Can anyone help with my project?

Narz

I am basically a beginner at PHP with some knowledge of programming concepts. I do have a very good concept of what I want to create though. Here is my game concept : http://www.narcity.com/WorldConquest.html

I realize now perhaps getting it done by Jan 1st is pushing it a bit but I'd like to work as quickly as possible. Any advice on which to start, which are the best online resources and explanations of coding concepts, etc. What do you guys think? I appreciate all comments! Thanks!

planetsim

Hmm.. Nice little game you wanna make..

PHP wont be able to do it though..
You can do little bits like update members account information like what he did last time he visited so he/she doesnt have to begin all over again. Other than that.. Im not sure.. But i think if you work with Flash you can do it..

Oh... if you want help. Just PM me.. Im not good at flash but if you run into trouble in the PHP dept. I'll help..

binaryabraham

informit.com has a free book on php, Writing Simple PHP Applications. It's a very good start if you are new to php. I checked it out and found it useful.

Weedpacket

Being turn-based, it does look doable in PHP (think "event-driven" - the events in this case taking the form of client requests and maybe the odd cron job to initiate maintenance and AI tasks at regular intervals). The map of course would be a client-side image map (PHP can write appropriate HTML for that of course). Changing colours of territories are a strong hint that the image binary itself may need to be generated dynamically, using GD-Lib (better: write an image file and update it when a territory changes).

Remember of course that the server won't supply the client with anything unless the client specifically makes a request; if you want to "announce" things to the client then the client will be needing to make regular requests for such information (a common suggestion on this forum for how to do this involves using an iframe to contain such announcements, with a meta refresh - it may be possible to refresh that iframe to include a script which causes other frames to refresh as well, should that be necessary).

For a possible source of ideas specific to aspects of your project, there's a (text-only) turn-based game project currently hosted at Sourceforge that caught my eye when I was leafing through some of the projects there (I'd been thinking of writing something along the lines of a MUD at the time).

And once synchronisation and consistency issues are dealt with, multiple players wouldn't be at all out of the question🙂

Narz

Thanks for the advice guys. I checked out the link Weedpacket, unfortunatly the download seems incompatable with my Macintosh. 🙁

Keep your comments coming. Thanks! 🙂

Narz

By the way, thanks binaryabraham for the link to the PHP tutorial site. I printed out section 1 and am reading it now!

Narz

By the way, thanks binaryabraham for the link to the PHP tutorial site. I printed out section 1 and am reading it now!

Weedpacket

Originally posted by Narz
Thanks for the advice guys. I checked out the link Weedpacket, unfortunatly the download seems incompatable with my Macintosh. 🙁

Oh, dear; um, what actually is the problem? If it's a matter of extracting the archive, Aladdin's Stuffit should recognise the beast as a tarball - and if it doesn't, renaming it to have a .tgz extension instead of a .tar.gz one might help.

If it's a matter of line endings that Stuffit isn't converting, you could write a PHP script that fopens and freads each file in turn, uses strtr() to convert Un*x \n characters to Mac \r, and fwrites it back out.

Or is it a problem with actually running it? I'm sorry but I wouldn't be much help with that - at least you'd have the source code, though.

ednark

i will also throw in my vote for doable as a webbased turnbased php application:

warning: late night babbling follows

1) you have a game world/map - and that map is in some state

ok a sql database can store the basic information for each game - the map, what countries have what polygons and are placed where , and as Weedpacket said the GD library can draw the pixels of the map each page load

2) you have several players playing the game

ok again the sql database can keep stats on each player in a certain game easy

3) turnbased -

3.a) either player 3 must wait for player one to finish, then an action to happen, then player 2 to finish, and the action to happen, then player 3 gets to give a move....

3.b) perhaps players 1-4 may enter their move at any time.. and once the moves are all there... the computer makes them all happen... then notifies the users that they can read up on what happened and log their next move

both of these are doable but again since you are using a browser to communicate to the program... the server cannot push info to the browser... the browser must ask for the info... there are many ways to do this... but it means that you can't just sit back and wait for the 'your turn message' but this is a function of the browser/internet and not php

if you use a java applet or flash as the basis for your game, both can load as a program inside the browser.. and can keep an open socket to your main server, where it will be able to wait and recieve input from the server like you want...

4) when one person enters a move, the server would check to see if everyone else has their move in... that way when the last person moves, the server will look and see that all moves are in,and that will be the trigger to actually do stuff and it can just
compute your actions and do the battle system like you wanted...

this will all have to happen behind the scenes and once the results are in..... they will be stored... when the user reloads or rerequests a page... they will be able to see the results of the turn

the current move state is again easily stored in a sql table....

so you need in sql:
-some table to hold members of your site
-some table to hold the map state for each game
-some table to hold the members/computers playing in each game
-some table to hold the moves each member is making

for the web you need:
-a method of authenticating that a certain user is playing a certain game: allowed to see page/perform actions
-a method of determining what state the user is in and showing them appropriate allowed actions
-a method of displaying the map and other game state info to the user

and all of that is doable... but by jan1 hmmm... depends on how much cofee you have