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[TheLastBanana]

I'm working on a Flash game which is targeted to smartphones and tablets. I'm considering including a level editor, but I have no experience with level sharing systems. The game is a puzzle game with fairly simple levels, so a level would be 10-20 KB tops.

These are my main questions:

• What kind of specs would a server need for this?
• Are there any services set up specifically for hosting something like this?
• Has anybody made a framework for communicating with the server (uploading and downloading levels and the like) or would I need to build one from scratch?
• Is this even worth doing on a smartphone/tablet platform?

Any help is appreciated!

[X-Tender]

• What kind of specs would a server need for this?

- It depends how many useres Acces your Database (and how Often) I think for Testing an usual Server mit PHP and MySQL is enough,

• Are there any services set up specifically for hosting something like this?

PHP & MySQL Databases

• Has anybody made a framework for communicating with the server (uploading and downloading levels and the like) or would I need to build one from scratch?

I use AMFPHP for communication between Flash and PHP/Database

• Is this even worth doing on a smartphone/tablet platform?

Sure, why not?
[/list]

You can Save the User generated Data easyly as Binary Blobs.

[TheLastBanana]

It depends how many useres Acces your Database (and how Often) I think for Testing an usual Server mit PHP and MySQL is enough,

I guess my question here is more along the lines of how much bandwidth, processing speed, hard drive space, etc. I'd need. Obviously that's a difficult guess to make, since there's really no way to know unless you can see how many people are going to access it monthly, but if somebody who's run a setup like this has any ballpark figures, that would be nice.

PHP & MySQL Databases

By "services" I meant hosting services, but yeah, I'm definitely going to need to learn a bit more about PHP and MySQL.

I use AMFPHP for communication between Flash and PHP/Database

Ah, that looks like it could come in handy. I'll definitely look into that a little more.

You can Save the User generated Data easyly as Binary Blobs.

Yeah, that's the plan. The game is grid-based, so it should be very easy to set up.

Thanks for the advice!

[Fallsburg]

You can save the levels as pngs and upload to some pre-existing photo hosting site.

[st33d]

Hah hah, that's pretty clever.

You could also hide key value data in the image with this special png encoder:

https://github.com/nitrome/PNGEncoder

I had to do some research into reading and writing metadata into a png for a game I worked on. I needed extra data in the image but without affecting the image.

Hell, so long as it's a redundant chunk, you can shove any old data into a png without affecting the image.

[TheLastBanana]

Ah, yeah, I remember reading about that. Certainly a clever way of doing it.