Jeremy, I think this is an awesome idea, and it's nice of you to take that on. As regards block party, though, I wonder if score posting is a route we really want to go down, mainly because of the huge amount of possible scoreboards. 3 to 8 block types, 4 board sizes, 4 game modes ... that's 96 possible scoreboards. I would love any feedback on how we could streamline/simplify this, however. For future titles this will be awesome! Thanks again. Best, Ryan
-----Original Message----- From: gamers-boun...@audyssey.org [mailto:gamers-boun...@audyssey.org] On Behalf Of Jeremy Kaldobsky Sent: Monday, August 01, 2011 9:02 AM To: Gamers Discussion list Subject: [Audyssey] High score list for developers Ryan, your post yesterday gave me an idea that I wanted to run past you, and really everyone for that matter. It occurred to me that quite a few arcade style games get posted, that don't support online high score lists. In most cases I'm sure this is due to lack of equipment or not knowing how to handle the server side of things. Since I've got the community supporting a server for my games, I thought I could help solve those 2 barriers that have been getting in the way. I'm still figuring out how best to set this up, but here is the idea. I adjusted the software on my server to handle high score lists. Developers who have games will contact me and I'll send them an 11 digit password along with a small 8kb file called hsa.exe. In your game, written in python I believe, you can simply run that file and pass it a command line argument that contains the password, the person's score, and their player name. Obviously your game would have to have its own way of getting the player's name, but that's nothing difficult. The little program contacts my server and passes the information along, all in the background, with no one even knowing what happened. The server accepts the data if the password is correct, and it does the work of putting them on your high score list based on score. When people view the webpage, they can easily see the rankings. Here is the example I currently have running, for testing purposes. http://www.kaldobsky.com/audiogames/highscores.htm The webpage side of things probably needs to be made more accessible, but please take a look. Each different setting of your game, like grid size, number of blocks, and so forth, would have its own password so that it would have its own high score list. The 2 lines at the top, the 1 line at the bottom, and the number of people in the high score list can all be set using a separate admin program that I would also give out to the developers. The tiny hsa.exe file would be sent along with your games, but the admin program would be kept with you of course. I'm just wondering if this type of idea would provide easy high score tracking for our large group of developers that aren't already using high score lists. With this test high score list I've got running, I'm encouraging people to play around with it and see how it works. The hsa.exe file can be downloaded here. www.kaldobsky.com/audiogames/hsa.zip Just put it into your game's directory, and execute it with the command argument from within your game. The password for this practice score list is 398-093-129, so here are some specific examples of how you can submit high scores. If you had a player named Goblin, and he just ended a game with 45 points, here is how you could submit that score from within a python game. import os os.system("hsa.exe 398-093-129,45,Goblin") >From within a Visual basic 6 game. x = shell("hsa.exe 398-093-129,45,Goblin",0) Or even from a dos batch file. hsa.exe 398-093-129,45,Goblin Give it a try and please let me know if you guys think this is a good idea, and if you think other developers would actually want to use it. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
