Greetings.
I've been playing with php/mySQL for a month or so now and have been moving along at a steady pace. There are a few things that are really scratchy right now with me though and I was hoping someone might have some ideas.
Problem #1
I am working on a real-time rendition of the Battletech board game and we recently added SQL support, allowing us to dump data from the game to the website.
One of the things we dump is a listing of objectives on the map along with information such as their X,Y location on the grid. Given that I retrieve something like: "300 201" as a result (IE: two space seperated numbers), how do I nab only the first or second number?
In this case, I'm just trying to seperate the X and Y coords for use in other functions. This should be very easy but I'm not sure what it's called in php.
Problem #2
Does anyone know of any good tutorials for using graphics libraries of some sort for php? I need to be able to draw things on a map with a php script.
The map that I'm going to try to do this with is over on http://btech-online.org/index.php?page=mapoverview
I'm basically looking to draw some colored dots or shapes to show who owns what.
Problem #3
How hard is it to make graphs out of raw data and does anyone have recommendations on what back end to use for them?
I'd really like to get some detailed statistics going and stuff, so it'd be a big help 🙂
And last but not least...
I'm looking for good documentation about field data types. My current tables are pretty bulky and inefficient because I have no idea how big or small each field should be (as well as what type in certain cases). Any ideas?
Thanks in advance!
