I had a customer this year whom I grossly underestimated my time on a project.  Actually, I had two of these customers, each battling for my time.  I started working on the first customer’s project, thinking it would be done in a snap, only to find that the logistics of the project were more than just one person could handle.  I ended up having to pay for some additional workers, which ate up all my initial funding…. The customer wouldn’t pay me more, and I was running out of money as a business, so I had to take on additional small jobs just to keep my electricity and Internet connection going.  Then the second customer, whom I thought just needed a simple Joomla install with the exact content of their current website installed, turned around and provided new content and wanted not just a few changes, but TONS of changes made to a template they purchased - changes that went far beyond what the template was designed for.  I ended up learning how to trick out Joomla to do just about anything I wanted it to do in the process, but a 2-3 week project ended up requiring 6 months - no profit in that…
The customer kept making remarks, early on about how more time would need to be used sometimes to get maximum results and get a smaller profit, but honestly, I lost all my profit on his little project in the first 16 hours.  I have logged over 400 hours on his site now, and unfortunately the contract I have in place only allows me to charge him $200 for the whole project - 50 cents per hour, if even that.

So as I continue to write code, I am finding that it is only fair to not underestimate and not be in denial about time and the cost of time on one’s business and the business of your customer. If you think you can get something whipped up in 15 minutes - honestly, every minute adds up and it could very well take 20-30 minutes, plus 15 more minutes of testing and bug fixes.  That 15 minutes turns into 45 - 60 minutes, quickly.  So if the project might take an hour, just multiply it by 3, just in case for your estimate.

Also, when estimating, put every single detail down in paper as to what you’re expecting to do for the customer.  You might not estimate down to the detail level for the customer to see, but at least keep a running tally for the overall estimate, then multiply this by a percentage based upon how familiar you are with the type of project.  If its something new, just multiply by 300%.  If you don’t get the job, maybe its best.  If it is something you’re familiar with, still factor in some unexpected curveballs the customer will throw at you - if they’re too severe, dont be a nice guy - tell the customer it will cost extra, and have them pay it up front, or at least half the amount for the new work done outside of the original, agreed upon spec.  This will make sure the customer thinks things through before throwing you every pitch they have (curveball, slider, knuckleball, change up).

 In my opinion, if they’re so damn concerned about security, then they would get this SIMPLE assed thing fixed, rather than leave it broken for years so that people can’t even update their systems updated and left with security holes!!!!  I have servers that I can’t easily upgrade the kernel on and don’t have any physical access to.  Maybe if I did get updated to Fedora Core 4, it would alleviate some issues, but I doubt it!  I saw some comment from one of the FC team just apologizing for signing stuff with the wrong signatures, but nothing was going to get done to fix it!  Its as if they really didn’t give a care - it happened and that was that…. sorry… GRRR..

 Nonetheless, our PHP project will be concentrating on a nice simple HTML based MMRPG that can be played from the comfort of your office computer, without having to worry about shutting down your system when the boss comes coming in, or worry about all the sounds of sword fights and bloody gore being heard down the hall, or over the cubicle walls.  The Realm Builder site is a great reference for just fundamental terminology and features that MMRPG games are expected to have.  In fact, I had this idea of what they call a “pet” that I would incorporate in this game, which is basically a thing that follows you around and helps you do battle - like a guard dog, and was definitely going to include that in the game.  The twist I was going to make is that the guard dog can be converted to a bad guy, by the other bad guys, so you have to go out and find a new pet to help you do battle.

 If the pet is a robot, my strategy was to allow the player to either buy a new one with credits, repair features on it, add features, or find parts and build it themselves, but also with the help of a manul that they would need to find or purchase.  I think in the early stages of the game, I’ll just launch the game without pets robots, but introduce them later to help do battle.

Anyway, I have a few more things to study, and am going to continue working on this.  I hope to be able to get some more ideas out there and release some code, soon.

 I also decided to create a custom interface that would make managing the game tables in the database easy to administer.  And that is what I’ll refer to them as - game tables.  So far I have tables for players, player items, locations, and items.  The way I setup these tables is kind of crazy and really hard to explain.  I have a players table which is nothing but the fields I think I’m going to use in the game.  these are just records containing and ID field and a name field.  Then I have a table called players_data which ties to the `players` table to get the field names for each player record.  Player’s data has the records of id, recordid, fieldid (from players table), and value (the value of the field in the record).  Pretty nuts eh?  Well, this allows me to quickly and easily design the data structure for the game, and I forgot to mention, I also have a pID (parent ID) field in the Players table, so I can categories the fields in a tree structure.  I’m using a script I found online to accomodate the creation of the tree.

I also created some custom database functions to deal with all the selecting, updating, inserting, and deleting of records.  The select functions used to determine the players x,y coordinates on the map are pretty interesting.  I have to basically get two arrays of x and y results and then get the intersecting ‘point’ using an array_intersect_assoc command.  I was afraid with these extra queries and the craziness of my array manipulations used to support my game design program, the performance might be slow, but it works amazingly fast.  I’m sure it will be faster after I flaten out the database structure and use regular queries to handle the bulk of the work. 

