Connect to an external DB and auto fill custom field

[janohjk]

Hello guys, I'd like to have assistance with a little project I have, I can handle most of it but I am not experienced in vBulletin customization.

We run a little online game, we have two different servers:
- in one server we run the gameserver and its database.
- in our second server we host the website and the vb forum + vb database.


in our game a player can own an account, but an account can have more than one character.

just a little part of our community use our forum (we would like players to participate more on the feedback process) and as a plan to encourage its use we plan to give small gifts for linking your forum account to your game account (and reaching X post counts)



Here is my plan to how the linking process would be:
- Player logins to game account and generates a "linking code".
- Player logins to forum account and writes the "linking code", a new code is generated "linking code 2"
- Player logins to game account and writes the second code.
- If both codes match the accounts will be linked.
- Player can apply to "gifts" area from now on.

I can handle all the needed changes on databases, the web/game php scripts for the linking proocess, my doubts for this proccess are mostly in the vbulletin part:

- How to create a new section on the settings window


- If possible I would like to code this section in PHP. (not depending so much on vb)

Where should this new file placed or what is the correct way to do it, consider that I will need to connect to an external database.



Another plan I have in mind is to add a new "custom user field" to players profiles, this new field will shows players name ingame, as I said before an account can have multiple characters, so in the profile window there should be a dropdown list showing account characters and the forum user should select ONE from the list to show in the profile, my biggest doubt here is how to fill the dropdown list with the characters names.


is this even possible with vb? if yes I am not asking someone to make it, I just need some assistance with the vb parts, thanks in advance