Multiplayer card game using PHP/Ajax and mysql

Question

I am designing a map game, using PHP and MYSQL. I don't know how to make the players who sign-in to the website to see other players who are also connected to the site and be able to chat with one another.

I want to design the game in such a way that 2 players can play with each other and be able to send messages during the game while others groups are playing at the same time.

I have designed the map game successfully, but the problem is making the player 1 who log-in to site to see the player 2 who will also log-in and both can get connected to play each other. http://i.stack.imgur.com/YyCPG.png

I will appreciate your responses.

Answer 1

Buttons (controlls) and graphics handle on browser. With javascript, there is lot of drawing libraries, well, even game libraries (craftyjs, gameQuery ...).

State a current game has will be on server in a database.

table players {id, name, score, actual_game_id ...}
table games {id, name, player_which_is_on_move_id, ... remaining_time (for example) ... }
table card {id, game_it_belongs_to_id, which_player_has_him_in_hand_id, value ...}
table message {id, game_where_it_was_sent_id, player_who_send_it_id, text, ...} 

I derived this from thinking about entity relations (may contain mistakes):
player can play only one game, game has N players
card belongs to only one player, player can have N cards
card belongs to only one game, each game has its own cards (so they are not mixed btw games)
only one player is allowed to move at a time
...

Communication between player and server is trough AJAX. Player side is coded in javascript, server side in PHP (or similar) + SQL. One problem is that You have to periodically ask/query (chat made by periodical query in AJAX) server whether something new happened (server can not contact You trough AJAX); there might be a way to let server contact You trough something else than polling with AJAX, but I do not know what it is.

• A player sends server messages like "can I play?", "my username and password is ...", "I am moving this card", "I am sending this message to a chat window > hi folks, this game rocks!" ...
• Server determines whether and how to change database (add message to message table, save the move to tables if it is valid).
• Player periodically queries server "has something new happened", for example when he is waiting for move of a other players.

You have to figure out rules of communication (communication protocol). Also there is a chance, that some of javascript game libraries has methods to help You handle communication.

Answer 2

In SQL, one method could be:

If a player can be in more than one game at a time, you'll need to use a Games table which houses all of the current users mapped to a game_played identifier

If a player can only be in a single game at a time, make a field for the Player table that states what game_played ID each is currently attending.

Search for game_played ID's to help pair players together and reference the data to each other.

As for game state and messages, you can use tables and simply reference the game_played ID to help sort this out.