ID:538302
 
It's not too difficult to create a website with a database and php interface. How do you think this can benefit BYOND games?

At the moment, all I can think of is a sort of signature management tool. That is, you can make a small signature button with your stats on it to share around. Perhaps you can do some resource management as well, for games that utilize villages/clans/etc.? What can you think of?
I wrote a website with the Zend Framework once that had an administrative system connected to a BYOND server.

In order to add administrators to the game you would have to login to the website and add the person there.

It also had a statistics page showing how many different keys connected and how many of those keys were active players (i.e., logged into the game within the past 2 weeks).

Personally I prefer Java nowadays as it's a more robust language than PHP. My latest web development related to BYOND is the DM Den, which includes the ability to automatically create forum threads on the BYOND.com forums whenever someone writes a blog post on the website.
Well I think something like Dream World in Pokemon could be done with byond. Like you could send a character and its stats ,inventory etc to the web and then use the that to get some special prizes and fight some bosses that arent that graphical that give unique items. It could be done but I dont think anybody from byond would use such features
This is very possible and quite easy.

Audeuro wrote a good PHP script to connect to BYOND worlds using sockets.

The system would obviously use world.export to report back to the PHP page.

I may make a library about this and have a central page for all games obviously game ownership would depend on the users KEY and the API key involved ..

If anyone is interested in helping send me a quick PM I have a server ready for this.
I'm pretty savve on how to do it, I'm just not sure how we can take advantage of it. I'm liking the Dream World idea.

My initial instinct is to make a game mostly based around the browser. You manage a city, its resources, and go to tactical browser battles with it. But you can send a person from your city to BYOND as a sort of "hero mode", play a roguelike or something, and interact with your city up close and personal.
That would be easy.

Make that mini browser game using DMCGI or PHP/AJAX/Whatever Language. (I would use DMCGI for auth/get users KEY at least then whatever for the rest. - depending if you want to make it in DM or not)

Save all the information in a MySQL database.

You should be able to open that world just using byond://ip:port load the data depending on the users key and ta da?

If you are using DMCGI you could use link to display the address or hide it in a href or a button.
Just out of curiosity, is DMCGI still available and or supported? Its been a few years since I've done much of anything with Byond and I'm not sure what has changed.
It's been a while since I've checked (maybe 3 months or so), but I'm fairly sure DMCGI operates fine under *NIX hosts, as it used to. Nadrew tends to know more on these things, so it'd be interesting to see if he comments at all.
DMCGI is available but hasn't been majorly updated in the 10+ years I have been here...

But it will still do everything you want and need it to.
I wish I could have a mini site which displayed the servers hosted and the players playing it, like another hub, some games like NEStalgia have it, and I saw that on Dragon Ball Zee long time ago, I have no idea of how to make it though, what a waste to have a shell knowing I could have a website doing that, I sadly don't have any knowledge on php.
Tiberth wrote an easy to use pho function for this...

It pretty much grabs the servers from the hub on said game and displays them.

You can find it by searching php or his key.
DMCGI isn't officially supported anymore, it's just there to be there. There's no plans to update it or even keep it supported by the language forever. There's always the chance of an update that removes/breaks it.
In response to Nadrew
Nadrew wrote:
DMCGI isn't officially supported anymore, it's just there to be there. There's no plans to update it or even keep it supported by the language forever. There's always the chance of an update that removes/breaks it.

Which is a load of crap IMO it's a great system I don't understand why Tom didn't keep this going, apart from the fact that Dan created it but wait didn't he help create BYOND? ...

DMCGI is great it allows for many many website based systems for games ie - a card / deck manager without having to open BYOND and more
It's simply not in-demand enough to justify putting any resources into.
That might be because no one knows about it really, its hardly documented the only reference in the guide that comes to mind is when you search CGI (even then it doesn't depict what DMCGI is or does).

In the past we have had a fair amount of posts on interacting with a game via a web browser ie admin controlling, Everyone would reply with TRY DMCGI! but how would you start if nothing is documented?

I do understand that BYOND has better things to focus on at this point in time, but DMCGI should of never been forgotten IMO it's possibilities are endless and it seems many of us have had to resort to other languages to do our bidding mainly PHP which is a copout on BYOND's part..
There was also the fact that you had to compile your stuff, that made it a pain in the butt to modify and increased the file size by a ton. It really was no competition for Perl or PHP. Its main use was and still is the use of BYOND keys, which can be off-loaded to other languages with very minimal DMCGI use.
I fully understand why it has been allowed to fade away, and I promise, I'm not complaining. :) For me, it's just nice to do things in the language that I already program in.