Creating an Online Game

[conkermaniac]

Hi everyone,

I was thinking of designing a very simple game, where four people can play at once over the Internet. Unfortunately, I do not have my own server (nor do I know anything about server management), and all I have is virtual shared hosting. How can I make the game so that it is efficient?

The only method that I came up with is to submit every move to a MySQL database, and have the players refresh their pages often in order to retrieve the latest moves from the database. Does anyone have any better ideas? :)

[hohoho]

maybe a cronjob for every 10-30 sec ?

[spec]

or just have the page auto refresh every 5 seconds.

[conkermaniac]

Originally posted by spec
or just have the page auto refresh every 5 seconds. Yeah, that's my idea at the moment. Would cron jobs be any better? :confused2

[Canuckkev]

Well, I don't think a cron job can auto refresh a users page...

There is a way to get a constant stream of php...oh wait, I think that might just be auto refreshing as well (php chat). I guess you will have to use meta's...or flash.

[conkermaniac]

Canuckkev, thanks for your advice! Unfortunately, I'm not too great with Flash (although I do know an adequate amount), and I am totally clueless as to how it interacts with databases and the server. Could you please advise me or point me in the right direction? Thanks :)