This looks amazing futureal, I can't wait to install this when it is released, congrats on all the hard work and making it a free hack :D

I have a multi-player game on my forum :p

Before I say anything I?d just like to say that I might not be appreciated around here because of the way I was defending John. This is only because I felt that selling hacks via vB.org is OK, and nothing else.

I?m all for improving hacks, etc, and as this hack is not even going to be sold, I don?t feel that any ?bad words? between myself and anyone else in this thread is needed.

What has happened in the past has happened, and there is nothing we can do about that now, but I?m more than happy to forgive and forget if anyone that opposed me is?

Anyway, my suggestion is this, I like the idea of each user having his/her own personal high score which will be overwritten if they beat it, or left as it is if they don?t.

I feel that something like this would help to save database space, and would give the users two things to work towards, getting the highest score on the board, but also beating there own personal best without recording all the failed attempts. Maybe this can be an option that can be turned on and off?

Another suggestion I have is that you should have an arcade main page, showing all the high scores and games available (like in johns hack). However I don?t feel that the whole thing should be blocked out to unregistered users, instead (like I?ve done on my site) only playing the games and recording the scores should be locked out. This way the unregistered users get to see what they are missing out on, and sign-up rather that just seeing a no permissions page and leaving.

The only other thing I can suggest is that you make it easy to be placed into directories other than the forum one (using the chdir() functions) and making sure the templates reflect this.

(I've almost finished my vBstory hack, so if you would like any help or suggestions, please feel free to contact me)

I've started work on a multiplayer system, all games are managed on the new high speed dedicated server I'm having set up. So, when people install this and play games on their vB forums, the games run off this server and scores go back to it. Because of this, security can be a lot better, and multiplayer gaming is a possibility for anyone running a vB board. (Not to mention global stats.)

So far we have 8 games in development, including 2 player air hockey! :cool: Of course, with server side security in place it'll be possible to link it all in with Lesane's Store.

If anyone wants to have a look through my old and tattered Arcade Hack code, just ask. If enough people want to have a look I'll upload it somewhere.

futureal - I noticed you included a date field in the scoreboards. I was thinking about doing the same, but I didn't bother because I didn't know how the vB timezone system worked. How do you make the GMT +/- adjustment?

Looks amazing futureal!

And since we're rehasing this: has anyone put any thought into the Lesane Store integration? I know that there is an interest in it from John's Tetris thread, but I think it got lost in all the other... debates... in those threads.

Any ideas?

Thanks Erwin! I will definitely check that out when I have the time. It should not be too difficult at all to integrate something like this into vBulletin.

What I'd like to know is what a store hack verson of this would do? Give you points the more you play or something?

Don't get me wrong, I like the idea, but would it not be better to leave a feature like that off? after all, this is a reward for your loyal users, you can't really give them more points for doing something like playing games when they should/could be posting messages?

Maybe it's just me?

What I can see being popular is some type of points casino where you gamble your current points on the slots, or some type of card game - now that would be cool, I can see my users going for that IN A BIG WAY!!! :D

It is possible that this could be an admin-defined option -- something where if a user does not beat his/her high score, instead of taking them to the "Add Score" page it goes straight to the "Play Game" screen or perhaps the Scoreboard. The only problem with this implementation is that it would "break" the statistics engine, which works on counting rows in the arcade table to determine popularity, average scores, times played and so on.

Database space is not a huge issue. On my main site that is running the arcade already, games have been played 3,636 times, and the total space taken up the table is 224KB. That is very, very small.

I agree completely about not blocking out the pages to Unregistered users. In fact, that is already exactly how my hack operates. A future improvement could be to make this selectable by the admin.

This is also (sort of) already part of the hack. The admin defines a directory for games (in my case, /arcade/) and then all .swf files are stored there and called from there. I figured that was a lot better than keeping them all in the /forum directory.

Thanks for the input!

<font size="4">OR!!!</font>

Depending on how mean you are you could get your users to gamble a number of points on one of the game, and then choose a level/score.

If that user reaches that score during that game, then they receive more points, if they fail they loose them..

Obviously each of the 5 current games have seperate scoring systems, so it would need to be customisable depending on each game, or even go as far as have multipul levels:

i.e. if on snake they choose, and get more than 50, they double the number of points, if they choose and get 150, they get triple points, etc...

The only problem I can see with this (or the whole points system) is that there are a number of diffrent points systems available, and I believe it would be prefrable to support all of them (or at least most). e.g. I'm not going to install the store hack cos I have no need for it, but I might re-install the itemshop or the gold hack).

