a_bertrand

Usually you do such things via Javascript... What kind of "pop-up" do you want? You may check for example jquery plugins like http://jacklmoore.com/colorbox/

What do you need exactly? As creating a table can be like:   create table toto( id integer primary key auto_increment, name varchar(80));

MVC => Model View Controller is known to me. MTV? Never saw that abbreviation, don't know what it is. To explain why I didn't took any external lib, I must maybe explain the target of my engine: new game owners or people without a formal training in computer science. Therefore I choose to go for a simplistic approach of the different problems to avoid to overkill people with over complex (for the current need) libraries. For example if I take a library like Agavi or others it would mean that developers taking my engine would need to learn Agavi as well, and potentially lose people due to the complexity the the first impact with such frameworks. Maybe there is no real need either for going to a full MVC pattern. I choose to "critique" you because you tend to say "this is not secure" or "this is bad practice / badly written" without giving an alternative or speaking of what is not good. I would tend to say that generally constructive critics are good, where constructive means that you can learn something from it, or you can actually directly fix an issue with it. Where on the other side negative critics of the kind "this is just plain crap" (don't take me bad, I don't say you do critics that badly) does not help and actually are simply demotivating or upsetting people receiving the critique. So basically I was simply begging to be able to learn from you ;) Now if you don't like the subject, simply avoid to talk about it

- Full blown template system? Like smarty? Well on purpose I choose to avoid it. And yes and no it does what you describe... Want to see more? then join the beta and dig into the code. - MySQLi of course doesn't prevent people to do stupidities, like placing anyhow some user received value inside the query itself and not as parameter. - Again even passing values by arguments and not directly inside the query doesn't make your code safe from other kinds of hack, for example simply trying to read messages of other users. However I hardly see how an engine can prevent such behavior by itself and for me this would be the task of module developer to ensure the checks are made. - I thought about PDO, but didn't saw any real advantages. - Never said you should optimize first, did I? I just pointed out where a DB class can be useful, for example to catch all the queries and maybe do some stats over them. General comment to your comments, you are generally showing good knowledge of your subject, however when it touch security your kind of answer is always like: if you don't know it, stop coding. Most people here are hobbyist, or at least we are all hobbyist game coders ;) so instead of saying none of the code is secure, it would be much more informative to describe types of attacks and how to prevent them. Of course NO software is ever secure, otherwise there would be never an hack. Sadly softs complexity increase with the size of the softs, and you may rely as well on some other libraries / software / os which could introduce without your knowledge nor any way to prevent it side effects / security holes. The only real solution against hackers is to avoid to be connected on the net. Sadly if you want to make a web game, you have to be connected and then of course you will have to face such things like security holes and more. However sharing knowledge can lead to better code and therefore I would be more than grateful to get some of your advices / hints. BTW switching database is not simply matter of changing the driver to another DB, usually queries need to be modified as well therefore defeating the purpose of simply a DB layer which let you talk to all the database with the same set of function. Now if you talk about something like LINQ which goes a step further and do more or less the work of a ORM or hibernate if you are in the Java world, then yes having complete abstraction of the DB is a great advantage.

Please use the right section.

It's a bad start as the code quality is sub-par and will actually teach you wrong ways to do things. Also the plus value for yourself is nearly null as if you want to end up with a somewhat good game you will be more or less forced to re-write all. At the end of the day you will just loose time not win anything. But that's my personal opinion.

Moved topic. Next time please post in the right section...

Honestly I'm unsure if I would pick McCode lite for a game. Beside the fact I'm unsure the securities provided by the lite version, I would also tend to say it's not exactly an up to date script to start with and development on this engine is... let's say dead.

As the development of my game engine is progressing at high rate, I had some discussions with two of the well known figures of McCode mods development (not CB nor Dabs). The first one said he had an hard time with the engine, and wondered why I choose to have for example a menu file on each module directory instead of merging all those entries into a single menu file on the above directory. Also he got somewhat scared by the fact the engine look totally different (from a developer point of view) as McCode. To try to answer those firsts issues, I will explain what were the requirements when I started to code the engine. If you browse the forums, you will see a lot of post from new comers to ask: how do I install script / module X, or I installed it but I get an error on line Y etc. The problem of the current McCode code is that modules are actually not code you can simply drop on the same directory as the other files, you will have usually to modify the database by yourself as well as edit some files to use the new code. For somebody which knows what he do, and if there is at least some explanations of the steps, you should be able to do it in no time, however as we see, many of the new game owners simply have an hard time. To make the installation / upgrade and removal of modules a breeze, I choose to make a really modular design, where modules should NEVER touch existing files. Therefore the installation of a module will basically involve the creation of a new directory, and putting the module files inside. Yet even better, we have an automatic module installation tool directly available from the admin panel, which allows to upload a module directly from your web browser. This will take care of all the setup for you including the creation of the tables. Has convenient this can be for a game owner, of course it needs some time for the module developers to understand how it works. Don't be scared, as I provide also a module creator wizard which will create the directory and files for you after you fill some form, and there will be a wiki manual describing the goal / usage of all the files, class and functions. The second person was somewhat annoyed by all the functions the engine provide like LinkButton, or TableHeader or others, and wonders why I created such functions and even stated that he would prefer to code without them. He went even further stating that a class for the database was not needed and all this makes only life more complicated. To answer this kind of remarks I will try to explain what happened to my own game (NEaB) a couple of years ago. At first NEaB didn't used any of the "Button" or "Table" function, and simply had as many scripts just a mix of HTML and PHP. Then at some point we decided to improve the look and allow to have better buttons as well as letting the player choose the look and feel. For this, we had to go through ALL the files and change all the links / buttons and tables with functions which would allow us to change the HTML for the different themes. As this was a really painful and not-interesting work, I thought it would be much smarter that the engine provides all the functions AT THE BEGINNING, and will allow to ensure that all modules will look the same, and at the same time allows the game owner to change without efforts the look and feel. For the database class, there is even more reasons for it. First of all, I don't know how many of you (beside Danny) tried to actually work with MySQLi, but I can tell you that it is by far not user friendly and it adds loads of functions to call if you want to use it. So the primary goal of the DB class is to make the usage of the MySQLi class a breeze, and ensure therefore that we are safe from stupid SQL injections issues. As you may know, MySQLi allows to pass parameters of the query as additional parameter to the functions which means you don't mix the values and the query in one string. No more "select * from users where id = ".$_GET["id"] Instead you would do something like query("select * from users where id = ?",$_GET["id"]) And then the MySQLi will pass those values in a safe way to the database. A second reason for using a DB class is that the engine provides even a small query profiler, which let you see how many queries a page required, which query has been run and how long they took. That should help you to see where the bottlenecks are. Again, having all those functions without any kind of help would mean it would make the development hard, however I took the time to comment all the classes and functions inside the code itself which means if you use an IDE with code completion (Eclipse PDT, Komodo or others) you will know what the function / class do and how to use it with all the parameters needed. The documentation of the function will be available as well on the wiki site and we will provide there examples of usage too. A long post to try to explain the process / reasons behind some of the decisions of the engine. Of course if there is further questions / remarks / self experiences with cases related, please share !

