, and it seems to do all that I need…with one exception!

import System;
var date = DateTime.Now;
var timeDisplay : GUIText;
 
function Start() {
	InvokeRepeating("Increment", 1.0, 1.0);
}
function Update () {
	var seconds : float = date.TimeOfDay.Ticks / 10000000;
	transform.rotation = Quaternion.LookRotation(Vector3.up);
	transform.rotation *= Quaternion.AngleAxis(seconds/86400*360,Vector3.down);
	if (timeDisplay) timeDisplay.text = date.ToString("f");
}
 
function Increment() {
	date += TimeSpan(0,0,0, 1);
}

Basically I need to be able to get my time from the server (not a network game I must add), I have a php script that returns the time as a Unix timestamp, and just wondered if anyone knows if its possible to replace the

var date = DateTime.Now;
with a timestamp returned from the server?

The DateTime.Now is no good to me as my project is a simulator of a certain place so i need the time to reflect the time at the location and not on the users machine.[/code]

2

Use the WWW class to call a php file and grab the data returned from that. Then simply echo the timestamp in the php script.

3

Hmmm… ok tried this but no dice!

Bascially the WWW call will only return it as a string so I get errors telling me that I cannot access the methods of dateTime - is there a way of casting this data from WWW to DateTime?

4 
string wwwResult;

// EX:
// wwwResult = "2008-04-09 17:40 PM";

DateTime dateTime;
dateTime = new DateTime();
dateTime = DateTime.ParseExact( wwwResult, "yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm tt", null)
5

Cheers AngryAnt - sorry for the delay in replying! Very busy at the moment :frowning:

After a lot of playing around (and swearing!) I realized that Unity, when reading the value in seconds returned by a php script using the time() method, automatically converts that value to the date format in your example.

I do however have another question - in my script i want to be able to compare the current date time with a set value (say 8pm), this will in turn set the sun to an appropriate value. I have the methods in place to get the current time from the server, but how would I go about comparing these values?

The only thing I can think of is to set a date like so:

var refDate = new DateTime();
	
	refDate = 2008-01-30 20:00;

The only issue with this is that I don’t really want the date to be compared, just the time. Any ideas?