Implementation Questions

[jjohn]

Seth (or anyone else that can answer this),


There are some text files in FQ that I don't understand. Can you please clarify their purpose for me, as a mod maker?
<ul>
* karma.txt

* Karma would be a interesting game machanic to have, but I don't see it in 0.78. Am I missing something? If not, then this file as no purpose yet, right?

* no_customers.txt

* I may be missing something here, but when does a player not get a customer, a risk or an event? Was this supposed to be related to karma? If players can't get a "no customers" turn, then this file isn't used.

* yangs.txt and yangs_nice.txt

*I don't grok either of these files. Is the idea that Yang will sometimes send you food during one of those mythical "no customer" turns? I'm beginning to warm up to that concept. What purpose do these files serve?

[/list]



Thanks for your time. No doubt I'll have more questions.

[Heretic Man]

Well, the Karma system was something Seth was going to implement, I think, but he decided against it so the text file is like the appendices, yeah it's there, but it doesn't do anything. *The Yang text files are for when people send Yang's food to people, but are too lazy to type anything witty. *And lastly in the earlier version (beta) you could get turns in which no one showed up. *This was annoying so Seth got rid of it. *Just think of FQ as the human genome, full of nifty things, but some of it doesn't do anything.

Oh I got your "Stranger in a Strange Land" reference. You're my new best friend. http://www.rtsoft.com/ib3/iB_html/non-cgi/emoticons/tounge.gif

[jjohn]

If you look at the HTTP requests that are passed between the flash client and the server, most (all?) of the "game" commands are serviced by a virtual program called 'request.xp'. In typical CGI environments, 'request.xp' would be a seperate program, but in FQ the FQ Server itself handles all requests made to this program.



The flash client makes GET requests with somewhat malformed GET query strings. Normally one or more URI escaped key-value pairs joined together with ampersands follows the name of the script and one question mark. The flash client will send URLs that look like:




<table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tr><td>Code Sample </td></tr><tr><td id="CODE">
/request.xp?checklogon?&key=0%2E481396000832319&i%5Fsent=0&st%5Fintro%5Fnews=&title=&st%5Fno%5Fmore=
[/QUOTE]<span id='postcolor'>
</p>



Here, the first GET parameter is "checklogin." Pedantically, it should be "checklogin=" or even "checklogin=1". In any case, it shouldn't be orphaned without some value. What's more distrurbing is that it is followed by a question mark. The question mark is a sentential character that separates the filename from the query parameters. The appearance of the second question mark is troubling.



Fortunately, the Perl method URI->query_form() can parse even this mess. :-)



The questions I have:
<ul>
* What's checklogin suppose to do? The login screen won't appear without, I guess, some confirmation from the FQ server. I don't think this has to do with the license scheme. Is this just checking that there are seats available for another player?

* There is some session mechanism at work in FQ. Is the "key" parameter an ID that uniquely identifies sessions to the FQ server?
[/list]



I hope these questions aren't too nosy.