FLEX3 + PHP5 = massive multiplayer strategy game! Take a look at the screens.

[totty90]

Developing a new browser strategy game.

I will post here some images and some news, but i would need some advices. I'm not going to promove it here in anyway, so there will not be names, and not any links.

The game: it works with PHP5 as server side engine, and MySQL as database. The interface is totally made in flex3, so is made in flash.Will be a massive multiplayer game.

Is made of tiles, and on every tile there can be 1 building or 10 to 20 units. Building can get upgrades, and can expliot resources like wood, water, food, gold, oil and metal. Then will be storage buildings, rafineries, and other kind of buildings, that you can suggest here... :)
Units, are mobile, and can move everywhere where is not a building or trees. There are 2 kind, army and workers.
The map will be like google maps, drag and drop.

If you want to suggest something you are welcome, new screenshots will come soon :)

The main focus will be on the graphics, interface, gameplay and user interaction!


every news and updates to the game, will be added to this forum.

So what do you thing about this project? :D

if you want to sponsor this game, without giving away money, but only a few time, take a look at this website. http://www.neobux.com/?r=totty90

[bluemagica]

what the hell is the gameplay like ? give a bit more description please!

[Geneve]

I see nothing, I know nothing, so I can't vote.... (meaning the stuff u provided is = null)

[Draxus]

Sounds very ambitious, I wish you the best of luck.

Your description and screenshot are far too vague to have any idea if the game would be any good though. An MMOS or whatever you'd call it sounds great to me on the surface... I'm a big fan of many flavors of MMO, but it's all the specific little gameplay details that would make or break it.... which you haven't said anything about. How does combat work? This isn't real time obviously so it's turn based, how long are turns? I assume the world is persistent like any MMO, so are there going to be multiple "servers"? How many people would be on one and how would the land be divided up? What happens when you're logged off and someone wants to attack your base? Do you even have a persistent base? That could go on forever and your answers are what would get me/people interested, or not.

[totty90]

Sounds very ambitious, I wish you the best of luck.

Your description and screenshot are far too vague to have any idea if the game would be any good though. An MMOS or whatever you'd call it sounds great to me on the surface... I'm a big fan of many flavors of MMO, but it's all the specific little gameplay details that would make or break it.... which you haven't said anything about. How does combat work? This isn't real time obviously so it's turn based, how long are turns? I assume the world is persistent like any MMO, so are there going to be multiple "servers"? How many people would be on one and how would the land be divided up? What happens when you're logged off and someone wants to attack your base? Do you even have a persistent base? That could go on forever and your answers are what would get me/people interested, or not.

COMBAT: You build your army, and then you can move them, tile by tile, or with an algorithm path finder, you will send army near the enemies building, and these should be in the range of the army in order to make any damages to the enemy's buildings.

ITS REAL TIME: Yes, you will be able to build everything you want, if you can, and have the necessary resources in order to build it. You can move your army how you want, when you want and everywhere you want.

ITS AN UNDEFINED WORLD: the world build by it self, currenly, you can drag and drop like in google map, forever, but is not the equal, there are others tiles. you can go from the tile x=0, y=0, to the tile x=3333, y =8933, for example, even if there is not in the database. I the database will only be stored not-empty tiles. Then will be terrains, that will be generated automatically when you scroll ungenerated piece of the world.


HOW MANY PEOPLE?: I have an MySQL database, so , i think that there can be as much as they can.


WHEN YOU ARE LOGGED OFF: everything is like before, your buildings can be attacked by the enemies.


BASE: there is not exactly bases, there will be a lot of buildings, that can may form a city. So your city can enlarge, as long as you build on it and make upgrades. You have no limits.


thanks for your questions

[totty90]

what the hell is the gameplay like ? give a bit more description please!

drag and drop, to scroll the map
select army with the mouse, and then send them to a new location, or to attack a tile, or building.
build buildings, select the building you want, and click on a tile.
select a building and then you can make some upgrades.

[TOdorus]

You're only describing a few actions you can do in the game, but you don't really explain the concept. I can drag windows in my OS and create new files, but that doesn't make it a game.

What is your GOAL in the game? How are you going to handle players that have reached a critical mass that becomes to powerfull to stop? What keeps players coming back after the first few plays? What is unique about this game? And so on...

[totty90]

You're only describing a few actions you can do in the game, but you don't really explain the concept. I can drag windows in my OS and create new files, but that doesn't make it a game.

What is your GOAL in the game? How are you going to handle players that have reached a critical mass that becomes to powerfull to stop? What keeps players coming back after the first few plays? What is unique about this game? And so on...

THE GOAL: is to enjoy, yes! xD you have to build your city, and make relationships with other cities, ally, and destroy other cities. This can be one of the goals. Then people can make new buildings, by sending a request to admin, or make an poll, and if more than 100 accept the new building automatically will be added to the game.

BIG POWERS: there will be a ranking and a global civilization level, and you can only attack the same civilization as yours, and with a ranking close to yours.


COME BACK AND UNIQUES: because there will be news every week, and you will not reach the end of the upgrades, because every week will be added new upgrades and new features. Then if they have build their city, will like to know how the business of the city is working, selling and buying stuff from other players.

[Draxus]

How would this all be structured though? I don't think unleashing a player base on a giant blank world with freedom to run wherever and build buildings wherever will work out well (much as I wish it would). How is this real-time using PHP? I don't have any experience making multiplayer games but surely it wouldn't be fast enough to keep up with the pace of a traditional RTS? (I'm still not sure how similar to a typical RTS your game would be though).

