Hi there, I have some experience with C++ and the basics of games programming. However, I would like to create a roguelike game that is playable within a browser. It needs to have very basic graphical support in case I want to use tiles and also have some sort of way to save games online, have user accounts etc... What language do you recommend I learn to do this?

It doesn't matter.

Pretty much any language is capable of doing what you want, pick whatever you are most comfortable and/or interested in and get to it.

In this case I would say it does matter. Creating a game like this in c++ would be quite a daunting task as you would need to write some kind of framework to run the game within a web browser.

If you want to create a simple text based rogue-like game for a web browser you could look at creating it as a java applet. Another available option would be to look at flash, this may be easier for you to create something more graphical based.

Can you use asp or php to do something like that? I have no idea if either are that easy for graphics?

You can go with either ASP.NET (created with C#) or PHP for this, it really depends on how you want to do it. Both PHP and C# have syntax that you'll be familiar with, so either should be fairly easy to pick up. There's a few things that may help you choose either way.

Firstly, hosting. Are you just making this as a learning project for yourself or do you actually plan on hosting it somewhere? From what I remember, free hosting with ASP.NET was an absolute pain in the ass to setup to be useful to anyone trying to do something remotely beyond "Hello, world!". Free hosting is never great anyway (obviously [grin]), but I have had substantially worse experiences with free ASP.NET hosting compared to PHP.

Secondly, it depends what sort of paradigm you'd prefer coding with. I've not used the latest PHP version, but before that, it really did have some funky OO concepts that would be really baffling coming from a C++ background.

Both options allow you ways to create dynamic images and stream them to the browser. The great thing with C#, is that it uses a managed version of GDI to do this, which is basically GDI with a wrapper. So if you've used GDI before, you'll find what you're looking for, pretty quickly.

I did a quick search for articles regarding image processing for both PHP and ASP.NET and quite a lot came up. From using ASP, I always remember www.4guysfromrolla.com being a great resource and that showed up in the list as well an article on www.codeproject.com entitled, ASP.NET Image Manipulation Examples: Adding, Zooming, Enlarging. Here's the Google links to my searches: ASP.NET :: PHP.

Hope that helps.