What time to display in text messages in multiplayer game?

Posted by Krom Stern on Game Development See other posts from Game Development or by Krom Stern
Published on 2011-05-14T18:15:54Z Indexed on 2012/06/20 3:25 UTC
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Say I'm having a multiplayer RTS game. There's a main server for each individual game and several clients connected to it. All packets are sent to server first and then server retransmits them back to clients.

Say Server is located in one time-zone and all of the clients are in different time-zones. ClientA send a text message in chat at 12:03, what times should be stamped for other clients? Should his message be uniformely timestamped by Server (12:02) or each client should timestamp the message whenever it is recieved (12:04, 16:04, 03:03, etc..). Bear in mind, that all the messages are to be in the same order on all clients, server takes care of that.

So thats the question - use local time for each client or use global server time to timestamp chat messages?

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