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How to make Hi-Score Competition more interesting (shared web-folder)?

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torino:


--- Quote from: emphatic on July 07, 2011, 12:26:40 am ---+1 on Frontend integration. It's like the leaderboards for the XBox 360. But will it work across different MAME versions?

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Some games have pretty small internal scoreboard list, or none at all, so you must be talking about expanding those or creating some more global ranking list to include all the previous competitions? -- How would you like leaderboards to work? What data should they keep and how (where) would you like to actually see (browse) all that info?


I don't see why would different "hiscore.dat" or mame version produce different .hi file format for the same game, and as far as my own test showed it works fine across many versions, but I also would not be too surprised if we encounter problems. We have to test it some more in order to figure out the problem in your case, so just let me know when you're ready and we will make more strict setup in order to narrow it down.

Donkbaca:

I think front end integration would be sweet.  I think the best thing would be to integrate it with Headkaze's CP wizard.  It would be sweet since it launches before every game on a lot of front ends, and you can have it be a menu option to view global high scores.

torino:

The important thing is that front-end is able to pass game name as argument, eg. "SYNC.BAT skyshark". We do not want to updated all the games all the time, so SYNC.BAT script needs to know what game is about to start, or what game did user just exit from, and import/export just those scores for that particular game. -- I'm not using any popular front-end, but if anyone wants to try this out and is not sure how, just let me know what front-end it is and I'll see if I can figure it out.

Raitsa:

There is a suggestion made in the GameEx forum to include this feature as a "GameEx specific score board", but will it materialize, lets hope; its up to to the GameEx developer to decide.

torino:


--- Quote from: Raitsa on July 07, 2011, 02:50:26 pm ---There is a suggestion made in the GameEx forum to include this feature as a "GameEx specific score board", but will it materialize, lets hope; its up to to the GameEx developer to decide.

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The first thing they should do is to survey how many people would actually use it, then divide that number by two and then see if it is worth doing at all. Embedding this feature in front-end certainly has its advantages, like better control over submissions to monitoring cheating. However, we can not gather 10 people here even if everyone can use whatever front-end they want. People are simply not that into it and half of them don't have network connection on their cabinet computer at all. -- In any case, and unfortunately, that does not help our friendly forum competition as we would hardly ever be able to get everyone to use the same front-end.


By the way, I think I can make our "poor man" solution to work with any front-end, by making SYNC.BAT as impostor for "MAME", so whatever front-end you use it would do its business as usual and unknowingly execute our SYNC.BAT script as if it was MAME itself, and then the script can do the rest, which is to update scoreboard before it start the game and also after game ends.

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