[quote name='Serapth' timestamp='1344456838' post='4967512']
[quote name='Monkayy' timestamp='1344455689' post='4967503']
[quote name='Serapth' timestamp='1344454652' post='4967497']
Not PHP. Anything but PHP!
As you are just starting out, picking one language is ideal. Keep focused as best you can.
This guide should help you choose.
But isnt Nationstates in effect just a series of dynamic webpages which is the point of PHP?
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You know what, I know NOTHING about Nationstates, and I still realize that PHP is not the solution!
PHP is a bastard of a language and should go the way of the dodo. If you have a game that is basically a series of dynamic web pages, use something else... I would suggest Node/Express/Javascript personally in that case.
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Okay, I am new and you have a good reputation so I trust you How much does javascript have in common with java? (just wondering). This video explains Nationstates very well if that would help my question (it is 6mins long but if you skip through it you can still get the idea)
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To add to this, PHP is in fact all you need, it just is a horrible, horrible mess of a language(The only common web backend option i can think of that is more painful to work with would be ASP(the old one, not .Net, The general suckiness of the old pre .Net ASP is also the main reason why PHP got popular, it was the lesser of two evils back in the day, today there are plenty of better options to choose from), There are hower two really good reasons to use it even today:
1) There is a crapton of PHP code out there under permissive licenses that you can reuse for various purposes.
2) If you pick a random extremely cheap webhost odds are really good that they do support PHP but nothing else. (big webgames tend to need a more expensive host anyway though).
Personally my favourite for web development is python+django but i do use PHP alot, simply because it has been around for so long that it gets hard to avoid it completely.
JavaScript is , much like PHP quite a nasty language but for the frontend you don't have much choice, JavaScript is the only real option for dynamic web frontends (unless you go with some browser plugin solution but then your frontend is more of a traditional application that just happens to be embedded in a browser). (Java is, as has allready been mentioned a very different language (Both languages have C-style curly braces and the word Java in their names but thats pretty much where the similarities end (Java is a reasonably good language)