My Idea

[cloudncali]

OK this is my solution to a problem i have had

I have always wanted to make something multi player on line, nothing huge just something other people could play together.

Problem: my mom and Dad both refuse me to me to run a server in my house at all, plus that would be a crappy connection. I cant afford to pay for a decated server.

Solution: Use Perl/CGI off a web server to act as the server, use a java interface for the game, the CGI will do most of the server stuff AND communicate with the mySQL database, the communications will be via sockets.
so yeah just use my free web host(100webspace.com) to run the server script
here is a digram to show how this might work


sound like a good(or possible) idea?

Edit: oh and the reason i am using this instead of a serverlet or JSP is because i have had horable luck connecting to a mysql database with java

[draco]

Sounds like it'd be terribly slow... especially with 100webspace.

[ih8censorship]

Hm, well http sessions are kind of funny, they aren't as open of a connection as say a games server (unless you can keep the connection alive on the server without having it time out) so you'd have to make up some sort of cookie to handle session data. Then you'd have to work in something so cheating and data corruption would be harder, like with some say sha1 or md5 hashing of some sort. It would be interesting to know what sort of games could be powered by a generic web server, even if just a proof of concept thing

If your wanting to communicate to mysql via php, there are modules designed for that you know (well if they are installed...)

[C-Man]

i'd go with peer to peer in this case, you couldn't really run your script in a loop or do much communication with sockets as only http ports are open and scripts have a timeout length (it gets killed after a certain ammount of time running) and yeah it sounds horribly slow

[FrozenKnight]

it depends on your game but i would assume that a perl run server would be so slow and laggy no one would want to play it. you might want to find out your parents reasons they don't want to run a server. you may be able to find a loop hole.