What you are asking is inherently impossible. The game runs on the client and is therefore completely at the user’s mercy. Only way to be sure is running a real time simulation of the game on the server based on user’s input (mouse movement, keypresses), which is absolutely ridiculous.

I would imagine it only looks in the current working directory – See http://uk3.php.net/manual/en/function.getcwd.php if you want to know what that is.

You can always find a path relative to your application by basing it on $_SERVER[‘DOCUMENT_ROOT’]

The filename argument for parse_ini_file is a standard php filename, so the same rules will apply as opening a file using fopen.

You must either specify an absolute file path («/path/to/my.ini») or a path relative to your current working directory («my.ini»). See getcwd for your current working directory.

Unlike the default fopen command, if a relative path is specified («my.ini») parse_ini_file will search include paths after searching your current working directory. I verified this in php 5.2.6.