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[Evan Balster]

In the past, I've written PHP scripts for web-based highscore systems in games.  My friend Beau 'teknopants' Blyth's "Shoot First" uses client-side download and parse code written by me and server-side code written by another fellow to track daily, weekly, monthly and all-time highscores.

[Incidentally, perhaps I should share that software.  It'll work with any Game Maker game.]

Now, I've released my first online game project (It's free!  See my sig.) and for a variety of reasons, I'd like for my game's server to act as a web server.  The main one is so I can distinguish server downtime from port blockage and get metrics about the world before the client connects.  It'd also be cool to be able to type in "server.infiniteblank.com" and see that stuff pop up in a browser, or show the number of people online on the website.  I'm coding the system tonight using this as reference material.


Anyway, I'm curious how extensively others have used HTTP transactions for practical game programming.  I think they're magical!  They let game servers have web interfaces, let game clients download software updates from the web, and are more generally permissible by firewalls.  What's more, games can interface with web servers and databases -- bridging the gap all the way to the opposite side of the software world -- and do nifty things like the aforesaid highscore system.


As an afterthought, some online games could run through HTTP-based systems by interfacing with PHP scripts and such.  I might very well offload a big chunk of my server's functionality to my web host at some point soon.  [Downloads are most of the game's bandwidth consumption, though, so take that with a grain of salt.]

[george]

I've done this only a little, but there are a lot of resources available on the web (name and definition databases, various social network apis, etc.) that are marvelous resources for PC games to make use of.

[moi]

This poll is biased because it lacks a "no" option.
(I've no idea what you're talking about though)

[Snakey]

I use it quite a lot. My current experiment which is an Action RPG in Unreal uses HTTP communication for things like player authentication, downloading content, saving/load player characters.

It's also really easy for me to announce news to players and have it usable for the website and the game.

It's also a poor man's way of doing a lot of nifty things.

[David Pittman]

I've written an HTTP-based leaderboard for a non-browser game. I was surprised by how simple it was to get it working (using Winsock in the client and Python on the backend). Also taught me a bit about encryption and security. Maybe someday I'll ever release that game and find out if it all really works.

I also like the idea of having a web server that could push patches or new content to players--keeping them up to date on new versions of the game without having to seek it out at a website. Haven't tried implementing that, though.

[Endurion]

I've used them for HitBlock, a little puzzle game remake of mine. It's used to upload online highscores, but also to up- and download user made level sets.
Basically all interfaces with a PHP script on the server side.

[mcc]

My iPhone game hits against a little Django webapp to upload and download user-created levels. I was originally thinking about also doing a leaderboard this way but ultimately didn't. This works especially well with an iPhone app because I can just throw up a web view and display a page right off the Django site right in the iPhone app, however I'd still go with the web backend approach for networking at this point even if I was just doing RPCs and never displaying html to the user.

I still need to find a good approach for parsing JSON in C++ though...