NEW Website Based Game

[MiCRO]

Hi everyone

Well it would seem at last I have finely found a PHP games development community I have looked around for years and never found one for PHP.

After finding hallsofvallhalla video on youtube it lead me here.

My name is MiCR0 and I am a professional programmer but am not in the gaming development industry.

I have been working on a new type of game for years now and I work on it every now and again when I find the time but I have to admit it’s not going fast the passed year.
I have always looked around for other PHP programmers who are up for joining in my project with no luck.

Well my project is a big as it can get and when it’s finely finished it will be by miles the most in-depth and biggest (in structure & code) online game ever constructed.

I also need to add that this game is not for everyone but for small group of people, who you would call geeks & this game will never make any money but hopefully make enough to cover to cost of the servers it will be hosted on however even if it does not I will be coving the cost of the servers as this is a game I will be playing therefore I am not making this for profit.

The game is being programmed in the following languages;
PURE PHP
Oracle
AWK
Bash
Perl
Python
Curl
AJAX

However 90% of the work is PHP & Oracle.

So what is this game?
The game I am building is an online hacking game which I got the idea from slave hack game however 1000000% more.

I have already build the whole games infrastructure & user session system as well as a whole virtual Internet with over 4.5 Mill servers each with there own logs, services software and security & a lot more.

This project is highly complex and no beginner project.

The player introduction to this game as follows:

Welcome to *********** the new generation of website based gaming. So you want to be a hacker?…… or you want to hunt down those pesky hackers, well *********** has it all. Be as ruthless as you like, learn to build you own viruses….. But be wary someone is after you!


The tables have turned on game development as we know it. An all new, web based online virtual hacking world with millions of servers you can hack into as well as unlimited levels and progression within this virtual world. The only thing that will bring you down is the Internet Police, who could be anywhere at anytime. With 3 roles to pick from, what one would you play?

Start as a hard core Hacker (Black hat) or Internet Police (White Hat) or even choose to be in the middle (Gray Hat) not so evil but not so good.

Write Killer Viruses and even worms that spread from computer to computer, the choice is almost unlimited with over 5,000 types of software and killer viruses you can make/release, or even sell software with hiding viruses inside them to other players.

Learn and research your skills making better software and viruses, Train to program in C, C++, C#, Perl, PHP and even ASM and many more. Develop your skills and progress in the game making and selling bigger and better software or viruses, the choice is yours.

Well if you are up for joining me on this I am looking for one person to join up with me as this is a ton of work and looking at 2-3 years more work left to do on this project.

[Jackolantern]

It sounds pretty neat, but ouch...Oracle? If your game gets popular and you need to up your processors isn't that going to get pricey? That would be constantly putting a hurdle of profit you would either need to jump over, or an amount you would have to keep throwing at it to keep the license. Do you not like MySQL? It is reliable, scalable, and has high performance, and best of all, it is *free* for server-based architectures! It is definitely not very robust in transactions, but games can typically get away with being a bit skimpy there (we aren't processing credit card payments or handling surgery requests on our network!).

[Noctrine]

Yeah, thats what I chimed in on also. Oracle? Srsly?

If you are using that, you won't find many people in this community capable of helping you. Hall's Tutorials are made for mySQL, and off the top of my head, I think only Halls, Jack and Myself would have had any long term experience with it.

But yeah, interesting idea, I wish you luck with it.

[hallsofvallhalla]

i love the idea. I have often thought about why there are not more hack style games. Can't wait to see updates on this.

[MiCRO]

I have build the whole thing using MySQL 4.1 however I think oracle is going to have to be used as a select on a 5 mill records table I do not think MySQL will have the speed.
However I have not worked with MySQL cluster so I am not 100% sure.
But I work with oracle clusters daily.

Input is more then welcome.

Also I just want to add this game is 100% free to play however there is a Subscription system for access to small things like live chat & start a team(Clan) as after I finished IGZ now known as (voobly) the amount of dead clans and wasted space I never do that again.
Also other things like clear criminal record, Change Name, Side.
As once you’re a black hat there is No other way of becoming a white hat again.
However I am sure 99% of the people who play this want to be a black hat anyways However everyone starts off at white.

I try and sort out some screenshots however I did not want them public.
So is there on any takers on working on this with me?

[Jackolantern]

5 million records? What is going to generate all those records? That will be slow in any RDBMS unless it is powered by a powerful (and expensive) cluster!

[rockinliam]

Just thinking of all the problems such a size game would cause makes my brain hurt. Not to mention to run a game like this would not just involve ftping the php to a web server you have rented for £50 a month, you would need some serious hardware for that amount of data. That said i would love to play!

[MiCRO]

The big table will be the logs tables they are breaking up into B IP Classes however still BIG.
After playing this game for 8 hours i racked up around 100MB log table and that was JUST ME!

I have a lot of servers that are 4 x 2.7Ghz with 16 GB ram so server power is not a problem.
Plan is to have a 8 cluster which will mean 86.4 Ghz of power & 128 GB of ram in total have to wait and see what the load is like to get an idea how much power is needed when its all build.

[hallsofvallhalla]

After playing this game for 8 hours i racked up around 100MB log table and that was JUST ME!

that worries me. I can build an entire 40,000 location map system in Mysql and it only take up 1 meg. Matter of fact my entire database for Quests of Crocania is less than 2 megs. Granted I do not have the features you do.

At your rate with 50 players it is 150 gigs per month. Just not possible to maintain no matter what database. It would take multiple Databases in a very efficient and expensive network. Image 300 players or even a thousand.

[Jackolantern]

Yeah, an Oracle setup to maintain that would cost thousands of dollars, or possibly tens of thousands in licenses and hardware once you get even mildly popular. This does not sound like a viable design in its current iteration. Can you live with less logging? I don't know what kind of logging could rack-up a 100mb data table for one player in 8 hours, but surely you couldn't need that much data! If you had just 50 players playing for an average of 8 hours a day (or of course 100 players 4 hours a day, 200/2 hours, etc.), that would be 150gb in a month. Like Halls said, that is too large for any RDBMS without very serious (and very expensive) hardware behind it. That would be the size of say a large telecom company database. Waaay overkill for a PBBG.