vbProArcade Beta 2

vbProArcade Beta 2

1/5/03: Beta 2 released
9/12/02: Beta 1.03 zip updated to include safe mode fix
9/3/02: Beta 1.03 released -- small bug fixes, see below
9/1/02: Beta 1 of vbProArcade has been posted. Please see below for installation instructions.


Background Information

vbProArcade is a fully-customizable Flash arcade add-on for vBulletin, complete with game-by-game scoreboards, forum integration, a "champions" system, statistics, and more.

This is an extensive hack that is still in BETA form, and I don't recommend installing it if you are not willing to work through potential issues and future updates/upgrades! I am working on making the installation instructions as easy as possible, but it will probably be some time before it is perfect.

Watch this post for updates as they happen, and check out screenshots from the list below. If you would like to see the hack in action, you may visit my Shadows of Namek forums. You will need to register to play, but you can view the scoreboards and the arcade itself as a guest.


Credits

This hack materialized thanks to work and help from a number of people and forums. Here they are:

• Original vbTetris Hack by Erwin Loh
• Original vbTetris Leaderboard Hack by John Warwick (john.eovie)
• One of my users, Simon Steel, for work on Flash coding/recoding
• The users of one of my forums, Shadows of Namek, for their extensive testing of the system
• And The Kryptonian for pre-release and release candidate installation testing.

Games

So far, there are FIVE GAMES that work correctly with this hack. They are:

Breakout
Pacman
Snake
Space Invaders
Tetris

All five .SWF files are included in the release archive.

There is now a Flash Games Development Thread for the purpose of modifying existing games to work with vbProArcade, or for creating new games to be compatible with vbProArcade. If you have a game that you wish to see modified but don't know how, post the .FLA source in that thread and hopefully somebody can assist you.


Installation Instructions

Download the file attached to this post, unzip it and familiarize yourself with the contents BEFORE doing anything.

There are TWO separate files worth reading, the Documentation and the Installation Instructions. I recommend that you read both BEFORE doing anything else.

Once you have done this, the instructions to be followed are contained in vbproarcade-install.txt. Follow them as precisely as possible. If you encounter an error somewhere, it is likely that you missed a step or made a small error. Please double-check your work BEFORE posting about problems here.

And it cannot be said enough: read that file before you do anything, and if you are unsure of something, please post your question(s) before attempting to install the hack.


Problems and Fixes/Workarounds (as of 1/5)

• None

Known Bugs/Limitations

Here is the list of stuff that I know does not work. I will be working towards correcting these bugs BEFORE adding new features for the next release.

• Netscape will allow you to play the games but not record scores
• If a user uses the "Back" button to go to the game screen, and does not refresh before playing, the score will result in a Security Violation. This is by design.

Screen Shots for Beta 2

Here is the list of posts from this thread that contain screen shots for the new version. Check them out!

• Main Arcade Screen: https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthrea...106#post292106
• Game Screen: https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthrea...107#post292107
• Game Over Screen: https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthrea...109#post292109
• Scoreboard: https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthrea...110#post292110
• Top Score Board: https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthrea...111#post292111
• Admin Modify Game: https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthrea...112#post292112
• Who's Online Display: https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthrea...113#post292113
• User Detail Screen: https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthrea...811#post337811
• Admin Score Editor: https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthrea...736#post338736
• Champ System in Postbit: https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthrea...745#post338745
• Modify Games in Admin CP (contracted): https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthrea...858#post389858
• Modify Games in Admin CP (expanded): https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthrea...859#post389859

Upcoming Features

This is the stuff that is in progress for future release:

• Complete Admin Panel Scoreboard Editor
• Additional integration with vB
• Even better Who's Online screen

Some have emailed or PM'd me asking if I would accept donations for my work on this hack, and yes, I certainly will, and any and all support is greatly appreciated. With over 2,000 lines of original PHP code, in addition to HTML and Flash work, I have spent a great deal of time developing and debugging the source for this, and it is a great feeling to have people like it so much that they want to give something back.

All donations received go directly back into supporting my websites and my design activities. You may click here to donate via Paypal. Note that donations are by no means required, and not donating does not mean you won't get support for the hack.

Last but not least, thanks for checking this out!

[Da`Nacho]

Has anyone else experienced weirdness with online.php after this?

It appears to show people in the arcade who aren't really there, I've verified this over the phone with friends. They can be in another part of the forum and it will still show them as 'Playing in the CandidForums Arcade'.

I've double and triple checked to make sure I properly added the code to online.php and it looks fine.

This problem didn't appear in beta 1.x either...

[Littlebit]

Hi
I just installed.
I probably missed something silly, but my proarcade.php isn't showing the games or images...
path to games is
/board/games/
and I uploaded the images to my images directory for the forums.
I did double check I uploaded games and images...
what did I miss?
-littlebit

[Da`Nacho]

Originally posted by Da`Nacho
Has anyone else experienced weirdness with online.php after this?

It appears to show people in the arcade who aren't really there, I've verified this over the phone with friends. They can be in another part of the forum and it will still show them as 'Playing in the CandidForums Arcade'.

I've double and triple checked to make sure I properly added the code to online.php and it looks fine.

This problem didn't appear in beta 1.x either...

I've figured out the cause... It's the $vbchamptext and $vbchampicon if you use it in the postbit templates. Any time a browser reads a thread with a champion in it, online.php sees them as 'Playing in the Arcade' because they are being served the champtext or champicon from proimage.php.

I'll just pull the variables from my postbit templates for now, but it would be cool if there was a way of fixing this.

[NTLDR]

Thanks littlebit, I installed this for use later on this month and the games never loaded and I didn't bother to look into detail but I've just figured out why! *lol*

I assume /board/games/ is the URL from your base domain? IE: www.mydomain.com/board/games ?

[Littlebit]

I'm overlooking something simple aren't I

[Tigga]

Very nice work futureal! It took a little while to customize all the templates to my liking, but everything looks very nice now and my users are loving it. One small thing I found though... Shouldn't the places in the script that call the date use the vbdate function instead? I'm not sure if that could be something you forgot or overlooked, but I figured I'd let ya know.

[Tigga]

Littlebit - Where do you have your flash games located at? Make sure they're in your board/games folder. If that's correct, either post here or PM me a link to your site. I can't guarantee I'll find what's wrong, but I'll be glad to take a look.

[Littlebit]

pm'ed ya

[Littlebit]

Thank you Plurplanet for noticing that...the names of my templates with longer names messed up a bit in the auto upload.
All games and graphics now appear great! WooHoo!
I did get a weird happening when I finished a test game and it, I assume was supposed to go to the updated with score page...is this what you mean by the score not working in netscape or do I need to fix a link somewhere? heres what happened and my browser info I tested it on:

The page I came from: http://www.mysite.com/forums/proarca...&game=breakout
Where it tried to go: /proarcade.php
my browser info: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.0.2) Gecko/20021120 Netscape/7.01
The error: 404

[Littlebit]

I just noticed that others have a miss redirect too in Mozilla...just a heads up that I'm also getting the 404 error for the redirect after a game ends in IE 5.2 for MacOSX as well...
I don't understand where its coming from to fix it. Any ideas?