Real-time webbrowser game

Question

I'm trying to create a real-time webbrowser game in ASP.Net MVC3, but I'm unsure about what's the best approach to processing 'real-time' events on the server side.

Imagine that the client wants to upgrade a building, upgrading a building takes time. A record gets inserted in the database that holds the end-time and on the client a ajax timer start's running. I was thinking about having a windows service running all the time. Every second the service checks the table and does the real processing when the time passed the end-time. However I could imagine that when you have a huge amount of data to process this can get problematic.

What would be the best way of doing this?

Cheers.

Answer 1

I've seen games like that before. You do not need to count down yourself, you just need to store the datetime for whenever the building will be ready.

When a page is requested you send a timestamp of when the building will be completed, and use javascript to count down. For example, like this.