Background:
I wrote this game after seeing something similar on another site written in Shockwave, and I wondered if it would be possible to create the same functionality using Flash. There are other Flash versions of this classic card game around, but none with the score-keeping functionality I wanted. This is my second publicly released FLA file, and is vastly more complicated than my first. Whilst I have radically improved my ActionScript coding skills for it's creation, I am in no way suggesting that the design is flawless, so please do let me know if you have any suggestions, or if you make improvements to the code, or spot any bugs in it.

Thanks:
The stopwatch function code used in this game were developed by Mike Gieson. They came from an FLA file he published at flashkit.com, and he has kindly granted me permission to reuse his code for this game. The stopwatch functionality he developed is very reliable, and has a very low drain on system resources. I have also borrowed a couple of graphics from his original file which I have edited to fit the style of the game. Thanks Mike ;-)

The Game Concept and Rules:
The game contains 24 cards (increasing or decreasing this number is not a simple task) which are dynamically shuffled every time a new game is started using the Math.random function. Cards are animated when they are flipped, and a user may only flip two cards at a time. After two cards are flipped, they remain visible for a short period to give the user a chance to remember their positions, before returning to a face down position. If the user clicks a new card while two are face up, the previous two flip back over straight away. Games are timed with a stopwatch which can be paused at any time during the game. While the game is paused cards may not be flipped. The number of flips attempted is also recorded as the user plays, and both the user's time and total flips are presented to them on completion of the game. If the user makes more than 999 flips, a game over message is displayed - likewise if the clock runs over 59 minutes and 59 seconds. Without these checks the variables might overflow and cause runtime errors on the user's PC. After completion, the game will check a scoreboard to see if the user has beaten any of the top 5 times or lowest 5 total flips. If they have, they will be presented with an opportunity to enter their name and win a place on the scoreboard which will be displayed after they enter a name. If a high score is not achieved, the high score chart is displayed after a short delay upon completion. A local record is also kept of each user's best time and lowest flips. This is updated silently whenever the records are beaten, and is displayed continuously on screen.

The Scoreboard:
The scoreboard works on a synthesis of a PHP scoreboard script. PHP is only needed at all because Flash has no built in functionality to write to ASCII text files. Included within this scoreboard system is a server time-out check - if the server takes too long to respond or to read the scoreboard, the Flash file will fail gracefully and display a server time-out message. The scores are saved to an ASCII text file in a format which can be split into an array when read by Flash. This feature can be switched on or off by the developer.

The Personal High Score System:
The final section I developed is for recording the personal best scores of each individual user. This is done with Javascript which is run silently from within Flash. No Javascript is needed for the page containing the flash file. Two cookies are used, one for the best time, and another for the lowest flips. These are read using Javascript whenever that user opens the game, and updated whenever the user beats their scores. This is done without any user input, and is simply displayed on screen. This feature can be switched on or off by the developer.

IMPORTANT! - To make the Javascript for this system work, you must set both the name and ID properties of the Flash movie on you html page to "CardGame" and set the MovieTitle variable accordingly. If you forget this, the Javascript won't work.

Customisation:
There are 7 variables which can be changed by the developer. They are in the first frame of the "Actions" layer in the card game movie. These are as follows:

The PHP file included requires one variable to be modified. The variable is on the second line of the file and is called "$filename". This needs to point to your "scoreboard.txt" file which can be a relative or an absolute path - if you use a relative path, it must be relative to the PHP file, not to the flash movie. You only need to change this variable if the "scoreboard.txt" and "scoreboard.php" files are not being kept in the same folder.

If for example your "highscores.php" file is in a folder called "php-bin" and your "scoreboard.txt" file is in a folder called "results" on the same level, for the PHP script to read the scores file, it needs to drill up one directory and then drill down to the "results" folder to find it, so in this example your path would be "../results/scoreboard.txt" ("../" means up one level). An absolute path will also work such as "/results/scoreboard.txt" - Absolute paths start with a "/" which is the root of your site, and are relevant only to the root of your site regardless of where they are being used.

These are the things which you can safely change in the code. The most obvious thing you will want to change is the photos. By far the best way to do this is just to update the existing photo symbols with new photos, rather than importing new photos and trying to manually reposition them on the screen. This is done as follows:

First make 12 jpeg images to use on your cards. They must all measure EXACTLY 58 x 44 pixels. If they don't measure those exact dimensions, the photos will look very bad on the screen because Flash does not do a good job of stretching photos from their original dimensions at such a small size. Anyway, select properties on the Card you want to change. You will see a new dialogue box - click Import to select a different photo with which to replace the original. Do this for each Card.

You might want to change the cards manually, or change the back of card graphic. There is a symbol called Card Graphics which contains 13 frames - one for each photo and a back of card graphic. It is safe to edit this symbol. You may make the cards larger or smaller by editing this symbol and it will have no adverse effect on the game code. You can change the clipart I have used for the background and the control panel (obviously), but I strongly recommend leaving the code well alone unless you are very familiar with the language. There is a lot of interconnected code throughout the game, and in changing something you may be breaking a link somewhere else in the game which is not immediately apparent.

Servers and Installation:
For the scoreboard to work properly, your server must support PHP. Also, you must be able to change the permissions of your files using the UNIX command CHMOD. For servers which do not support PHP (this includes almost all free hosts like Geocities and Angelfire), you cannot use the scoreboard and will have to disable it. If you do have PHP enabled, you must CHMOD your scoreboard.php file to 755, and your scoreboard.txt file to 777. If these permissions are not set, it won't work. You will need up upload bother of these files to your server, making sure that the paths you upload them to are reflected in the Flash variables which are looking for them (see above). If you don't understand what I am talking about here, I suggest disabling the scoreboard.

That should be all you need to know to get the game working (and quite a lot you don't need to know). If you have any questions, you can email me at wwarby@hotmail.com, but please do try to work through these notes first because I do work full-time. I don't mind helping people out, as long as I haven't already answered the question in this file. And please do let me know if you use this game online. It's great to see my own work implemented elsewhere on the Internet, and inspires me to publish other files I create.

-William