Hmmm, Travian?

[Kingoflodis]

I'm a browser based game freak... It's just... Who I am.. Hahaha.

So I was curious what people think this game was made with now...

Travian.us

If you like browser based games, I'd recommend this, but yeah... I was curious what it was made with, and after that start... (Knowing what it was made with), where would be the best place to start learning that language or what not that was used?

Another question:

Aren't all programming languages free?

[oracle128]

I was curious what it was made with

It's made in PHP; you can tell by the .php extension the game pages have. Since it's a turn-based, non-animated game, it doesn't need anything more.

where would be the best place to start learning that language or what not that was used?

There are millions of PHP tutorials on the web. One of the sites I recommend is W3Schools. The official PHP site is also the best place to go for a language reference.

If you want to be outputting dynamically generated images, you need something like GD Graphics Library. From what I've seen of Travian though, it just uses regular images for the interface.

A game like this, whilst not simple as a whole, is made up of several features which themselves are quite easy to do: generate a static interface with HTML/CSS and images via PHP; using PHP to access a database; using PHP to do math and algorithms; make a PHP login system etc. Even the "real time" component of Travian is simple to do; using the server time, you can calculate the time between accesses of the interface, and hence calculate what's changed since then, eg resource gains, military movements, village construction progress, etc. The countdown timers are just for show: the PHP parser reports how long is left until they're ready at the time of the page request, and JavaScript counts down from there. You could do a similar thing with progress bars, health/mana/status bars, troops movements etc if you wanted; the good thing is, disabling Javascript would remove the pseudo-animation, but won't affect gameplay and will still be playable. An intuitive order queuing system would be one feature that would go well.

The really hard part, aside from coming up with the game idea, graphics, and getting a player base, is designing the game so that you have people coming back, without need to centre their lives around the game events. So you need a fair amount of automation in the game, allowing people to enter the game on their time, without finding that their base/army/whatever was destroyed/crippled in the few hours (or even days) that they were gone. You also have to promote things like team cooperation/alliances (depending on the type of game), while avoiding the possibility of giving one group too much power (take a look at the top ranking Travian players) and intimidating new or casual players. Game mechanics are the meat and potatoes. If you want to make a game like Travian, do 3 things: make a list of the best features that you would like to implement, the ones that are good but need improvement for some reason, and the features that you would like to avoid. Making a clone game is more fun if you can make it better than the original.

Aren't all programming languages free?

Languages themselves are all free; a language is just information, and you can't prevent people from learning a language. It's the language's tools you have to worry about; are the compilers/interpreters/parsers free? The IDEs? The (hardware and software) environments in which they run?

With PHP you don't have to worry; the PHP parser itself is free/open source. PHP scripts can be written with any ASCII text software (programmer's text editors are recommended). It can run on almost any server (eg. Apache, the free/open source web server, or Microsoft's IIS). Which in turn can be viewed in any web browser. So no, PHP development doesn't cost any money.

[Kingoflodis]

Hmm, do you think that php is a really good language to learn in todays world?

Thank you for all the information btw :>>> Very much so helpful :>

[oracle128]

PHP is an excellent language to learn, if you want to be doing web-based things (websites, browser games etc). Beyond web servers it's pretty much useless.