Some weeks ago, I was organizing a LAN for my school mates, on a memorable game: Halo Custom Edition.
I hadn’t played Halo for years and I felt so excited to retrieve these sensations that I wanted everything to be perfect. I searched for a tool capable of displaying the scores on a wall mounted screen facing the players.
I was close to abandon when I found a small script in PHP called ServerStats, on a website which could disappear from one day to another. This script extracts the informations directly from UDP on the Halo server. Unfortunatly the script was far to be functional, then I started to correct it and gradually finished by a complete improvement of all possibilities.
Well, what doest it look like now? Discover by yourself:
Halo CE Server Stats tool, as I renamed it, is able to show a resume of important characteristics from any Halo CE server: its name, IP/port, version, amount of players, game type, current score by team or player and an image of the map, directly taken from the HaloMaps.org website! I highly recommand you to read the README file included in the archive if you plan to use it.
>> Direct download for the Halo CE Server Stats tool 1.0.
Lot of other informations are available from the server but not used in this script. I guess they aren’t useful just for a server status page. I found an other script called HaloStatus on this page, also in PHP, a demonstration (for the same server as previously) is proposed here. It uses AJAX requests instead of meta refreshs, it could be a good evolution for my script.
If this kind of things gives you ideas for writing scripts for other games, you should figure out GameQ, a PHP framework catching for you all transmited data from over 170 game servers. It looks awesome.
Please, tell me any if you have any problem or if you plan to improve this tool, by commenting this post or using my contact form.
Have fun.