Generate your Quake Live signature here: http://ansuz.nl/toys/quakelive/

So why did I build it?
I love playing video games and I love Quake Live (QL). So I was a little disappointed to find out that there was no signature generator available yet for Quake Live. After a bit of ‘Googling’ I found a post on how to show your stats on mIRC. The example used a socket connection to retrieve QL profile page and using good ol’ web scraping technologies to retrieve all relevant data.

How?
I started building this in Flex using a socket connection to load the QL profile. I then managed to retrieve all relevant date and store it in a usable way. When I uploaded the app, I found out you need a special cross domain policy file for socket connections on your server. Also, this socket cross domain policy needs to be served from port 843. As my hosting provider doesn’t give me control to that level I had to find something else. Quite obviously a URLLoader did the trick. It’s funny how you can get quite mislead by an example you find somewhere else.

After that I realised that most forums don’t allow you to use Flash in your signatures and if they do, they usually limit it to something like 15KB. My signature is nowhere near 15K.

I decided to finally take the smart approach and use PHP to retrieve the QL profile and generate an XML file with all relevant data. After that I started messing around with the GD Lib to create a PNG version of the signature. The script that creates the image first loads the XML and then creates the signature, you can see the result of that above. As you can see this image is quite large, so I’m planning to create a medium and a small version in the near future.

All in all getting data from point A, modifying it at point B and using it at C is a lot of fun!

Links:

• Sig Generator: http://ansuz.nl/toys/quakelive/
• QL statistics XML: http://ansuz.nl/php_lib/quakelive/statsXML.php?player=WJW4rr3n