Wow, that Chess game is unbelivably complex.

It's purely PHP, isn't it?

okay i can't wait for this hack, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE!!! Can u give us an approximate release date?

I will let you know tonight what the approximate release date will be.

At the moment, I just decided to pull *all* of the templates out and relabel/restructure them. I hadn't really thought ahead at all, and they were getting pretty confusing. It might not sound like progress, but believe me, you'll thank me for that later. :)

(The hack is split up across many templates, which in theory should make it easier to add/subtract features and to find the exact piece of HTML code you want...)

This really does sound extreamly comprehensive, I can't wait to install this one :D

[high]* NTLDR awaits an approx release date :banana:[/high]

with all the extra query's you hang in the item shop this would kill your server i guess. ;)


[high]* NuclioN just teasing[/high]

Heh, I just realized that in about half my references I have been using "/forum/filename" rather than "$bburl/filename" ... in other words, I'm still having fun with template editing.

As far as integration with the various Store/RPG-type hacks out there, I could see this being used. For example, the for each score of more than XX you get YY points/gold/whatever. For each day that you can maintain a rank above ZZ in some game you get something... and so on. Plenty of different ways you could do it.

Now, as for *me* doing an integration, I have no idea. I have never taken a look at one of those store things code-wise, but I can't imagine it would be too complex. Still, I don't think I'd be running one of those on my own forums any time soon, so I dunno. Perhaps once this hack is released and stable, I can check it out... but it's something I would probably leave to somebody who is more experienced with the store/RPG stuff.

I can't wait for this one. You can check out my sig for games. If you need any of the files, pm me and ill send you a copy to add tot he hack. Just use one of the "test" user names in my sig and goto the extras or the link and look at all the games I have on my forum.
Use anything you like.
Peace
Emmett

I hit a roadblock tonight when I realized I had made an error in something I had said earlier, regarding the "Top Score Board." I had been using a GROUP BY clause in the SELECT query to get each user's top score. However, it came to my attention that in doing this, we are discarding all unique entries from other fields, and to make a long story short, the incorrect date/time/comments were coming back.

As far as that goes, I am left with a choice as to what to do. I can either:

(a) drop the entire idea of a top score board (I won't do this, though)
(b) add an additional query to the page for each user (server intensive, 25 users per page means an addition 25 queries)
(c) dump the entire table to an array in a second query and just use a search algorithm to find the correct values (might have major issues down the road if the table gets large enough)

What I will probably do is file this under the category of "known bug" and get back to it later, when I have the time to do a server-load test of options (b) and (c). In the meantime, if anybody knows MySQL extraordinarily well (in other words, you understand what I said in the first paragraph :)) and has a good way of doing this efficiently, let me know.

Try to ask g-force2k2 or Logician, they have pretty good knowledge with queries.

Still working on getting this into "release candidate" form. My biggest concern is finalizing the table structures, so that those of you who install this as a beta do not have to go back and nuke your old tables when future versions are released.

Thanks for bearing with me.