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!

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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?