What do I use to find out if the TimeOfDay has changed? {UNANSWERED}

(EDIT to fix typo, L should have been : in several cases)

Your script has a lot of issues. We'll rebuild it from scratch.

We want a loop that's constantly running. So we'll make a loop like this:

while true do
	-- something goes here
end

There's a problem, though: if you run this, it will just crash. So we need to put a wait inside:

while true do
	wait()
	-- something goes here
end

Great! Next, we need to check whether the current time is 18:00:00. How can we do this? For now, forget about the loop.

if --[[ it's currently 18:00:00 ]] then
	-- turn on the light
end

We need to fill in both of these things. The turning on bit it looks like you've already got:

if --[[ it's currently 18:00:00 ]] then
	script.Parent.SpotLight.Enabled = true
end

So now we've just got to figure out that condition. The time is stored as a string or a sequence of characters. So what we want to check is string equality.

We're comparing two things. The first is the string "18:00:00" and the second is the current time, game.Lighting.TimeOfDay. To compare two things, you use the == operator. So we want to write:

game.Lighting.TimeOfDay == "18:00:00"

There's a problem, though, which you might experience. Basically, the problem is that your script could potentially miss the exact time of 18:00:00. Depending on how fast your time-advancing script runs, you might skip forward. So what we can check instead is whether it's the 18:yy:yy without caring about anything other than the current hour.

To do this, we'll use :sub. :sub is a string method which returns substrings or pieces of strings. We'll look at the first 3 characters of the time of day only.

We write game.Lighting.TimeOfDay:sub(1, 3) which gets characters 1-3 from the string. So we want it to be "18:" instead of the full string. So we'll say:

game.Lighting.TimeOfDay:sub(1,3) == "18:"

We'll put this into the if-statement:

if game.Lighting.TimeOfDay:sub(1,3) == "18:" then
	script.Parent.SpotLight.Enabled = true
end

And now we can put this into the while-loop:

while true do
	wait()
	if game.Lighting.TimeOfDay:sub(1,3) == "18:" then
		script.Parent.SpotLight.Enabled = true
	end
end

And we repeat for the other time, turning off the lights:

while true do
	wait()
	if game.Lighting.TimeOfDay:sub(1,3) == "18:" then
		script.Parent.SpotLight.Enabled = true
	end
	if game.Lighting.TimeOfDay:sub(1,3) == "07:" then
		script.Parent.SpotLight.Enabled = false
	end
end

And there you have it!