[Release] Compo4all MAME - ladder/scoreboard competition for classic arcade games :)

[skeezix]

Managed to wangle a spare half hour & couldn't resist having a go, all seems to work fine

Edit : Top 100 might be worth looking at, would it be a major ball ache to limit people to one entry per high score table?

Maybe I should keep (say) top 1000 or 500 or whatever, but then default to showing top-X in the display; the url could have an option as to how many to show. (but I don't want to pack too much into this display, as w'ell work on a real display which looks nice, has some features; maybe jump from clicking on a guy to show his cross-game stats, etc.)

Arcade highscore tables didn't limit you to one entry, so never occurred to me; if we keep top-XX big enough, shouldn't matter if one guy plays a lot and gets a lot of spots? Or should limit it to any given profiles 'top 3' or something, so as not to pollute too much? Maybe we should see how it goes over the next little while of testing..

I did notice a bug that doesnm't seem to hurt.. it pulls down highscore of (say) 26000 from Mr Look, and shows fine; but as I played and got aroudn 2000 or something, it started showingf that as the high score and ignoring the value from MrLook; I'm not sure if thats a MAME bug, or did I futz up somethign in high-score-RAM, but doesn't really matter to the system.

What game should I add next, for tabular testing? Donkey Kong original has I think a 5-person table and is also pretty common to everyone.

jeff

 

[mcobit]

You could need to log in to view the hiscores. This way you could show the players last scores, even if they are not in the top 25 along with the topscores.


Also you could keep more scores and make it selectable how much are shown on screen.

 

[budweiser]

Donkey Kong -- All The Way - It's on like Donkey Kong ..

 

[EvilDragon]

Fun

 

[ShleeDragon]

Very damn cool.

Does this work for all roms? with highscore on some of them?

 

[Asmo]

Very nice!

Mr Do!

Would get my vote.

 

[skeezix]

mspacman


    Initial     Name     Score     When
1     MRL     MrLoon     26310     22-Feb-2013
2     BUD     Budweiser     23640     22-Feb-2013
3     EVD     EvilDragon     21740     22-Feb-2013

Close

 

[EvilDragon]

I just played one game so far

 

[skeezix]

Mr Do

Galaxian

Galaga

Robotron <-

Sinistar <-

Quartet

Joust

Asteroids

Tempest

... oh dear... suckers for punishment are we?

 

[Linux-SWAT]

Bank Panic requires a very high-level skills.

 

[EvilDragon]

Aaaand just finished my second game.... never played MsPacman Arcade version before, only VCS2600 one.

 

[mcobit]

ED leading the list

 

[DrCJBoduma]

Fantastic work, really like this idea, brings the fun competitive side back to gaming on mame.  

CJ

 

[levi]

Great idea this. I took part in the old ROT, but gave up after I installed a new OS and never got round to rebuilding my emulators. Now I've got my Pandora, I'd be up for another ROT so I'm certainly up for a ROOT.


However, I'm a bit new to this MAME thing - I've always been happier with systems like consoles or the Capcom play systems etc. That said, I've managed to get PanMAME set up and Ms. Pac Man running.


Trouble is, when I copy over the zip file from the one appdata folder to another. The splash screen pops up, then the desktop disappears but I'm just presented with a plain grey background with an empty window open over it - no title, no contents.


FWIW, if I start up C4A without a network connection, it gets further in that it presents me with a menu theoretically letting me create a profile etc., and an error message telling me it can't contact the server. I do see the empty box pop up momentarily and flicker before being replaced by the error dialog, which is slightly taller than the empty window, but roughly the same width.


Looks to me the program is crashing while still in the init phase. Hitting close on the window does nothing until GTK kicks in and offers to kill the process.


I'm not sure what else I can do to debug this, but if there is anything please let me know. Would be well up for this competition.

 

[skeezix]

The /tmp/pndrun-c4a..whatever logfile should spell out the issue.

Are you on latest firmware? Perhaps the gtk version in older firmware is incompatible in some minor way (it sounds like its crashing during the frontend, not mame per se?) ..

First run should not let you do much (half the buttons grayed out) until you make profile; with no network, it should error and quit (hit OK on the error box, and quits out.). So something is not happy if those things are not occuring.

(I know there is versioning .. on my desktop the gtk libs are slightly newer; when moving the frontend code to pandora, there was a few functions missing, so I had to figure out alternate means, etc; so it woudl seem, even somethign old like gtk, is still under a lot of development.)

Jeffphone

Try again .. looks like the server code might have been wedged. I'll have to see if I can capture that somehow.

