Tutorials / How-To?

[aspekt9]

Is anyone familiar with any tutorials or How-to's that walk you through developing a game server status script. That retrieves server info and client info such as kills, deaths, client name etc? I know it's been done in PHP but I wanted a bit more explanation to how it works.

[bpat1434]

I don't know of any tutorials, but I can write a quick one for Bungie and Halo 2.

First, we'd need to figure out the RSS feed, or the HTML we want to use. Bungie gives us an RSS feed, so that makes it much easier for us. The URL we will use is: http://www.bungie.net/stats/halo2rss.ashx?g=return2z3r0
The format of it is this basic layout:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<rss version="2.0">
  <channel>
    <item>
      <title></title>
      <link></link>
      <pubDate></pubDate>
      <guid></guid>
      <description></description>
    </item>
  </channel>
</rss>

So, first things first: Grab the RSS Feed. We'll use [man]file_get_contents/man to get the contents. If you have fopen_url_wrappers turned on, this won't be an issue. If they're off, you'll have to read the file using other means. So we get the rSS feed:

$rss = file_get_contents('http://www.bungie.net/stats/halo2rss.ashx?g=return2z3r0');

We need to strip out the new-line characters. We simply do that with [man]str_replace/man

$rss = str_replace("\n", '', $rss);

Now that we have the format, and the rss feed, we can create a simple regex to grab what information we want. Since we are pretty much only interested in the title, date, description, and link, we can do something like the following regex:

/<item>.*?<title>(.*?)<\/title>.*?<link>(.*?)<\/link>.*?<pubDate>(.*?)<\/pubDate>.*?<description>(.*?)<\/description>.*?<\/item>/i

With that RegEx, we can use [man]preg_match_all/man to find all occurances of the games. It will return an array we can then iterate through.

preg_match_all('/<item>.*?<title>(.*?)<\/title>.*?<link>(.*?)<\/link>.*?<pubDate>(.*?)<\/pubDate>.*?<description>(.*?)<\/description>.*?<\/item>/i', $rss, $matches, PREG_SET_ORDER);

NOTE: We use PREG_SET_ORDER so that when we itterate through our matches array, we have the games information in its own sub-array.

Now that we've got this, we can easily display the output any way we want. Just iterate through the $matches array and display the output:

foreach($matches as $game)
{
    echo '<a href="'. $game[2].'">' . $game[1] . '</a> was played on ' . $game[3];

echo '<b>Game Information:</b><br /><div>' . $game[4] . '</div>';
}

That will display each game from the feed.

So that's a quick tutorial. It's not much, but you can get more in depth and such as you go on. Hope that helps.

[ EDIT ]
I've taken this exact tutorial, and created an example of what can be achieved using this method. You can view it here.

[aspekt9]

This is great, just what I was looking for thanks. What if the game doesn't have an RSS feed say it's from a url like udp://1.1.1.1:8000 for unreal tournament would I have to do something like fsockopen('udp://1.1.1.1' , 8000, $error, $errstr, 30); But then how do I break down the information in it?

[bpat1434]

You would have to look at the format of the information given to you. Is it xml, or html, or just plain text? What breaks up the different parts (kills, deaths, sprees, winners) from the others?

Then it'd be up to you to develop a regular expression to match all that information. If you need help, just ask. You can look at this article to help you with data mining.