Question

I am using php, html, css to create a bingo game (There will be nxn boxes. It will be filled in random order for 2 players. Players has to select numbers one by one. One who fills up rows or columns or diagonals five times wins the game).

I created player1.php and player2.php. I am having 9 boxes and populating it from databases. If user clicks a button I’ll update the corresponding values as 0 so that when page loads I’ll disable the button if the text is 0.

If player1 clicks a button in player1.php, it should reflect in player2.php. How can I do that? Is that possible by reloading page every second? Is it good to do that?

Answer 1

As short answer: no it is not.

Pure PHP is not the most suited for interactive game like that but there are few things you can do.

You could use javascript with Ajax to do this. Let’s say you have X players (each using playerX.php although i would put it into player.php and determine each player by GET parameter or something). When one of the player clicks a link, it goes a server-side script, in PHP (possibly using Ajax if you want), that updates your database.

Now the tricky, each player page ‘asks’ the server every certain amount of time for the state of the game, and updates the page accordingly. The easiest way to do this is create a script (lets call it state.php) that will output data from your database using JSON. You can read the request using ajax and update your page using javascript.

I suggest you read about jQuery and Ajax (which can be also used with jQuery).

If you want to avoid having to refresh the page each time, learning javascript and ajax is your best bet.