Basically, there is a setting in the General Options part of the vBulletin admin panel where the admin defines what time zone the server is in. All dates/times are stored in "server time" in the database, and then adjusted based on the user's defined time zone in their User Options setting. I forgot the name of the function offhand, but there is a vB utility function that will take a server time and spit back the user's time based on $bbuserinfo.

As for the multiplayer engine, it sounds great! If you don't mind me asking, what kind of technology are you using for the games? Flash or Java, maybe?

Wow, that Chess game is unbelivably complex.

It's purely PHP, isn't it?

okay i can't wait for this hack, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE!!! Can u give us an approximate release date?

I will let you know tonight what the approximate release date will be.

At the moment, I just decided to pull *all* of the templates out and relabel/restructure them. I hadn't really thought ahead at all, and they were getting pretty confusing. It might not sound like progress, but believe me, you'll thank me for that later. :)

(The hack is split up across many templates, which in theory should make it easier to add/subtract features and to find the exact piece of HTML code you want...)

This really does sound extreamly comprehensive, I can't wait to install this one :D

[high]* NTLDR awaits an approx release date :banana:[/high]

with all the extra query's you hang in the item shop this would kill your server i guess. ;)


[high]* NuclioN just teasing[/high]

Heh, I just realized that in about half my references I have been using "/forum/filename" rather than "$bburl/filename" ... in other words, I'm still having fun with template editing.

As far as integration with the various Store/RPG-type hacks out there, I could see this being used. For example, the for each score of more than XX you get YY points/gold/whatever. For each day that you can maintain a rank above ZZ in some game you get something... and so on. Plenty of different ways you could do it.

Now, as for *me* doing an integration, I have no idea. I have never taken a look at one of those store things code-wise, but I can't imagine it would be too complex. Still, I don't think I'd be running one of those on my own forums any time soon, so I dunno. Perhaps once this hack is released and stable, I can check it out... but it's something I would probably leave to somebody who is more experienced with the store/RPG stuff.

I can't wait for this one. You can check out my sig for games. If you need any of the files, pm me and ill send you a copy to add tot he hack. Just use one of the "test" user names in my sig and goto the extras or the link and look at all the games I have on my forum.
Use anything you like.
Peace
Emmett

I hit a roadblock tonight when I realized I had made an error in something I had said earlier, regarding the "Top Score Board." I had been using a GROUP BY clause in the SELECT query to get each user's top score. However, it came to my attention that in doing this, we are discarding all unique entries from other fields, and to make a long story short, the incorrect date/time/comments were coming back.

As far as that goes, I am left with a choice as to what to do. I can either:

(a) drop the entire idea of a top score board (I won't do this, though)
(b) add an additional query to the page for each user (server intensive, 25 users per page means an addition 25 queries)
(c) dump the entire table to an array in a second query and just use a search algorithm to find the correct values (might have major issues down the road if the table gets large enough)

What I will probably do is file this under the category of "known bug" and get back to it later, when I have the time to do a server-load test of options (b) and (c). In the meantime, if anybody knows MySQL extraordinarily well (in other words, you understand what I said in the first paragraph :)) and has a good way of doing this efficiently, let me know.

Try to ask g-force2k2 or Logician, they have pretty good knowledge with queries.

Still working on getting this into "release candidate" form. My biggest concern is finalizing the table structures, so that those of you who install this as a beta do not have to go back and nuke your old tables when future versions are released.

Thanks for bearing with me.

Re: the multi-player chess (Humpa-Chess)
Yes, I have it installed on my site. www.ez-company.net Works great, very popular addition. :) Obviously, it was recoded quite a bit. We integrated it into the site and we use vbPortal.

Do you have FLAs for any of those? I'll modify them.

Apok2002: Well done on the chess integration. It looks and works great!

Thank you, but I didn't do anything but beg my buddy KhanSW to get it integrated correctly. He's the brain behind it. :)

There are few changes (aesthetically) I'd like to see, but it's further down on the priority list. :)

I'm looking forward to this ProArcade hack though. My members will love it (esp since they are all gamers).

Sweet! I'm jealous. This makes me *almost* want to return to vBPortal... I wish I had time to port it to pure vB...

Progress update: I just finished coding the remainder of the "Champion System" into vbProArcade.

