I created netcode of a game to multiplayer and currently we are counting on a dedicated server, however for information ends we are wanting to inform in the official site how many players are on-line in this server, in which map it is etc... ** the server of the game is not in the same machine of the server site, a good solution would be to use socket of the PHP in a certain port to communicate with the server c++ socket? Somebody has some better idea? Thanks =)... my English is bad... =\

Many games implement that way of doing it. It works just fine.

You might be worried about external entities spoofing data for your data collection server. I would use a shared secret between the machines (so that information cannot be spoofed), and then have each server/zone report population at some interval (say, every 5 minutes) to the statistics collection machine.

Typically, I'd encrypt the statistics with the shared secret, and then sign using the Tiger hash; that way, only someone with the shared secret can decrypt the data and validate that the hash is correct; spoofed packets won't hash right so you can discard them.

thanks