{"id":23,"date":"2010-05-03T22:16:40","date_gmt":"2010-05-04T04:16:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/timothypoon.com\/blog\/?p=23"},"modified":"2010-05-05T11:48:33","modified_gmt":"2010-05-05T17:48:33","slug":"using-websockets-with-php","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timothypoon.com\/blog\/2010\/05\/03\/using-websockets-with-php\/","title":{"rendered":"Using WebSockets With PHP"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Mega<\/a><\/p>\n

For my senior design project class, my group decided to try our hand at making a multiplayer 3D tank shooter game (called Mega Hovertank Wars) that plays in an HTML5<\/a>-compliant browser. Along with one other team member (the other two were pretty much dead weight), we worked heartily on the game engine, but it turns out he didn’t have much experience with programming in anything except JavaScript. Obviously, that won’t cut it for writing a game server.<\/p>\n

Luckily, I have a hefty amount of experience with PHP, and we were really set on writing our code so that it could run on just about any server or web hosting plan out there, otherwise I probably would have taken a C++ or Java approach.<\/p>\n

My original plan was to use long-polling with AJAX<\/a> since most other Comet<\/a> implementations required packages to be installed on the server that usually weren’t allowed on most web hosting plans. However, through a combination of finding this to be too slow for effective gameplay and discovering that Chrome had websocket<\/a> support, I decided to change over to using sockets, though sticking with PHP (just because I like it).<\/p>\n

Client Side<\/h2>\n

Unfortunately, it turns out that since we had written our engine to use WebGL<\/a>, we had to make the game run in Firefox 3.7a versions, aka Minefield, since that has the best WebGL support. The problem is that Minefield doesn’t have websocket support, so I had to use a bridge to use Flash sockets instead of websockets.<\/p>\n

After perusing the web a bit, it turns out there was already a solution out there by gimite<\/a>, aka Hiroshi Ichikawa, that uses a combination of other solutions floating around the Internet to provide websocket support to browsers that don’t yet provide it natively. You can check it out at GitHub<\/a>, but it basically breaks down like this:<\/p>\n