Trying to understand other games

[OldRod]

Been searching around, trying out a lot of different browser RPGs to see what I like/don't like and to see how they work.

I'm seeing a lot of links like this:

Code: Select all

http://www.somewebgame.net/index.php?dt=cz0xOTgyMDMyNzU2JnBhZ2U9Y2hhci5ldmVudHM,

Every single link in the game is like that, with a different value for the "dt" obviously.

How are they doing this? And more importantly, why?

For instance, in this one particular game, on the main screen you have links to see info about the location, a list of players in the same location, and resources you can gather at that location. Each one of those has a link like the one above and clicking it changes what you see on the index.php page you are looking at.

I'm guessing that the encrypted string is decrypted somehow and then used to display what's asked for on the page, but how do I go about doing this? And is it to prevent cheaters/exploiters?

[hallsofvallhalla]

http://php.net/manual/en/function.base64-encode.php

[OldRod]

I figured it was something like that - thanks for the link.

So I guess they are passing a gigantic string of stuff and parsing it in index.php? Their index.php must be huge

[Torniquet]

not neccisarily.

i use post variables to display different pages of my PM menu on my main site.

all together i think the code would come to about 5-600 lines of code.

but i have broken it down to about 40 lines and 4 or 5 includes.

if var is something include this page, if its something else include another.

its so much easier to manage content that way, but still has the same effect as if it was all written on one page