 

[levi]

Brilliant, working perfectly now*! Highscore website doesn't update immediately, I take it? Or low scores in my case - I used to be so good at Pacman too!


I guess making error reporting a bit more robust might be on the cards now (although probably after making the server code a bit more robust, eh?)


* Although I did need to attempt to quit the game three times before it took me back to the launcher menu. Once might have been butterfingers, but I'm pretty sure I did it right at least twice.

 

[skeezix]

Right now its syning on entry/exit to the Launcher; I'll update that soon to be before/after the emu runs (ie: while launcher is still up.) If peopel really like this, I'll updat ethe emu itself to do it live (the code sort of works already), I'm just gauging interest and direction still (ie: we could go nuts, and have live readings out scores scrolling on the screen and all sorts of madness, but no point in leaping that direction yet.)

Next step is games with high score tables, and generating those tables from the much larger tables I keep; I've got it more or less working, but need to do some finalization and tests, and then get it out to you guys to test...

It shoudl be pretty stable stuff. I'm very surprised the serevr wedged, but I added some additional handling for some oddball cases; it shoudl either drop session or crash out and restart.. but _wedging_ I've not seen before; sort of looks like a spammer-bot foudn it and fed it a pile of random bullshit and blew it up .. but the way it hung, I didn't have logging to catch the particulars. I've added some failsafes, and additional logging so if it happens again maybe I'll be able to spy it. We'll see

jeff

 

[skeezix]

I'll see about adding Galaxian soon; its another single-score game with very easy highscore format in RAM.

Maybe I'll add a half dozen over the next week, just so its more interesting

jeff

 

[levi]

Ah right. I don't see my score entered in the table, but I dunno if you had the server doing any recording when I quit the game. To be honest, I don't see the need to intercept the game to pull out each game score - just the highscore at the end of the session should be enough.


I guess games with prepopulated highscore tables would be harder. Although...I guess this is the reason you asked for our three letter ID when logging in. Clever!


I'm not convinced having too many games on the go at the same time is a great idea. Granted, it would give people the opportunity to try another game if one is not to their taste, and that's why we had two games on the go in ROT1, but add too many and you dilute the competition. If anything, I'm thinking a month long session might be too long if we're now getting near-live updates and feedback, but I can see the code is currently set up to run for all of this month and next so that might be a more difficult change.


Regarding the server, if you want to run a separate instance on another port and let us try to crash it, I'd be up for that. Would be handy to know the API and the language the code running on the server is written in.

 

[skeezix]

I don't quite see how your score got missed unless you happen to hit the exact second I did a code promotion. (When I noticed it was wedged, I restarted it; then 20mins later, restarted again with some possible fixes and better logging.) There is the edge case of .. your connection goes down while you're playing, or the server goes down; theres no 'save the hi score for later' type handling .. would likely lead to a lot of weird cases to do so.

Give it another shot and let us know; if your score doesn't post again.. check the /tmp/pndrun log (or check it now, if you still have it.)

--

Theres rather two parts to it all, conceptually; the highscore leaderboarding, and the competition side. Right now they're together but theres no reason they have to be .. right now, client starts up, asks server which games are on 'right now', and shows that list. But I can make another tab say, or a toggle button or whatever, to make all of its known operational games available and be in non-ROT mode. ie: A leaderboar that applies forever, without a year/month component.

Over time, say the system knows how to handle 20 or whatever games, .. a given week or month season coudl be two games, but why prevent people from playing the others and still logging their scores .. outside of the current 'season'.

--

So I'm of a mind for two modes..

Mode 1) Play current 'season' of games

Mode 2) Play any of the highscoring instrumented games, but againast a non-compo leaderboard. ("Top 500 of all time" sort of thing.)

We'll see

jeff

None of this code is particularly mature; started the project abotu 2 weeks ago (but did bang my head around on it quite a bit over that two weeks..) -- I'll get a few more games (ie: at least a couple with single score and a couple with their own high score tables) for testing sake, prove everything is running nice, and then we can fire up an actual ROT season compo if people like. (a 1 month, say.. we'll talk it out.)

The banner right now is perhaps misleading.. nothing is in stone right now; we're still screwing around. I'm thinking now, we blow away through Feb and alll or part of March for getting a half dozen games going, and picking which we do a compo for; then we run a couple weeks comp for remainder of March, or April, say.

So for now, lets just play for fun.. beat your fellow board-mates scores all to hell and see how it goes. I'll add a few more features or games in, but mostly trying to prove stability. (Also, the code is pretty nasty, though functional, so I may want to try and pretty it up, if it looks like this might stick around awhile.)