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

[Asmo]

EDIT:

No,my bad - it was some kind of synch magic happening - I just rechecked my galaxians and it displays the current high score from here - so the rash of identical scores must have been players somehow having that submitted when they left without beating it.

Now I think of it, a lot of the suggested games have a populated scoretable already, Robotron for example. Mr Do comes with a clean slate though!

 

[skeezix]

The table handler only looks for score values not found .. Ie .. Comparing the file sent to you and the one back, only find new entries


A single score handler ignores when your score matches high score.. I think it also needs to ignore the one last sent; right mow if A pulls top score 123 and them B punlishes 200.. Then A checks in 123 (no score), he would get credit for 123 ..


So in all cases i need to..


1) sync down a low score or zero


2) compare published score to last sentto that player score to determine actual score attempts


Tonight or tomorrow I'll update for tjese rules


Good beta testing

 

[Ian J]

Should I be quitting the emulator in a specific way?

I ask as I've tried both games & my score isn't showing up on either.

I quit using alt+Q then select exit.

Sent from my GT-I9300

 

[levi]

You need to do that then quit the launcher (using the button) before it'll upload your scores. Notwithstanding the current Galaxian bug.

 

[levi]

Oops, seem to have got duplicate scores in the Galaxians table now - perhaps because I left it in game (but paused and in low power mode) overnight, so it ended up resubmitting my score with a new date - making it not a duplicate.

@mcobit I've done a bit of pixel editing on your ROT image, hope that's okay:

(was )

I was wrong about the joystick - I think my issue was more that it was too close to the left.  I've based this on your original image.

I've made the following changes:

- Squared off the right hand top of the T

- Increased and levelled the thickness of the top of the T (was a pixel thinner on the right)

- Widened the top of the T

- Adjusted the curve of the R to try to reduce the sharp corner where it intersects the top, and lengthen it to try to integrate it better with the line where it would bridge the feet.

- Straightened up the bottom right diagonal of the R (was slightly flared).  Helpfully this has also made the bottom more level with the right hand side of the curve, squaring off the character better.

- Sharpened the eyes of the ghost, which hopefully will help with scaling (previewed it: Meh, never mind)

- Slightly sharpened the edges of the ghost

- Moved the joystick in more.  I think that helps emphasise the perspective effect between it and the buttons (or maybe I've just been looking at it too much)

I've not yet tried to add curves to the R and T like I was thinking before - right now the font is pretty conventional apart from the square O and the ghost and pacman.

 

[mcobit]

Thanks
Looks way more balanced this way. I will incorporate these changes into my vectorfile.
Should have uploaded that instead to prevent you to have to pixel edit it.

 

[levi]

Cool.  No problem - I'm an old hand at pixel editing, and not so familiar with these new fangled vector files

 

[mcobit]

Ok, did some more changes and am working on an icon now.





And here is an icon:



Alternate icon:

 

[graupelschauer]

Hey skeezix, that looks very interesting. Do you think that could be used as framework for other people with their own games, too? And maybe Achievements could be built in somehow

Okay maybe that's a bit too much but a general solution for scores, leaderboards, achievement and all that kind of stuff would be really nice.

Great work!

 

[aszu]

Great idea and it seems to work great. Just small question regarding the high score table. Would it be possible to change the way it`s being displayed to more esthetical and maybe even create dedicated website?

 

[mcobit]

A nicer website is on the way.

 

[PokeParadox]

Well I gave this a go with Ms Pacman... and got a really crappy score - I suck at pacman/ms pacman - but it works! yay! I'll give Galaxian a go when I can find some time - should get a nicer score there.

 

[levi]

More weirdness in the highscore system now - the Ms.PacMan score table claims I achieved a score of 71040 yesterday, which looks to be a duplicate of Link's high score from the day before.  Not sure what went on there - I'd guess it might be a repeat of the bug whereby I leave it running overnight before quitting and it resubmits, but it's unclear how that happened here as I don't recall leaving it running across midnight then quitting it, especially as given the Ms.PacMan highscore reset glitch means I can't have played it if that was the cause.

Best guess is that I accidentally hit the Pandora key when trying to hit Select yesterday, and as noted it did some weird things to the emulator.  I recall at some point when trying to kill it and get back to a usable system it got into a state where it kept restarting the Ms.PacMan ROM in a new AdvMAME instance.  I thought I killed my way out of that, but it's possible I did quit the launcher normally and let it do its standard syncing stuff.

