title: Multiplayer game with PHP. What are my chances?
body: <p>Firstly, I would need this information to make a realtime multiplayer browser game. Right now, I can pretty much code everything, with an exception - serverside events has to be pushed to clients. So I need a real solution (unlike longpolling) on this.</p>
  
  <p>I've been reading all the forums, all the articles, but this is confusing me.</p>
  
  <p>I would like to ask some questions, but I need an indepth reply, if possible.</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li><p>HTML5 brought us the WebSockets feature. It was barely supported by browsers at first, but right now, pretty much all up-to-date browsers supports it. Is it going to be the comet solution of future? Can it kill node.js and other solutions?</p></li>
  <li><p>There are so many options to pick from. Node.js, socket.io, APE, using API's of 3rd party websites. (like pusher.com) What would be the most benefical for me? I want to code server-side with PHP. I believe if we use node.js, I should code server-side with javascript too. Is it correct? If not, how can I use PHP with these frameworks?</p></li>
  <li><p>I am going to code a multiplayer game, so performance/scalability is an essential. I don't think I will ever get more than 100 concurrent players at the start, but nobody knows what future brings, so I would like it to code the way it can support few thousands of concurrent players in the future. What are my options?</p></li>
  <li><p>PHP, as much as I like the language itself, it simply lacks in this area... I don't want to code games like Travian, they're boring. I would like them to be realtime. I can learn a new language for this task if necessary. What's your opinions about this?</p></li>
  <li><p>I'm currently using Apache as a local web server. Used IIS and Nginx in the past. Is there any PHP web servers designed for this job? As far as I know, some languages had special web servers designed for concurrency. (e.g Tornado Web)</p></li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>Setting max_execution_time to 0 and flushing new data to clients in an endless loop is not an option in this case, it is not even effective at all.</p>
  
  <p>Any answer is much appreciated.</p>
  
  <p>Thank you.</p>
  
  <p>Ps. I will use it for other things like realtime notifications too, but mostly my 2D game itself.</p>