Alright, so I've been really hammering out code lately. I've re-written the way the textual weapon stats are stored, so the exists in their own database, as opposed to a single line that looks like
#FF0000:Pew Pew Pew;#CCCCCC:+100% Accuracy and so on. That has also allowed me to take the horrible and noobish coding way of having the colors locked into the database as the info is entered, and allowed me to use color & type references so I have a single array of information such as
$colors = array (0=>"",1=>"FFFFFF",2=>"5AC728");
Minor things like this I am having to change before weapon editing will work as I intend it to, otherwise its just a lot of wasteful extra coding I have to do in order to figure out what a weapons rarity, brand, class, & color information is.
The biggest reason the original code is like that, is due to the fact that I never imagined that this would be as popular as it is, and I had never intended to implement entry editing, or deletion. I kinda thought "Hey, you have a weapon? cool post it up, and that's that". Simplicity is how I designed it, but over time I noticed people wanted to leave comments about a weapon, or edit, and god forbid, delete their creation due to the backend not reading a willow text file correctly.
Now beyond that there is only 2 major features missing from the DB. Editing, & Items ( shields, grenades, & class-mods). I keep putting the Items portion off since I'm still debating how to best store and display the information. I don't know If having 3 different display areas is best for each type, or just having them all inline with each other is best. I also don't know if I want to keep them inline with the weapons on the front-page, or add another section underneath the weapons to display them, or even moving both items & weapons to individual pages, and only showing the most recent 5 weapons & items on it.
I've also been mulling over if I want to open source the code, or keep it private. I know I've read some flak about this DB concerning the fact that it allows people to put up ungodly creations of weapons, or private groups have bitched about people putting their stuff up. If I did open source this, people could keep their own private databases of weapons on their own sites, and keep their creations to themselves. Another option is creating a user-base system, and allowing users to have their own private collections, and giving others access to them, while keeping my code private, but still allowing for private weapons.
The last main thing I have to create is an actual admin page for the db. Right now if there is something wrong, or some fuckhead is putting random ass bullshit on the DB, I have to manually connect to the SQL backend and find each entry and delete it, or modify an entry is a weapon is named wrong, or its not listed as the right type or brand.
If anyone here has any feedback about this (or even reads this), you can shoot me an email at
info@zerosubstance.net and tell me what you think.