[TOdorus]

@Draxus

There are online games that use ticks. Every tick (usually an hour) the world will update. Say you send troops over somewhere and the journey is 3 ticks and building a new building will take 6 ticks. If you combine some methods to communication between players you get instant politics ("Call of that army or I'll bomb that new building you're building. I know my bombers won't be back in time to defend, but you loose that new fancy building.") I think Planeterion cultivated this.

But it's a valid question, becuase I have no idea if totty90 will use ticks.

[Draxus]

@TOdorus Yeah, that's what I was initially picturing, I've played a few games that use ticks... but I wouldn't call that real-time and he said:

ITS REAL TIME: Yes, you...

[totty90]

@Draxus

There are online games that use ticks. Every tick (usually an hour) the world will update. Say you send troops over somewhere and the journey is 3 ticks and building a new building will take 6 ticks. If you combine some methods to communication between players you get instant politics ("Call of that army or I'll bomb that new building you're building. I know my bombers won't be back in time to defend, but you loose that new fancy building.") I think Planeterion cultivated this.

But it's a valid question, becuase I have no idea if totty90 will use ticks.

there are not exactly ticks. When you build your building, for example 09:30, at 09:45, your building is already done.
(Here i have a big problem, i've looked trough the internet for a lot of time, but i still don't understand how PHP daemons works properly, so if someone here could help me with this, i would be very very happy!)
When you are moving your army from tile (0,0) to tile (1,0), it will take to them 5minutes for example, or 1 minute.

I mean realtime, because, if someone is attacking your building, you will be able to see that your building is damaged, and you know how much time you have until will be destroyed. And because is a game made in FLEX, flash, the data from the request, are really small, like to update the view of your statistics, there are only 20 characters, not like in HTML, where you have to update all. Is more like AJAX, but better and faster.

Initially i will use HTTP requests, then in the future, if the game is working well i will use sockets, that will have better performance.

[bluemagica]

Totty90, don't take this the wrong way, but I don't think you are ready for it yet! From your descriptions so far, you have just visualised the final game, without planning the actual development stages, or the gameplay properly, also some of your concepts, like "realtime" are quite hazy! Plan it a bit more, i mean, plan how exactly the gameplay occurs, and how each element of your game is connected together!
Also, try and think what exactly makes your game unique, really! I have seen flash based rts games where " you build city, attack enemy base, get weekly upgrades", so so far, I don't see it standing out much!

[Alluvian]

You state that you can have limitless players with mysql, but mysql is just your database and really has nothing to do with how many players you can have. Your player limit will have to be based on how quickly you need the game to update and how fast your server becomes crushed with requests for data.

Making a game with php and mysql on the server side means you are initially looking at a polling engine where flash constantly makes requests to the server in the form of sending data to a php file and reading what the php file echoes out. This works very badly for realtime games because the flash clients have to constantly 'ping' the server asking for new data, and you can only do that so often. Even once a second is probably too rapidly if you have more than a few players. Your responses will start to come back out of order if you ping much faster than every 3-5 seconds or so.

Also, you mention going to sockets if you need to, but the problem here is that the game infrastructure for a polling engine multiplayer game and a socket server multiplayer game are VERY different. A lot of code would have to change in order to go from one to the other.

I would strongly consider you make your game turn based where the turns automatically proceed every X minutes / seconds. Maybe each turn is 30 seconds or a minute or so. This is basically the 'tick' concept put forward by a few others and is probably doable with a polling engine game using php and mysql.

[totty90]

You state that you can have limitless players with mysql, but mysql is just your database and really has nothing to do with how many players you can have. Your player limit will have to be based on how quickly you need the game to update and how fast your server becomes crushed with requests for data.

Making a game with php and mysql on the server side means you are initially looking at a polling engine where flash constantly makes requests to the server in the form of sending data to a php file and reading what the php file echoes out. This works very badly for realtime games because the flash clients have to constantly 'ping' the server asking for new data, and you can only do that so often. Even once a second is probably too rapidly if you have more than a few players. Your responses will start to come back out of order if you ping much faster than every 3-5 seconds or so.

Also, you mention going to sockets if you need to, but the problem here is that the game infrastructure for a polling engine multiplayer game and a socket server multiplayer game are VERY different. A lot of code would have to change in order to go from one to the other.

I would strongly consider you make your game turn based where the turns automatically proceed every X minutes / seconds. Maybe each turn is 30 seconds or a minute or so. This is basically the 'tick' concept put forward by a few others and is probably doable with a polling engine game using php and mysql.

can you explain to me how travian or tribal works game works? and i don't understand very well how the game can be turn based? thx

[bluemagica]

both are "tick" based.... When you build a building or something, it is just noted in the db, and alongwith the finishing time, whats left is putting a timer infront of player to give the illusion it is being updates in realtime!

[samvillian]

Are those counterstrike 1.6 graphics? the tile is and so is the fps...... I think.

[totty90]

Are those counterstrike 1.6 graphics? the tile is and so is the fps...... I think.

lol, no. maybe is the same, but no

[totty90]

both are "tick" based.... When you build a building or something, it is just noted in the db, and alongwith the finishing time, whats left is putting a timer infront of player to give the illusion it is being updates in realtime!

ah, now i get it. This was i wanted to do too. im so happy, because everybody said is impossible, but i was not understanding well