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HI-SCORE: worldwide sharing & public competitions (easy way)

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ptinolv:
I think the problem with dropbox is that everyone has the same read/write rights on the files. It may become complicated with a lot of players (delete, etc.). If I understood correctly, Hyperscore has the files on a server and don't let the clients mess with it directly.

I am not sure how Hyperscore deals with conflicts, but with a lot of users in dropbox we may end up with some of them (http://www.dropbox.com/help/36). Meaning that some scores may not be taken into account.


--- Quote from: Harakiri ---Can you imagine thousands of videos being uploaded on a daily basis being kept as proof for everyone to download..?  :dunno

--- End quote ---
That doesn't really solve anything, but I think Mame has INP recording that are not that big.

torino:

--- Quote from: Nephasth on June 04, 2011, 11:14:52 pm ---
--- Quote from: torino on June 04, 2011, 07:04:25 pm ---What do you mean, what is it you dislike about having internet connection?

--- End quote ---


--- Quote from: torino on June 04, 2011, 10:51:43 pm ---we could prevent or at least discourage it by recording gameplay and uploading the "movie" along with updating hi-score database, automatically.
--- End quote ---

Well, there's one reason I hadn't thought of before that I definitely don't want on my machine.

--- End quote ---

Why not? I don't understand what are you talking about. What's wrong with having internet connection, recording game input or sharing files?

torino:

--- Quote from: Harakiri on June 05, 2011, 02:34:48 am ---Eventhough one can't estimate the universe of players willing to benefit of this system, wouldn't it clog the servers? Can you imagine thousands of videos being uploaded on a daily basis being kept as proof for everyone to download..?  :dunno

--- End quote ---

Millions of people already share their videos, photos and whatever type of files over the internet, and somehow many of those file hosting services are free, so I think it's reasonable to expect we could too find some free server to suit our purpose which would support thousands and possibly many more users.

These "recordings" are not actual videos but only input (keystrokes) and initial state from which MAME constructs the video by using real-time emulation, so the files are very small and can be compressed very well. We could also limit the database to hold recordings for only certain number of top places, we could limit the number of games and each game, each tournament and each competition could have separate account, not just separate folder, so to offload the traffic to many different "clouds", in this so called "cloud networking", if necessary.

torino:

--- Quote from: ptinolv on June 05, 2011, 02:55:07 am ---I think the problem with dropbox is that everyone has the same read/write rights on the files. It may become complicated with a lot of players (delete, etc.). If I understood correctly, Hyperscore has the files on a server and don't let the clients mess with it directly.

I am not sure how Hyperscore deals with conflicts, but with a lot of users in dropbox we may end up with some of them (http://www.dropbox.com/help/36). Meaning that some scores may not be taken into account.


--- End quote ---

Yes, perhaps Dropbox is not ideal solution, it's just that people who actually did this experiment decided to use that particular server provider, and it turned out it was good enough while extremely easy to set up. Maybe some kind of ftp server would be better, and perhaps we could even use yahoo mail and share hi-score files by logging to a common email account. Whatever the case I'd like to hear about all possibilities and if there is any better solution.

On the other hand we could always fix the problem with multiple simultaneous file access by programing things on the client side, so we could make addition to our MAME build, or front-end, that would check if there was any problem with last server access and simply repeat upload/download until successful.

Reading the same file at the same time by more than one user is fine, it's only troublesome when we need to write, make changes, but that would only happen when someone break some record, which shouldn't really happen all that often, while input ("movie") recordings would be written only once and could then be accessed (read-only) by many users simultaneously without any problem.

Gray_Area:

--- Quote from: torino on June 04, 2011, 07:31:42 pm --- It would be as if we were all are playing on one and the same computer, anyone could set a new record at any time and everyone else would be able to know about it in real time.

--- End quote ---

I don't think people are checking BYOAC competition scores on their phones at two in the morning.

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