C4A Competition, Starting from September!

[ekianjo]

As announced yesterday, PandoraLive is now organizing a monthly C4A competition on selected games - you'll find more details in the below post! The competition has officially started, on 3 games from the repo. 



->> Continue Reading

 

[_wb_]

Excellent idea!

Also, thanks for including one of my games in you first selection.

I went ahead and played the three games. I'm only good at my own game though . I hadn't played it in many months. That damn hyper round in level 26 killed me this time -- if you don't quickly gain mass and attraction in those hyper rounds, you're pretty much toast before you know it.

Flappy Bird is unforgiving, I almost always hit a tube very early, and when I don't, I get nervous and it becomes even harder . Funny little game though, and even though it does not have lots of needs in terms of game controls, I very much prefer tapping a physical button instead of tapping the screen like on phones.

Tumiki Fighters is a very nice and original shooter -- picking up pieces of the enemy is just a great concept, and the balance is very nice: bigger pieces give more power, but since you get a huge hitbox it is impossible to keep them for a long time. I'm not very good at shooters though, so my #1 spot for this month is probably not going to last long .

Here are some direct links to the C4A pages, could be useful to put them in the PandoraLive article too:

Pandora NubNub: http://c4a.openpandora.org/#/nubnub

Flappy Bird: http://c4a.openpandora.org/#/flappybird

Tumiki Fighters: http://c4a.openpandora.org/#/tumiki_fighters

 

[ekianjo]

Thanks _wb_ for jumping in !!

Yeah FlappyBird is unforgiving, but you get better once you train a bit Beating Matti will be hard though!

Yeah I will put the C4A links as well in the article, too bad there is no link for specific months. 

 

[klapse]

Here are some direct links to the C4A pages, could be useful to put them in the PandoraLive article too:

Pandora NubNub: http://c4a.openpandora.org/#/nubnub

Flappy Bird: http://c4a.openpandora.org/#/flappybird

Tumiki Fighters: http://c4a.openpandora.org/#/tumiki_fighters

I don't see anythingi related to those games under those 3 links (in Firefox) - I expected I would see high scores or something.

 

[TrashyMG]

^ I see High scores on those links in Firefox.

 

[klapse]

Now it works for me. Nevermind... EDIT: It works sometimes. I always see the pacman maze and INSERT COIN. But the scores and buttons don't always show up.

 

[M-HT]

Yeah I will put the C4A links as well in the article, too bad there is no link for specific months.

There is. You need to add the year and month after a slash. For this month it would be 201409.So the final link for Tumiki Fighters is http://c4a.openpandora.org/#/tumiki_fighters/201409

It works sometimes. I always see the pacman maze and INSERT COIN. But the scores and buttons don't always show up.

The same for me.

P.S.

You can also use Skeezix' plaintext website for C4A - http://skeezix.wallednetworks.com:13001/links_1

 

[ekianjo]

There is. You need to add the year and month after a slash. For this month it would be 201409. So the final link for Tumiki Fighters is http://c4a.openpando...fighters/201409

Thanks, very useful, I did not notice that! 

EDIT: I have updated the original article on PandoraLive with the links. 

 

[levi]

Good idea this. Sadly, I don't think I'll be posting a score for Flappy Bird - my all time top score on that game is 3, and it's not a game skill I feel like spending time at improving (though thanks for porting the game Eki, at least it's something I can use to show my Pandora off to my phone gaming friends).


By the way, the only time the c4a website fails to load scores for me (and leaves me with the insert coin header) is when I've forgotten to enable javascript (for the c4a site, jquery and skeezix's site). Once enabled, it always loads fine for me. So check that if you're having trouble.

 

[ekianjo]

Once enabled, it always loads fine for me. So check that if you're having trouble.

Same here, it has always worked well for me, even on the phone.  

Sadly, I don't think I'll be posting a score for Flappy Bird - my all time top score on that game is 3, and it's not a game skill I feel like spending time at improving (though thanks for porting the game Eki, at least it's something I can use to show my Pandora off to my phone gaming friends).

It's strange, there are a couple of people (or maybe more) who indeed seem to have a very hard time with this game - Klapse mentioned the same thing in the comments, not being able to go above 3-5 as well. I wonder what's driving the differences from one person to another.  

 

[xiongxioi]

It's a bird, :blink:   it's flapping, :blink:   oh no, it's Flappy Bird.  :lol:

Believe it or not; I have not tried it yet. I need to give it a shot.  

 

[ekianjo]

Believe it or not; I have not tried it yet. I need to give it a shot.  

It's the right time to do so

 

[budweiser]

I might have to warm up a little bit, never tried the game.

 

[klapse]

The game requires very tight timing. I also have problems with jump-n-run levels where jumps require very good timing.

 

[ekianjo]

Here's the current situation with the competition with the temporary results... the competition continues until the end of September so everything is possible!

http://pandoralive.info/?p=4086

 

[levi]

Hmm, something seems to have gone wrong with my c4a setup, and I've no idea what it is. On playing Nub nub! or Tumiki Fighters my score doesn't seem to be getting uploaded any more according to c4a.openpandora.org 's Latest Activity indicator, or the monthly scoreboards for each game. Clearly I was once able to do this, as I have an entry in the all-time Nub nub! scores (made November last year apparently), but now no more. I was able to upload a Mr. Do score to test out my c4a registration, and that uploaded fine, I've just not been able to upload any scores for the games in this month's competition.


