A few requests:
1. Is it possible to hide those boxes that constantly pop up for half a second each?
2. Would you consider writing scores downloaded from the compo back to the .hi files so that when you're ingame, you can see them there to?
3. "Select Donkey Kong" and "Play" buttons are still hanging partially off the bottom of the screen
4. I don't know how easy this would be, but could you grayout, or filter off games where the roms aren't found/acceptable. Obviously you still want them visible/accessible. I put my Bubble Bobble roms on, and sat there for a couple of minutes thinking it was taking ages to load, in reality it had failed to start with the particular rom set I have
Cheers
Edit:
Also, what's the chances we could incorporate some non-MAME games? ie, I really like Spout, and there's a Pandora build. All it does is create a file with the scores in. It's open source, so could make a special build for the compo
In fact, a further thought would be creating a Compo4All library that devs could link into their games? Maybe I'm taking this a bit too far, but I think it'd be pretty cool
I'll do a client update in awhile, that fixes up a bunch of little issues; ie: rearrange buttons a bit to make more room and stop sloughing off the edge, maybe allow a 'offline mode' for when wifi is down, handle cases when wifi was up and is now down (retry, etc), etc.
i) The boxes are actually status updates where it announces that its pulling up/down some info to server and why; tyhey just show up blank right now since GTK is dumb and I need to fix it
ii) It originally pulled down scores; heck, prior to that I had it updating the game RAM live to show the current-to-the-second scores, but it really hated that
But it became a little problematic to work, so I'll revisit it later -- ie: right now it tries to reset to 0000 sort of score, or to the 'default' of a freshly booted machine; then when you submit a score RAM chunk or file, it breaks it up and compares to the known state sent down to the client .. if it sent position 3 as 1234 and position 4 as 2345, and it sees something else there, it knows theres been a change.. nice and easy. But if its a case when Jim sent up score 1234, and it sends that down to you, and then you submit a score Bob 2345, then it sees new Jim and new Bob, and it has to work out that Jim 1234 is old; or is it you, also? etc.. a lot of cases suddenly, and I found it not perfect all the time.. we ended up with 'looper' scores, where it'd go down to you, abck up and you'd end up with 5 peopel getting the 'same score' ... more accurate to just send down a blank, and then you look online.
.... another bigger problem was .. if you send down a score-table to a game, then the game will only register your score if you beat _those scores_; so if Space Invaders (only has 1 score total) and I send down SomeBigScore, then you cannot get onto the scoreboard _at all_ unless you exceed SomebigScore .. ie: after the third day, only the very top player can get a score _at all_; instead, we send 0000, and then everyon can registe their scvore into the _Game_, and the game pushes it upstream to my server, which evaluates if it makes the _scoreboard_.
So sending 0/default is much handier/reasonable. But there are workaround and compromises.. ifthe game has a table of 5, send the top/middle/low score for 1-2-3, and leave 4-5 blank say; etc.. We can play more. I don't have infinite free time anymore
iv) maybe; its possible, but I want you to be able to see the score table, even if you can't play Also, I want to rewrite the client entirely, so dont' want to spend too much time fiddling with it
v) Yes, the architecture an handle non-MAME game;s ie: arguments sent to the server include platform and game submitting (pandora and advmame it uses now.) Coudl just as well be something else. I'd like to expand the client and client/server protocols a bit more, have a league-id and so on. ie: I'm intending on havaing a raspberry-pi league, and a desktop-league, and so on; and the online website shoudl let you pick which league, or even cross polinate.. let you compare your scores against a desktop scores, if you wasnted to, etc.
lots to do..
jeff
