Creating your own Hub

ID:162300
 
Jan 27 2008, 6:13 am
I've heard you can create your own hub on your own website using PHP somehow, instead of using the default BYOND website. Does anyone have a guide or a place where this is described in more detail?
Jan 28 2008, 10:22 am
No one?
Jan 28 2008, 10:23 am
If you have the address of the game hub, you can make it a html link on your webpage, yes. example: byond://65.26.36.123:5000 <-There's the address
Jan 28 2008, 10:38 am
In response to Jholder84
The idea is to have people who start the game servers have their game automatically contact a website and have it automatically listed as an available server.
Jan 28 2008, 10:44 am
In response to Obs
The thing is that when you have a game hosted it constantly contacts BYOND to tell it that a game is hosted (if the hub is programmed in). Now you could code in to have your site contacted when the game is running, but to recreate the hub system in php would take more effort than I would care to put in.

Can it be done? Yes.
Is it practical? No way in hell.
The hub system is already in place so to do this is kinda
pointless...
My suggestion: Since the host address won't change it would be much easier to simply have hosts provide their addresses for the webhost to place on the site. No need to reinvent the wheel.
Jan 28 2008, 10:57 am
Jan 28 2008, 11:20 am
In response to Jholder84

The hub system is already in place so to do this is kinda
pointless...

-unless you are making a game with the capacity for violent features that wouldn't be appropriate for 12 year olds, and would probably not be allowed on the BYOND hub as a result.

Jan 28 2008, 12:12 pm
In response to Obs
Good point... Didn't think of that.

Perhaps BYOND should consider rating tags or some notification system for games including inappropriate material. Perhaps a suggested age so that liability is not their responsibility, but that of the player and or that player's parent/guardian.

Just a thought.
Jan 28 2008, 12:31 pm
In response to Jholder84
Jholder84 wrote:
Good point... Didn't think of that.

Perhaps BYOND should consider rating tags or some notification system for games including inappropriate material. Perhaps a suggested age so that liability is not their responsibility, but that of the player and or that player's parent/guardian.

Just a thought.

I doubt that will happen anytime soon.

Could a game be packed with extra programs, such as a C program that could automatically connect to the web-server and give IP address information, etc.. and have those programs run without the server running in trusted mode?


Or is there a way to get world data externally without using the BYOND Hub? Am I missing something? I actually don't care if the hub even looks like the BYOND one, what I'm trying to do is get a server address and check to make sure that server being retrieved is a server running the right game.
Jan 28 2008, 2:17 pm
In response to Obs
Your game is not likely to have its hub entry deleted. If you are dead-set on this idea, you're mostly out of luck. The only method for a BYOND game to communicate with a web server is using world.Export()... but that only supports the GET method, which is not supposed to be used for this purpose. It theoretically can, in which case you'd have something like this:

world/OpenPort()
  .=..()
  if(.)
    world.Export("[WEBSERVER]?action=open")
  else
    world.Export("[WEBSERVER]?action=close")

world/Del()
  if(port)
    world.Export("[WEBSERVER]?action=close")
  ..()


You'd also need to ping the servers periodically to get the number of players (look up world/Topic(), which will probably be what handles the pinging). Of course, there's a bunch more you'll have to do, but you're going to have to figure that out yourself, because this isn't something many people spend time working on.