I've tried this using a USB wifi dongle to make sure my connection doesn't drop out intermittently. Tumiki Fighters claims that even if my connection is out when I quit one time, the next time I quit when online it'll upload then. I think my score it getting saved in it's score table, but as it doesn't seem to accept a name to register against, it took me a while to spot my last score in the table.


It's not too significicant that I'm not able to register my scores currently, as I'm not scoring anything particularly challenging at the moment, but it's a curiosity nonetheless.

 

[_wb_]

Hmm, something seems to have gone wrong with my c4a setup, and I've no idea what it is. On playing Nub nub! or Tumiki Fighters my score doesn't seem to be getting uploaded any more according to c4a.openpandora.org 's Latest Activity indicator, or the monthly scoreboards for each game. Clearly I was once able to do this, as I have an entry in the all-time Nub nub! scores (made November last year apparently), but now no more. I was able to upload a Mr. Do score to test out my c4a registration, and that uploaded fine, I've just not been able to upload any scores for the games in this month's competition.


I've tried this using a USB wifi dongle to make sure my connection doesn't drop out intermittently. Tumiki Fighters claims that even if my connection is out when I quit one time, the next time I quit when online it'll upload then. I think my score it getting saved in it's score table, but as it doesn't seem to accept a name to register against, it took me a while to spot my last score in the table.


It's not too significicant that I'm not able to register my scores currently, as I'm not scoring anything particularly challenging at the moment, but it's a curiosity nonetheless.

NubNub only uploads a score when you quit, and only if it's a higher score than your previous highscore, even if your previous highscore is from years ago! If you want to make sure it submits something, there's an easy fix: just delete its appdata folder.

 

[Ziz]

NubNub only uploads a score when you quit, and only if it's a higher score than your previous highscore, even if your previous highscore is from years ago! If you want to make sure it submits something, there's an easy fix: just delete its appdata folder.

That is the reason, why I implemented this:

• A local highscore with 3 ranks
• Every score, that makes it to the top 3 is submitted
• I gave the possibility to delete the third (worst) one without loosing the best achievements (would be a shame!)

Maybe you could think about something similar, too?I didn't want to users to have to crawl to the SD card to find the appdata directory... Maybe they understood me wrong and delete the whole appdata folder. O_O

 

[_wb_]

NubNub only uploads a score when you quit, and only if it's a higher score than your previous highscore, even if your previous highscore is from years ago! If you want to make sure it submits something, there's an easy fix: just delete its appdata folder.

That is the reason, why I implemented this:

• A local highscore with 3 ranks
• Every score, that makes it to the top 3 is submitted
• I gave the possibility to delete the third (worst) one without loosing the best achievements (would be a shame!)

Maybe you could think about something similar, too?
I didn't want to users to have to crawl to the SD card to find the appdata directory... Maybe they understood me wrong and delete the whole appdata folder. O_O

Perhaps the best way to handle this is to let all games submit all scores all of the time, but put some logic in the (centralized!) score submitter to do things like maintaining local highscores, storing them when offline and auto-uploading them when online, and deciding what scores to upload (perhaps user-configurable so you can decide yourself if you want to upload every game played, only the scores that improve your monthly highscore, or only the scores that improve your all-time highscore).

That would be a better solution than letting each dev do things in their own way.

The way to do it would be to no longer include that sc binary in every PND, but let the C4A profile manager install it in /usr/bin/sc so PNDs can just use that one. The game should then immediately submit any highscore as soon as there's a game-over, but the score submitter should be smart enough to do something sensible with those submitted highscores (not just try to upload them to the server, but compare it first with previous local highscores). It could even keep statistics on how often you play games (because it sees all those submissions, even if they don't get uploaded) so it could generate a list of your favorite games (could be useful, because you're more likely to want to launch or check highscores of your favorite games).

That means existing PNDs with C4A support have to be modified a bit, but it makes adding C4A support to a game even easier than before, because you don't have to worry about score caching and error handling etc at all -- just execute sc (the new, smarter, globally configurable sc) and let it handle things.

You also maintain the C4A profile manager, right? Perhaps you could implement something like this, perhaps together with skeezix?

 

[ekianjo]

The way to do it would be to no longer include that sc binary in every PND, but let the C4A profile manager install it in /usr/bin/sc so PNDs can just use that one. The game should then immediately submit any highscore as soon as there's a game-over, but the score submitter should be smart enough to do something sensible with those submitted highscores (not just try to upload them to the server, but compare it first with previous local highscores). It could even keep statistics on how often you play games (because it sees all those submissions, even if they don't get uploaded) so it could generate a list of your favorite games (could be useful, because you're more likely to want to launch or check highscores of your favorite games).

That's very much in the line of what I was proposing to Skeezix. It should all included in the firmware (even in the Pandora firmware, not just the Pyra). SC is small enough and many more improvements are needed.