I’ll try to get some more code and information listed here soon.  I actually am further ahead on the game than I am on this series, but I might as well make sure that whatever ideas I’m going to talk about here are actually working first before wasting my time talking about it.

Lets get down to the substance:  I have for you some rough code that I setup to setup my own Amazon Affiliate store, using the Amazon API.  I thought I would try my hand at some affiliate marketing - so far its been okay.  I picked up a copy of this book that explains how to use the various API services available from Amazon, Fedex, UPS,  Google, and others.  I think its a great book if you want to setup some custom shopping cart software to take orders and allow for customers to track their shipments.  Its also good for me, as I don’t have a store yet to speak of, and will have to settle for affiliate marketing of the Amazon products.

To use this code, you’re going to need the ‘nusoap’ Soap library for PHP to use it with the Amazon API.  It allows you to use SOAP services without having to have SOAP installed on your system.  I tried installing SOAP years ago, and that was a pain.  So save yourself some hassle and use this instead.

If you would like to see this code in action, I have it in use online at my Christmas Gifts and Crafts site.

Forget posting a code snippet - Wordpress 2 couldn’t handle it and I tried numerous plugins - none helped the situation.

Download the zipped index.php, styles.css and images folder here:

Amazon Affliliate Code version 1

I ‘Googled’ the term ‘php mysql import script’.  Did I find anything useful?  Not really.  Just alot of folks asking the same question, or tools that are integrated in other applications.  Boy that really stunk.  So I had to go ahead and write my own utility.  Here’s the code below. 

• Note that I didn’t include a listing of my ‘common_new.php’ file - this is only a file that contains the dbconnect() function, which does nothing but connect me to my database with my login credentials - you can create your own library of functions to include)
• Also note that I have some search patterns setup to massage my SQL data to work with my version of MySQL, you might use these examples to make additional changes.
• Finally, also note that this is setup to drop the tables before reimporting them!  If you don’t want to lose tables and maybe just run a script that only does INSERT statements, then comment out the line: $page=$prepage.$page;  But if you have no CREATE TABLES statement to begin with, it shouldn’t matter - as I have this program setup, it only wants to drop tables that already are being created in your SQL

 

< ?

include ("common_new.php");

$filename="transaction_sheeet_dev.sql";

$page=file_get_contents($filename);

$pattern="/CREATE TABLE \`(.*?)\` \(/si";
preg_match_all($pattern,$page,$matches);

foreach ($matches[1] as $k=>$v)
{
 $prepage.=”DROP TABLE IF EXISTS`$v`;”;
}
// TAKE OUT THIS LINE IF YOU DON’T WANT TO DROP THE TABLES
$page=$prepage.$page;

$pattern=”/CREATE TABLE /si”;
$replace=”CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS “;
$page=preg_replace($pattern,$replace,$page);

$pattern=”/\`timestamp\` timestamp NOT NULL .*?\,/si”;
$replace=”`timestamp` timestamp NULL,”;
$page=preg_replace($pattern,$replace,$page);
unset($matches);
$pattern=”/InnoDB/i”;
$replace=”MyISAM”;
$page=preg_replace($pattern,$replace,$page);
unset($matches);$pattern=”/latin1/i”;
$replace=”utf8″;
$page=preg_replace($pattern,$replace,$page);
unset($matches);
$pattern=”/(.*?)\;/si”;
$r=preg_match_all($pattern,$page,$matches);
$db=dbconnect();
foreach ($matches[1] as $k=>$v)
{
 $sql=$v;
 echo “executing:”. $v.”
“;
 $rst=mysql_query($sql,$db);
 //if (!$rst) die(”could not execute: $sql
MySQL said:”.mysql_error());
 
}
if (count($matches[1])==0) die(”found no matches”);

?>

 

 

I have finally decided that in order to put together a decent framework for this game, what is needed is a good plan.  So I started to write some things down and make the decisions I could not make two years ago, and so far, here is what I have:

The game would be similar to Urban Dead at urbandead.com

The players table will have fields with information directly related to the player:

• name
• password
• location on the map
• player class type
• health points
• experience points
• action points
• timezone
• email
• last login time
• created date
• number of logins
• disabled flag
• IP Address

The players items would be stored in a seperate table in a category type structure in which you have a parent item, with its associated child items, and each item would have some attributes such as hit point effectiveness (I will have to research a better term for this from other games), which is the minimum and maximum on both hit points multiplied by max and min percentage.  The value could be negative (for weapon items) and positive (for healing items). 

I want to give some more thought to the player items data structure and design, and will layout these details in my next posting.  I hope you can appreciate the value in planning these database details first.  It will make coding the game alot more fun.

The two accounts I *thought* were for possibilities for this domain, I thought I had narrowed it down to one or the other, several times, till I finally logged into my shell account, and renamed the index.php to index.phpz, and realized I was still getting the default page, even though the index.php file was renamed.

Anyway, I figured out which account was really tied into this blog, and I can now start posting to it.

For all of you in the USA, I hope you have a Happy Thanksgiving - I know I will.

-Jason