[futureal]

Originally posted by Ninth Dimension
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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!