On PHPMaster.com today there's a new tutorial introducing you to the array handling features in PHP - sorting, slicing and more.

In my previous article on PHP arrays I suggested a number of things that are tables and therefore can also be expressed as arrays. In this article I'll use a pack of playing cards to explore some of the built-in array functions most often needed by PHP programmers. To highlight some of the array-handling functions PHP offers, I'll be using some components of Buraco - a game very popular in my part of the world and quite similar to Rummy.

In the example he represents a deck of cards with an array of values like "A", "03" and "13". This array is then looped to make the full set of 52 cards and shuffled to deal a "hand". Array functions put to use include array_rand, in_array and sort.

If you're looking for a challenge to keep you occupied for a while and want to flex those developer skills, check out the Toughesst Developer Puzzle Ever as created by Jeff Blankenburg.

For the second year in a row, my friend and colleague Jeff Blankenburg has created what is quickly proving to live up to it's namesake - the Toughest Developer Puzzle Ever. Some of the puzzles are technical, some are not but all require that you understand the web, development and technology to solve. Even if you don't get in on the fantastic prizes that Jeff has lined up, there's great bragging rights in being able to solve the Toughest Developer Puzzle Ever.

Josh Holmes (whose blog is linked above) was the creator of three of the levels of this difficult puzzle. Give it a try if you're looking for something to really stretch your knowledge!

In a new tutorial from the IBM developerWorks site starts off a new series looking at creating some games, from start to finish.

PHP is an easy-to-use, easy-to-learn, widely accessible programming language. It's well suited for developing simple scripts you can use to help you in all kinds of games. Whether you play simple pen-and-paper games by yourself, complex tabletop role-playing games with a group of people, or online games of any kind, this series will have something for you. Each article in this "30 game scripts you can write in PHP" series will cover 10 scripts in 300 words or less (3d10 stands for "roll three 10-sided dice") simple enough for even a beginning developer, but useful enough for a seasoned game player.

The ten scripts they walk you through are things like a die roller, a name generator, a deck builder/shuffler, a poker dealer and a crossword helper.

Paul Reinheimer has posted about a contest in the making - a turn-based robot battle sort of game where PHP scripts compete against each other.

Just a quick announcement, in an effort to come up with a self scoring contest, I came up with the ridiculously simple concept of robots firing lasers at each other in a fictional arena. Each robot controlled by a different PHP script, and a central arena managing it all. It's basically a turn based game where your robots take turns for you.

You can check out more about the game and its rules over on the Web Bot Battle site. It defines how your bots should act and even has some examples for you to work from.

Troy McCormick has pointed out a new game he's developing combining the CodeIgniter PHP framework, MySQL and the ExtJS library - ExtJS Poker.

ExtJS Poker is a Texas Hold'em Poker game programmed using PHP (Codeigniter), MySQL, and ExtJS. check out the early screenshots on the SourceForge project page.

ExtJS is a cross-browser Javascript library that helps you build rich internet applications with high-performance widgets, an extensible Component model and licenses to fit your use. CodeIgniter is a PHP framework with a very small footprint created for programmers who need a simple and elegant toolkit to create full-featured web applications.

The results from the latest poll the International PHP Magazine posted this past week are in. This time, they asked which of the options they gave was the visitor's most favorite PHP-based game.

Two options got the majority of the votes - 34.7 percent for Alien Assault Traders and the ever-popular catch all option "None". Other games that were included in the list were things like phpDiplomacy, Solar Empire, Star Trek Allegiance, and Solar Empire. The rest of these options all had around 5 percent or lower of the votes.

In their latest poll, though, they move back into the usual web development arena with the question "Which is the Best Tip for Creating a Web Application in PHP?". Options include using page/object caching and implementing gzip compression.

The International PHP Magazine has posted the results of this past week's visitor poll asking "Which Feature Is Not Suitable for phpDocumentor?"

Of the choices, the "None" option got the most votes (33.3% in fact) followed at a large margin by "Fully customizable output with Smarty-based templates" and "Generates a todo list from @todo tags in source". The users have spoken and they think phpDocumentor is flexible enough to handle everything from outputting in HTML/PDF formats to having a web and command-line interface.

This week's poll question asks about something a little more common - which of the items in the list are your favorite PHP game (and yes, there's "All" and "None" options). Check it out and cast your vote today!

Pádraic Brady, developer of the (work in progress) PHP-based strategy game Astrum Futura has posted today with the results of his look at a ranking of current PHP-based games and their popularity.

Sometimes I find it useful when measuring what's being downloaded in terms of open source PHP games to look at the top 10 rankings on Sourceforge for each gaming category. I say sometimes, because it tends to be fairly unreliable and doesn't really reflect real usage online.

Games on his list include Solar Imperium, Alien Assault Traders, PHP RISK and number one on the list - phpDiplomacy. Each item on the list includes the Sourceforge ranking against all other projects.

Pádraic Brady is back today with another update on the game he's working on and his latest addition - the stars and planets ("bodies").

Planets and Stars ("Bodies") form the central hub around which the majority of a player's activity will center. This planning document addresses the generation and mapping of these entities, and not their individual contents, facilities or uses.

He breaks it down into a few steps:

• Laying a Foundation
• Adding Stars
• Skeleton Map_Star Interfaces
• Implementing the Map_Star Interfaces
• Position Random
• Generate Simple
• Conclusion

The end result is a system for positioning stars and providing all of the star's data to the user.

In the continuing development of his online PHP-based game, Pádraic Brady has created a simple class to help with mapping out the objects/structures in the game. He shares the code for this in his latest blog post.

The code sets the stage for the Redux mapping system. Basically, we're aiming at a grid-based map with each grid coordinate representing a Sector.

Right now, it's just a skeleton structure, but it already has some of the key bits of functionality in place. The Redux_Map class manages the requests coming back and forth between the client and server, and the Redux_Map_Grid class helps to generate a grid structure of the objects found in that sector.

He even includes the unit tests for testing the Redux_Map_Grid class to ensure everything's in tip top shape. Next on his list is adding actual entities to the game - planets, facilities, etc.