"master Server" For Listing Internet Games?

[leiavoia]

Not quite the usual question, but perhaps best for the "backend services" catagory, so here goes:

 

I am designing and programming a nice little turn based strategy game:

 

http://www.project-axis.net/

(website hosted with TCH, woohoo!)

 

Okay, so we were talking our forum about how to go about setting up multiplayer games and such. The simple way would be to have a small program on a computer somewhere act as the "master server" that lists games on the internet that are currently in play. When you start a server on your own, your game logs into the master server's list of current games. That's all the master server does. It's not like a "Quake III server". It doesn't play the game, it justs logs current games like any other database app. Then if you want to play the game as a regular client, your game checks for and returns a list of active servers to play on from off the master server

 

My question is, if i program this small and simple application for logging currently active servers (probably in C++ or just PHP/MySQL), can i host it on my regular account that i also host my webpage on? It needs to be on a computer that the whole world can access and is always on. In other words, my desktop is out :-) "but hey, i already pay for a hosted machine!"

 

The program would not consume very much resources. Especially if no one likes the game :-)

[MikeJ]

Just have every game that starts up "register" with the master server by calling a php script on the master server (use authentication or whatever). Log that in the database and have any query for games just hit another script that pulls the info from the database. Keep it all web based and transaction oriented and I don't see any reason it would be a problem.

 

Now if you want to keep an application constantly running (basically running a daemon), that could possibly be an issue. Although I don't see anything that explicity says you can't, you'll probably want to get someone from TCH piping in about their policy on that one.