Dynamic sigs - how do they work?

[Ellie]

Not sure where this goes, I figured here.

Anyway. You know them dynamic sigs you get for games such as RuneScape, that show stuff drawn from a database, well how do they work? I was thinking of making some for my game.

Like this if nobody knows what I'm talking about:

http://sig.runeweb.net/sig/6/Wyatt+Drago.png[/img]

 

[Yeyinde]

Server takes the image request and sends the request to a script (PHP, Perl, etc.).  The script then gathers the data and assembles an image and sends the image back to the server.

 

[___]

Check out PHP's image manipulation APIs, particularly GD, they'll get the job done for you.

 

[e]

Actually, you don't need to send back an image per se. You just have to trick the browser into thinking it's an image by setting the content type (an HTTP header; more here) to that of an image, typically image/jpeg, image/gif or image/extension (more here).

So, theoretically, you could send back anything really; I'm not sure how well it'd be displayed, though, but I assume some tricks could be pulled.