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trapper · Posted: Sat Jan 05, 2008 12:34 am Post subject: ALARM type TIMERs in VDS6

I have also posted this in the new DialogScript forums at http://www.dialogscript.com/index.php?option=com_fireboard&Itemid=62&func=view&catid=10&id=49#49 . As it's not purely a bug report I decided to post it here as well as I'm not sure how many VDS users are regularly visiting the new forum yet.

Looking at the changes to the TIMER command in VDS6, it doesn't appear to me to be as intuitive as it could be. To explain...

The values are now specified as floating-point values compatible with the @DATETIME function... this seems a good change to me. In the Help file, the values for the types CHRONO and CTDOWN are specified as so: 'The is the timer period'. This makes sense as these types are counting up to, or down from, a period of time.

However, the ALARM type doesn't work as I would now expect it to. The Help file says, 'The is the alarm time', but strictly speaking it isn't. If I wanted to set an ALARM type timer to trigger at 6:00pm today (5 Jan 2008) I would expect to be able to use the command 'TIMER START,1,ALARM,39452.75' as 39452.75 is the VDS time for 6:30pm on 5 Jan 2008. But I can't use that command, I have to specify it as 'TIMER START,1,ALARM,0.75'. In other words, I have to specify the fractional part only.

It seems that the integer portion of the time value specifies the number of days relative to today (ie. 0 = today, 1 = tomorrow etc.) whereas the fractional part of the time value specifies the time-of-day.

Hopefully someone can clarify HOW the ALARM type actually works, and why the parameter isn't strictly the VDS floating-point value.

Regards.

vdsalchemist · Posted: Mon Jan 07, 2008 1:51 pm Post subject:

Trapper,
Please do not double post. CR is monitoring both forums, however if you double post then we will be wasting time trying to answer both posts and will not be able to answer all posts in a timely manner.

jules · Posted: Tue Jan 08, 2008 12:50 pm Post subject:

Off the top of my head (since I can't remember, and don't have the VDS 6 source code to look at) I think the reason might be that an alarm can reoccur at the same time each day. It is not a one-shot timer that alarms once and that's the end of it.