How to implement an online high score table?

[WILL]

Very cool topic!

If you had purchased a web hosting package you could use the domain and access the database server that the hosting uses. There are a lot of libraries that will allow you to access various database servers. PHP is not really necessary unless you want to add some interaction with the game it's self and a website. ie. displaying highscores or some kind of weekly or monthly stats on a site you designed for the game.

You can however do a lot of neat things if you did setup a databse to receive data from your game such as hosting exciting screenshots from players once they hit a new top highscore and create user accounts for your game kind of like Blizzard does.

Free hosting can be a problem if you want stability so you should consider the low cost of paying a more solid hosting provider if you try this option.

Besides the web hosting options they do have other highscore/award system services for different platforms such as iOS, Mac OS X (with the new Mountain Lion 10.8 version) and Android. Using these would depend on the API or libraries they provide to developers to use. Only C-based headers/libraries would of course mean translation too.

BTW Would anybody be interested in such a library/service if it were provided to Pascal game developers as a simple library file they could add to their games?

[Cybermonkey]

Yes, I thought about using it on my web host (not free but paid).
And I would be very interested in such a simple library!

[WILL]

To make your own custom you'd want to find a decent and easy to use library (no dynamic libraries if possible) for accessing a MySQL database from your webserver.

What comes with the standard install of FPC?

[WILL]

Or if you would rather have your web host do all the database work, you could do some PHP script that would take either POST form data or URL Query and process it to go into your database. The problem then is getting the data back as a file your game can process.

I think if your PHP is bad or non-existent, you're better off with learning the MySQL-based Pascal library.

Plus having a script like that could open it's self up to security leaks or falsely given data. Cheating and hacking.

[Cybermonkey]

You mean the game itself communicates with a MySQL database on the server? But if I want to have an online high score list I'll need another PHP script which displays the table on the web page, right? Which leads to the same problem, that I have no clue of PHP, yet. (Maybe I should read some tutorials about it, looks a bit like BASH).

[WILL]

Well yes, if you wanted to have a web page or whole site that shows off your highscores, then yes.

BUT, I'd recommend doing one thing at a time. First get your high scores working between database server and wherever your game runs. THEN worry about web pages that show the high scores. Your development will be all the happier for it.

The PHP docs are actually pretty great to be honest though. When you get to that part it shouldn't be too hard to pick-up and learn PHP. I could even post a small script that you can take and copy paste and edit a few parameters and reuse to get whatever data you want to be displayed whereever you want on any PHP generated webpage.

For now though, figure out your MySQL library access from your game side of things.

[Super Vegeta]

Implementing a script that would print a nicely-formatted high-sore table basing on a file or data from MySQL takes only basic PHP knowledge, and that's really easy to learn. There are a lot of people who complain about PHP, but IMO this thing is great for making small, simple things - just like shell scripts.

Btw, why do most the packages on FPC documentation produce E404 when clicking "view interface"?

[sixten]

Or you could use a preformated html document that is downloaded and edited and then uploaded again. You know where the different entries are, so editing the file will be easy. The Synapse units does the networking in just a few lines.