What this basically does is display text under a user's title if they are the champion of one of the games in the arcade. The system can be turned on/off completely, or selectively on/off on a per-game basis. The champion text and color can also be changed on a per-game basis, and when a new game is added, they are set to default values of "Gamename Champion" and your forum default font color for that game.

Just like (most) of the rest of the hack, the system is all automated, and will automatically move from user-to-user as champions change. There are probably a few more places in the forum where this can be added -- right now it is only in showthread/postbit.

Attached is an example screenshot of the admin panel and a "champion" user's post.

Other stuff I did today:

- fixed the number format so it displays correctly with commas
- implemented the admin-selectable scoreboard icons for the main arcade
- implemented the admin-selectable king icons for the main arcade & scoreboards
- updated the Who's Online display to include users in the main arcade page
- reordered and cleaned up some stuff in the admin panel
- renamed and reorganized the templates to make them easier to figure out
- added links back to the main arcade page from the play/scoreboard pages
- removed a few redundant queries and broke some code into separate functions

So that's where we're at right now. There are only a couple more minor things to take care of and then I can start packaging the code for a full beta release. I would anticipate no later than Saturday night for getting that out there, maybe Sunday daytime at the absolute latest.

Looking forward to it. :)

Is there a way to make it also put a crown beside their champion title that is inserted below the user title ? I've added the crown-addon for tetris and that keeps everyone fighting over it , the crown graphic.

yeah the crown thing is v. cool, that would be good for this :D

I can't wait for this to be released, looks so promising!

of the flash games I have all the files, the other games are java in which I have the files also. Its all hosted by my site, just some of the miniclips are from other sites but i have the orignal files.
Which all ones you want? Ill d/l them and post each one here for ya. I don't mind sharing them at all.
Peace
E

Well, I only read the first page, and it's a great idea...This is a shot in the dark, but wouldn't it be nice to play Head To Head Tetris w/ other members??

This looks wonderful. I can't wait for it! :)

My personal preference for my own forums was to have a text label rather than a crown -- I think that having crowns for all the games would just clutter things up like crazy. But I did plan on adding that feature at a later date. Most of the code is already in place, you'd just have to extend it to use a graphic instead of a line of text.

One I get this beta out, I will look into adding that.

Just a quick side not, forgive me if it's "off topic". But in Tetris, I have some members who have pretty much mastered it, with scores around 200,000. To make it fair to other members, I have to reset the scores via myphpadmin every other week or so to let them have a go at the Leaderboard. Is there an easier way? And if these other games will have a difficulty cap like Tetris, perhaps there should be some other way of resetting the scores instead of going into myphpadmin?

In any event...those master Tetriticians :) requested more levels (level 10 is the last level available). Don't know if there is anything that can be done about this...has anyone else experienced a slight "problem" w/ this difficulty cap? Is it possible to add on more levels? Also, what about the new games' cap? Will there be one?

Maybe it's not a big deal because I'm in the minority here. I run a gaming community, so of course these guys are going to eat up these games quickly. hehe If so, then it's understandable as it's "not the norm".

Apok2002, thats a good point!

something like this maybe could work! when user selects to play a game, say Tetris, they get a high score, say above 100,000 they are enterd into the Pro leaderboard, if less, a beginner leaderboard? get what I mean?

look forward to the hack! considering I already have the arcade hack, I will convert to using this one...I have my reasons :)!

a flashmaster could edit the patern of the stones in a way that the leader of the highscore table will experience strange behavior of the stones, fitting in eachother. A quick vertical turn or so, just enough to find waterloo around the 90.000 score. A new tetris leader will emerge and law and belold...he/she's getting the same problems. :D

I think that a number of diffrent flash files are available in johns original tetris thread that can be downloaded and used with johns system - I dunno if any of the variables have been changed in this new one or not?

Apok2002: The ability to reset a scoreboard is already a planned feature, but not in there yet. Depending on how much time it takes me to rip the code and templates out for the install instructions, I may or may not have time to add it for this Beta. It *will* be in the final hack.

Ninth Dimension: The five games that will be "released" along with vbProArcade are:

Tetris
Breakout
Pacman
Snake
Space Invaders

Tetris is a modified version of the original vbTetris, Breakout was found open-source on flashkit and heavily modified by one of my admins, and the other three games were found on some programmer's website (the URL is on the games) and modified by myself to work with this hack.

I hate to be a pain in the ass, but I'm wondering if you could estimate an approximate time frame for the release of the first release? Nothing definite; just a scale, like a few days, or a week, or a few weeks. :)