I came up with a fresh idea that I havent yet found any literature online about, and I term it PHP XSessions.

It is pretty much using PHP as per normal, but using the session to hold information in XML format thus giving an easier method to parse large amounts of player and session state information from the server to the user that can be called with a small line of code and easily manipulated and displayed using javascript.

For those curious about the name, I am not talking about the Green vs Briggs fight that has Australian Boxing in turmoil. Nor am I talking about the Gillard vs Abbot fight that is brewing. The programming, nerd gloves are coming off and I'm getting back into some fairly involved interface programming.

So without further ado... Drumroll please!

I had been working on the best solutions for managing the players, towns and guilds in the game and after a lot of different approaches and designs, I am now focusing on having them all grouped as entities. I want the relationships to be dynamic and each town, guild and player share most of the methods and variables. Ownership of resources, units, buildings can all be held by the different entities. As well as many beaurocracy control actions.

Ok so the major hitch I have found when programming in DOS (Batch files) is that multidimensional arrays and mapping is a pain in the ass. Seeing as there is no simple array variable format for mapping you cant use a simple nested for loop like you could in java based languages:

for(var i=0;i < limit;i++) {
  for (var j=0;j < limit;j++) {
    var map[i][j] = mapTile
  }
}

The batch language dictactes a much more archaic format, only allowing one changing variable per statement.