Well, this too is something that I have been wondering about for some time now. I myself am no stranger to computers, nor am I the least bit frightened by new technologies... So I was thinking of making a website of my own. An interactive gaming type of a website. Where people can get to play a game for free, but if they want their data to be saved, (so they can continue from where they left off) - Then the sight should be capable of storing and managing sign-ins and sign-outs of individual players and their profiles. Site should also be able to accept payments from registered members, as well as donations from anyone else who'd like to make a financial contribution (to fund my efforts and maintain the site). However I'm not really interested in creating a community forum too, just a simple gaming website will do very nicely. As I'd hate to waste my time and energy policing what others will be posting in the forums. I have of course created very cool graphics for it, and on demand I can easily create more too. I also can create a single stand alone HTML page as well with whatever knowledge I already have. But how to connect individual players (unregistered and registered), to a central computer on which the game's engine will be hosted - And all through a single website? This I guess is the question for which I can't find an easy answer anywhere... Any advice which will point me in the right direction will be appreciated a lot.
S-H here is a reply from my son... Hi S-H, my name is Kyle. I am a professional web developer, so I hope I can manage to answer your question adequately! To save someone's information, you'll need some sort of application to store data, be it MySQL, MongoDB, Postgres SQL, SQLite, etc, and to use those data storage applications, you'll need some knowledge of a server side language. My Server Side language of choice is PHP, as it's easy to learn, and simply because it's what I normally use. Other choices would be JSP, ASP.Net, Ruby, Python, and maybe a few others. It's not an exhaustive list. So to answer your 4th paragraph's question, you'll want to set up a server side language (recommend PHP) and then add some sort of data store (recommend MySQL). After having the components on the server, you can have your PHP page save the game's progress to the database and pull it back up when users are logged in. A word of warning, you're in for an adventure doing this! Don't get overwhelmed with it, but there is a TON of stuff to be done, if you're going to do this website. Don't let it's complexity intimidate you.
Thanks Carolyn, and Kyle too! I myself have some programming experience, and so I had created some stand alone EXE files in the past. But this was almost 20 year ago from today... I mainly used Q-Basic v4.5, and then moved to C++, but majority of my experience was from Q-Basic. So when I was in my mid teens (during the early part of the 90s), I said goodbye to all PC programing - And took up AutoCAD 3D, electronics, and physics as my major areas of interest. So I was actually wondering, what would happen if those few games which I had created so many years ago for fun - Now be made to run through a website? Will I be able to manage the level of complexity? It is now obvious that I will have to rewrite the whole code in a new and modern language. As a stand alone EXE file from the mid 90s can never be integrated into a website. The unfortunate thing is that when I left the programing world, (around the time when the first Intel Pentium 60MHz chips were coming out) - There was no World Wide Web, no cell phones either, and certainly no HTML5, nor any JaveScript. But my last creation was a program that I had made, which was to check for the floating point error in the first Pentium chips. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug There was a rumor that some people were importing these defective chips in Pakistan (to make a quick buck). So I created a program which would check for it. Now one person (a computer salesman) tried to steal this from me, actually he first tried to bully me into handing him over a copy. Just because I was 15 or 16, he thought he could get away with it. However what the fool did not realize, is that I protected all of my creations with a trojan (virus) type of code embedded within my program. So eventually, one fine day his hard drive was formatted beyond recovery (along with my program and all his irreplaceable data)! And the best part is that he now could not even blame me in the open - As he had stated in front of many people that he no longer has any copy of my software. So nobody could point the finger at me!!! But after this bad experience, I decided to go beyond PC programing. And soon the new MMX (multi media extention) chips from Intel start to come on the market too. So that's when 3D CAD took a life of it's own. Therefore I went in that direction, and gave up on programing. My absolute last creation was an encryption program, theoretically uncrackable! That I still use till this day... But I think PGP has surpassed it. Well, maybe it did, or maybe it didn't - I'll never know as I never shared that with anybody (for security reasons). I figured that if I distributed it, it will eventually lose it's uniqueness (and so will one day be cracked)... It is only capable of encrypting simple text files, but really is impossible to crack! Mainly because nobody will have access to the encrypting program - So they will have zero idea what sort of a cypher matrix does it use. And neither will they have any idea what the key file will look like, or not big it is, nor will they know how many times will I make it timble over itself again... Anyway that guy who tried to steal my floating point error detecting program in the first Pentium chips - Yeah, he got blacklisted when Intel officially came to Pakistan in 1997. He was caught red handed selling overclocked 66MHz pentium chips as 100 and 120 MHz chips. So he eventually lost his business in a court battle. And last heard, he was trying to sell undergarments at a wholesale rate from one dimly lit basement shop in Rex Shopping Center Karachi! But today, when it comes to programing and web developing - I am now a dinosaur... What was once possible to do by a simple stand alone EXE file, now seems unattainable to replicate on the web... Surprisingly though, I recently wanted to try doing something again. But instead of bothering to first find and then use all those old programs of mine once more. I decided to search the web for a similar utility (as I was sure someone else would have done it by now). But to my amazement, I discovered that no one in the world has bothered to do something like that on the web (when it comes to an interactive real time calculating game type of a program)... So this is what has inspired me to revive and modernize my old projects again. And this time around, I am sure I will also generate a lot of revenue from advertisements too. By my estimate, I think I will get at least 25,000 to 45,000 hits every month on the website! I honestly had thought that all my past achievements would be of no value today (probably because I myself was half serious when I created it, during my misspent youth). So I was 100% sure that the world would have surpassed me by many times... But this "game", amazingly, is something no one has bothered to do up till now! So first I did not believe it, but after searching for it constantly for many days - I still can't believe it!!! And no, by now you must have realized that what I am talking about it is not really a game. Well, maybe it was for me at the time when I created it. But realistically speaking, it's something very powerful. Game like, sure, but not exactly a game... It once required a small supercomputer for it to give accurate results in real time. But now (almost 20 years down the road) a computer which once occupied a basement hall - Now a laptop can deliver the same processing power. Therefore the time for action has arrived!!! But, like I said so above - What was once so easy to do with just one stand alone EXE file. Now seems a bit out of reach for me...
