Earlier I wrote a very small sketch about online text-based games. Since then I’ve thought about how to set up things in such a way that updating and extending would be easy. Therefore I’ve taken a look at CMS systems like Joomla/Mambo. This CMS has a components folder both in the public_html folder and the administrator folder. Components to add need to be placed in these folders to be used in the front-end and back-end respectively.
What we would then get (and I don’t want) is that the urls get out of hand and you would get something like http://www.vankouteren.eu/components/forum/index.php instead of http://www.vankouteren.eu/forum.php (what is preferred). For this we can use the Apache mod_rewrite function. This rewrites the url and serves the page present at the rewritten url. So what we actually can do with this is serve the page saved at /components/forum/index.php as if it is hosted at /forum.php
If you want to do this, it is advisable to do this in the beginning as you can base your site upon this.
Next thing I’ve been thinking about is the learning algorithm. Funny thing is: there are a lot of topics about online text-based games, but none actually is about learning algorithms, online text-based game ‘engines’ etc. I ended up with a page referring to McCodes.com where a piece of code is to be found which is free to take, but this is just awfully scripted. However, it might provide me some insight in how to determine probabilities and stuff, so I’ll skim the code for those principles to get an idea about how other people do it.
I’ve also written some code, but this is just some test code to see if everything can be done in an object-oriented approach without a lot of little rules, so no stunning results here so far.