Making a sign that shows the times of events in a user's timezone

[imacutesealy (immaculatesealy)]

I’ve been recently looking into how to use os.clock to make a countdown to events that is accurate to every user’s timezone. Every day at 12:00 PM, 3:00PM, 6:00PM, and 9:00 PM I host an event called awards where players in my group get bonus xp. Many young kids don’t understand timezones, however, and repeatedly will ask my moderators to convert the time to awards or even assume the EST scheduled times are in their timezone and ask why awards aren’t happening. To solve this I wish to code a sign that will display the time until these events, but I can’t wrap my head on how to accomplish this from what I’ve read on os.clock documentation. Any explanations on how a script like this would work are appreciated.

[MRBEGI (Begi)]

You can use os.time and os.date to achieve what you want, here are the docs for them: os.date, os.time.

The script will look like something like this:
It’s a prototype of the script, you can modify it to match your case.

local function getNextEventTime(currentTime)
    local eventTimesUTC = {
        12 * 3600, -- 12:00 PM UTC (adjust these times according to UTC)
        15 * 3600, -- 03:00 PM UTC
        18 * 3600, -- 06:00 PM UTC
        21 * 3600  -- 09:00 PM UTC
    }

    -- get the current UTC time
    local currentUTC = os.time(os.date("!*t"))

    -- calculate today's start time in UTC (midnight)
    local todayStartUTC = currentUTC - (currentUTC % 86400)

    for _, eventTime in ipairs(eventTimesUTC) do
        local eventTimeToday = todayStartUTC + eventTime
        if eventTimeToday > currentUTC then
            return eventTimeToday
        end
    end

    -- if no event is left today, return the first event time of the next day
    return todayStartUTC + 86400 + eventTimesUTC[1]
end

local function updateCountdown()
    local currentUTC = os.time(os.date("!*t"))
    local nextEventUTC = getNextEventTime(currentUTC)

    local timeUntilEvent = nextEventUTC - currentUTC
    local hours = math.floor(timeUntilEvent / 3600)
    local minutes = math.floor((timeUntilEvent % 3600) / 60)
    local seconds = timeUntilEvent % 60

    local countdownText = string.format("%02d:%02d:%02d", hours, minutes, seconds)
    -- i'll put print in here, but you can update your GUI or sign with countdownText
    print("Next event:", countdownText)
end

-- so we call the function in every frame (you can use while True in here but I think RunService will be better)
game:GetService("RunService").RenderStepped:Connect(updateCountdown)

Let me know if it helps.

[imacutesealy (immaculatesealy)]

Thanks! This is exactly what I was looking for.