Need Coding Ideas and Help

gofetch

Ello everyone!

I'm new to the forum and this is my first post. I'm going to give you alittle background information before I head on to my questions. I'm currently working on a new project called Project Fetch!. Fetch! is a virtual dog game website and before you say "oh no another 8 year old with no idea how to do this", I infact did my homework. I'm about a month into this project and I've gotten almost everything working with the help of another forum. But everyone disappeared there and I need some coding advice.

You can take a look at Fetch! here...
www.gofetch.co.nr
Please post any comments you may have on it. It's not the best but I just started php myself. I knew HTML, CSS, Javascript, tiny parts of PHP, and DHTML before I started this project. I think I've learned alot over the past month.

Now, if anyone wants to say you need to read up on this or you need to take some tutorials, post the links and I will be happy to not fight about it. I'm here to learn and that's what I plan to do. I've very open to learning and pausing my project to learn so I can finish it correctly. I don't want you to code it for me because I love coding and it's my favorite part. I get alot out of making my own scripts and seeing them in action. I'm here for advice really.

On to my questions, I have a database table of all the "dogs" that people own on website. Every dog has an id, name, breed, mother, father, stats, and etc. I've been trying to learn how to code "auto shows" that the dogs can enter, be placed, and win stat points that are given out depending on the show place they won.

Now, the first thing I thought was I need a sort of randomizer but I can't seem to connect the dots myself. If anyone has any ideas if I should add another database table to do this or how I should go about writing the code please let me know.

Next question, I'm trying to complete a "breeding" code also. This script should let female and male dogs "breed" with each other and then the female should have a "puppy" or "puppies" a few days later. I already have a mother id, mother breed, father id, and father breed row in my database table, but how should I connect it all? I was thinking maybe just having it add the parent's ids and breeds and then just add a new dog to the database. But this also needs a random results script somehow put in, because all the stats for the dog don't just appear out of thin air. I would also like for the code to make the "puppy" a few days after the "breeding" which I'm not even sure how to set up. I would also like if the female dog couldn't breed for a few days after the birth of the "puppy", but honestly I'm pretty lost on this one. yes, yes, I'm clueless I know. But I'm learning.

Sorry for such a long post. If you have any ideas post away.

bpat1434

Your first question is a little vague to me. Not sure what it is you're trying to do exactly. Are all dogs going to enter? Will the show be mandatory or optional? Will it be held at a future date, or will it be an instantaneous thing?

Your other question (the breeding question) I think can be solved if you look at Cron Jobs (Apache) or Services (IIS). Basically you'd want a script to be run every day (at whatever time) that will create your offspring (if there are any). My suggestion would be to have a "breeding" table. That way the cron looks in there, if there are rows, and they're XX old, then a new dog will be created.

As for the stats randomization, you could just randomly choose between 1/2 of Mom or Dad's stats. Not sure if that's how you want to do it, but it's a simple solution (especially since most of the stats/traits will be inherited).

Hope that makes some semblance of sense.

gofetch

That's very helpful! Thank you!

For your first question, I would like it to be optional to my members and they have to enter their dog in the show and I would like it to be held at a set date/time.

My host makes you pay for Cron Jobs and I was wondering if I could handle that any other way? If not, I should be upgrading my host soon anyways depending on money. xD

As for your last statement, I would love for my stats for puppies to do that. That sounds prefect, how could I make it 1/2 of thier stats though? That is the problem. I'm not sure what functions to use for what. The people who were helping me confused me alot and I'm not used to this loosely based coding yet. -.-

bpat1434

Well, for the randomization you'd use the function [man]rand/man. I'd suggest you do a quick foreach and randomize between 0 and 1 (or 1 and 2). If it's the lower, then Mom gives that trait, otherwise, Dad gives that trait. Then, you just take the value that's given, [man]floor/man (which rounds down) the answer to $val/2.

You can't run a PHP script without somehow telling it to. That's done in one of a few ways:
1.) Browse directly to it.
2.) Include it via PHP / SSI or whatever
3.) Use PHP CLI to execute a script
4.) Get the server to execute it for you (CRON)

I'm not sure why any host would charge extra for a cron. It's built into most *nix systems, and for Windows it's just called a "service".

As for the "auto shows" thing you mention, that'd be another Cron I guess. Unless you wanted to set up manually the shows. Then it's a matter of using [man]rand/man again to define the winner(s) and stat increases. I'm not sure exactly what you're trying to do, so I can't go any more in detail.