You have to give more details, just like that I can tell you that the query is valid... simply it doesn't give back any rows matching the where condition.

doesn't mean it's an error could be legit... Simply your query didn't give any results back.

It changed a lot since 401 and 501, but you can already do quiet a lot with 401 Anyhow if you are new in the 3D world you will have a lot to learn.

Which means McCode 2... and illegal copy / outdated

Well like me or not that's your problem not mine anyhow I was just thinking we are not all here full time to answer, and as personal experience, I would allow a couple of days before wondering what's going on.

PM him, and allow a couple of days before getting an answer... that's the usual and good practice. If you can't even wait that... then maybe you are in the wrong business ;)

There is no real solution to protect your files, specially in PHP. The only solutions are like zend guard which encode your files, however for an engine where the owner should be able to modify it, it defeat the purpose. So either allow people to work with your engine and accept some pirated versions floating around, or keep the files for yourself ;)

And C++ to produce flash to produce text and images? Sorry I don't get it.

I would suggest to install XAMPP or WAMPP on your PC instead of uploading anything before having some ideas of what you are doing. Otherwise you will soon cry because you will be hacked. And... as the others said, start to read how to develop code with PHP.

Download a free engine and start working on it. For 40-70 pounds you will get nothing of any value beside the base engine. So the smarter move is do all by yourself or take an engine which allows you to start... But certainly not buy a full game for that price ;)

Well the goal is certainly to attract people, now don't think I'm running after the money, the goal is to have enough people for it to be interesting for others to join the boat and create / offer yet something better with the engine.

But I cannot certify they will not keep the compatibility, as it's their choice, and they are just at the beginning of the development.

Well as said, I'm willing to help any game developers which want to build a game based on New Worlds Engine. So if any of you have an idea, or a project or anything, then let me know ;)

Djkanna: true, normally an upgrade is easier than going to a different software. However I must admit I discussed with ColdBlooded and during the discussion I said that they are facing 2 possible roads: keep a good compatibility but end up with an engine which is basically the same old stuff or go for something new and loose the compatibility but get a better design, he answered me that they are thinking to go to the second option which would kill the compatibility.Think that even OS do take from time to time this road, look at the Mac OS X for example, which did it a couple of times already. Now, I don't say McCode V3 is useless, or will be worse than my engine, I cannot say it as I didn't saw it, nor I do know what they will do. I just warn you guys that it may not simply be V2 + patches + something else, it may be something completely different. Actually I think it would be much better for all to have something different. First of all, because instead of teaching new comers poor ways to code (sorry Dabs, your V2 code is not exactly follow any best practices), but may actually allow to get better games in a shorter time. On my own side, I can tell you that all the efforts have been done on the New Worlds Engine to make it an easy to work with engine, both for a simple game owner as well as for the developers. The code is and will be clean, no complex constructions, no complex hierarchies and yet a documentation which is growing (even if some times my sentences are not really human readable so far, isn't it srachid?). I'm also completely open to discuss any particular aspect of the engine, and my primary goal is to provide a good base code, more than actually create for myself a market. Also, I'm willing to collaborate with game owners to provide some of the functionality they may need for their game and this at no cost, if the code will be then available to others as well, or even simply as consultant and offer advice how to implement feature X or Y. What I will not do however is to do custom work for any of you, which mean, no special module for that particular game. BTW I decided to split those posts from the original thread as for me it was going completely off topic and I don't particularly like to hi-jack other people threads. Finally, don't worry for any kind of bad feeling due to my game going against McCode, we already discussed the matter with ColdBlooded and there is no animosity / war between us where actually we are more like willing to collaborate (but not drop any of the 2 engines).

As far as I know V3 will not be compatible with V2 which means modules which as been written so far should not work for V3.

300$? Is Redux not 120$?