Re: [pbmserv-dev] gamerz.php

[Paul van Wamelen <wamelen@math.lsu.edu>]

On Mon, 25 Jul 2005, John Williams wrote:

> On Mon, 25 Jul 2005, Paul van Wamelen wrote:
> > On Sun, 24 Jul 2005, John Williams wrote:
> > > I think I would like to help port some of the wamelen games to work on
> > > gamerz.net.
> > >
> > > Could someone give me a few pointers as to what needs to be done to get
> > > them working?
> >
> > Currently you will need an account on Richard's machine. Looks like you
> > do, so you are all set there. Now look at the .php files in the
> >   /home/PBM/pbmserv/public_html/
> > directory (and game specific subdirectories). You will need to know some
> > php. Fortunately it is a very easy language to learn with very good
> > online documentation:
> >   www.php.net
> > Now look at the code at
> >   http://www.math.lsu.edu/~wamelen/gamerz/files.php
>
> Actually, I was looking the stuff in
> /home/wamelen/public_html/gamerz/gamerz, which I saw mentioned in a
> Makefile somewhere.

Those are the same as the files in pbmserv/public_html at least after
hitting make, but the pbmserv files should contain less noise/old versions
etc. The advantage of also looking at
  http://www.math.lsu.edu/~wamelen/gamerz/files.php
is that you can see what kind of changes need to be made to translate
programs form the lsu server to the gamerz server...

>
> > and start making the translation...
>
> I noticed the parameter lists to some functions have changed.  DoGame no
> longer has the $Match parameter, for example.
>
> So I was wondering what prompted that change, and what areas of the code I
> should be concerned about changing (as opposed to the areas which probably
> still work).
>

The lsu site reads and parses the e-mail that gamerz sends, the gamerz
programs reads and parses the raw games files in pbmserv/games
subdirectories...

> > To set up a "test server" just copy the php files to your own public_html
> > directory and start debugging!
>
> Since I'm still shooting at a black box, I decided to start a game from
> scratch.  Following some of the examples, I now have a XiangQi board
> displaying using the CSS stuff.  Still need to work on the clicking part.

Great! Look at how Jungle does the clicking (at the lsu site)

> > When you get something working let me know and we can figure out a sane
> > way to integrate the make process...
>
> The one Makefile I looked at was just copying files from /home/wamelen.
> Do you do anything more complicated than that?

No, but if stuff is going to start coming in from different contributors
then we have to be carefull of not overwriting each other. If you make no
changes to the base files it shouldn't be a problem though...