Also, I spy with my little eye a certain ex-mod in the high score table.  Good to have you on board, lurker!

 

[sparkymark79]

please enable the game popeye for this purleeeesee!

 

[skeezix]

Hey skeezix, that looks very interesting. Do you think that could be used as framework for other people with their own games, too? And maybe Achievements could be built in somehow

Okay maybe that's a bit too much but a general solution for scores, leaderboards, achievement and all that kind of stuff would be really nice.

Great work!

Thats an interesting idea; its pretty hackish right now, but could be buffed up a bit; we'd have to ahsh out the goals of such a system, to see how much is compatible .. if the goals would match up. Stuff like a lobby and such .. lofty goals.

Ok, did some more changes and am working on an icon now.

rot.png

And here is an icon:

rot_icon.png

Alternate icon:

rot_icon.png

Whjenever you've got something, I'll do another client build; I've got just a couple minor change queued up .. moving the pre-sync and post-sync to around the emu instead of around the launcher, some other minor bits. Can do the artwork swap right then. Lartger changes .. UI layouts, adding out-of-season or test-server stuff, bit later.

I may run another server as well, since they're stateless .. so if one server is down, the other shoudl be up; so I coudl make the client have a range of ports it tries to reach, instead of hardcoding one, say .. make it try second or tertiary if the main is down, or something.

Great idea and it seems to work great. Just small question regarding the high score table. Would it be possible to change the way it`s being displayed to more esthetical and maybe even create dedicated website?

I've engaged mighty milkshake to see if he can pretty it up; its not my forte so its somethign very slow to work on for me .. presentation and all. I do need more practice that way, but not today

March season officially starts soon, gotta be ready

jeff

 

[skeezix]

I'd almost disallow duplicate scores, but thats too heavy handed.

Right now the 'looper' check is naive .. it sends you down the top score, and then checks to see if iuncoming store is top score.. if so, assumes a looper. If someone else bumps the high score to #2 (say) in the mean time (especially if you've let it be hung all night, it becomes likely), then your score could be a looper, but not detected as such.

A workaround for that ..

- disallow score submission if the pull was really long ago (seems heavy handed)

- if pull was long ago, don't allow the score to be a duplicate of any existing score (less heavy handed, fairly reasonable)

- to work around the looper issue entirely (for single score games like these two), send down high score table of 0 for all pulls, so that the only high score is in the online leaderboard

   --> ie: here .. even if you let it sit all night, you're still starting at a 0 score.. so any score you have, is one you earned, so no big deal. <-- so our current goal will fix this; I'll be doing this change in the next hour..

.... I could make the emu exit when low power mode is engaged or something, but thats seems silly.

jeff

another baby-night last night.. got about 3 hours sleep again. Man, year and a half of this .. I'm so used to not sleeping, that I don't even sleep when I hit a bed anymore.. brain just doesn't care anymore :/

 

[aszu]

I wonder if it would be possible to save/remember high scores when we play offline and then upload it next time C4A is run and wifi is on?

 

[levi]

Yeah, setting the highscore to 0 for now would avoid any issue.  Sounds good to me.

In the future, if we do want to restore the in-game highscores, the system could do with remembering what value(s) it pulled down and disallowing the same score going back.  Could be done either client or server side, as I see it.

I've been thinking about how it could handle games with score tables.  I reckon the best thing to do is to sync down the top n-1 scores to prepopulate the scoreboard, but leave the nth entry either as 0 or what was originally in the default scoreboard.  Thus it's both easy for people to see the community high score and be able to record a personal high score as well.  On games with an all-time high score table and a 'today's scores' table you could be even sneakier and populate the all-time board with the community scores, but leave today's scores blank, and only taking scores from the today's scores table.

But yeah, that'll need a bit of beta testing if past experience is anything to go by

 

[skeezix]

I wonder if it would be possible to save/remember high scores when we play offline and then upload it next time C4A is run and wifi is on?

I've avoided that, for ease of cheating; theres a lot of ways to cheat, and I do try to generally trust people.. but at the same time, don't want to make it really really easy, either so I'm avoiding some scenarios that it can happen trivially. *Shrug* I'm not sure here, as I don't like the whole idea of worrying about cheating whatsoever.. *shrug*

jeff

 

[mcobit]

So is everyone happy with the logo and icon?


In this case you can use the last updated versions. For the icon I like the one with the red border better.