Advice on How to Structure my PHP, Please

JimBadger

Hello there.

I'm creating a multiplayer browser based game, where players own a collection of fighters. Let's clal them boxers for simplicity.

Basically, the players will have an array of tournaments they can enter their fighters into, and when that tournament is full or its scheduled time to commence arrives...the fights will happen automatically. The fights are just text-based commentaries.

Now, I'd be really grateful for some advice on the best way to implement the PHP to make this happen.

I currently have a fight.php page, with all the HTML and PHP code in it. There's about 1000 lines of PHP, and it is only going to get bigger. I'm keeping the actual code clean, neat and tidy with sensible functions, and as much code re-use as possible, but there must be a better way do do it than having the mother-of-all PHP scripts being run every few minutes by the users.

I envisage 10,000 concurrent users, and each fight requires a 40,000 row database to be queried once per "round". Rounds last mere seconds, and there can be anything from 1 to 60 rounds.

I just need advice on how to efficiently handle big, resource hungry, often-used scripts, I suppose!

Many thanks in advance for any guidance offered!

Regards,
James

big_nerd

JimBadger,

I personally wouldn't keep everything in 1 fight.php file.

I would separate each PHP file for each "option" in the game, that being 1 to view upcoming fights, 1 to view others fighters & stats (assuming you are planning on this), 1 to enter the tournament, etc.

I would use Object Oriented Programming to do this, keeping a class for DB Connections, 1 for Tournament functions, 1 for Fighter Functions, etc.

This allows PHP only to load the functionality that pertains to whatever section of the game the player is in.

I would also have an offline script to run the fights, that can be run via CRON or Windows Task Scheduler, this way you arent relying on someone checking the fight to see what happened.

And also, in the case you haven't done so yet, I would do some reading on MySQL Indexing & Normalization, to keep that database running fast & smooth.

I can also recommend a Mind Mapper tool, such as FreeMind, which will basically allow you to create a flowchart of the games functions. I find with large projects it makes it easier to manage.

For the record, I use this method, and with one website that I run, the User Controls (user control panel) is > 1500 lines, and the Admin Panel is > 10,000 Lines of code, with 60gb of files being managed and over 1M Rows in a MySQL Database (combined over numerous tables).

Keeping everything modular helps, its faster to target errors/issues with a specific section and it also allows you to easily add functionality, for instance, if you want to add a Body Fat% to the game, you can write the algorithm that calculates based on the fighters stats what it may be, then once enough data is gathered you can THEN add it to fighter stats page (for instance).

Best of luck with the game, I hope I was of some help.

JimBadger

Thanks for the detailed reply. there's plenty of good advice there for me to follow up on, and do some reading-up on. Particularly running scripts offline.

The fight.php file is actually already just for the fights. It's 1000 lines of code just for the fight calculations and user feedback. Everything else will indeed be separate.

I'll take a look at that tool you linked to, too.

Thanks very much.

Weedpacket

JimBadger wrote:
It's 1000 lines of code just for the fight calculations and user feedback.

Even then you needed to use the word "and" to describe what it does - suggesting it could be divided into at least two parts 🙂.

JimBadger

Weedpacket;10934192 wrote:
Even then you needed to use the word "and" to describe what it does - suggesting it could be divided into at least two parts 🙂.

🙂 Good point. I'll try to think bite-sized.