Scoreloop and OpenFeint

#21 Tandoori, anyone?

I won't use OpenFeint personally, and I don't like Facebook (no separation of users - can't have one group of family and one group of people you play games with WHO DON'T SEE EACH OTHER LISTED). All those silly social networks are banned on my systems - except Last.fm :)

I'd use ScoreLoop or OpenFeint if they were pure, like XBL has been until now. If I could choose to keep Facebook out of my game, it would be great. But now even XBL is going to get a lot of social networks integrated :/

Unholy sources of trojans, all of them!

#22 XBL is just a glorified friends list with Achievements.

Thats actually something you could pretty easily recreate on your own.

OpenFeint / Scoreloop need to add more, after all they make cash from your end users, especially Scoreloop

#23 Exactly, so I'd rather make my own cashcow for my own games ;)

#24 It won't work as cashcow.
You can be happy if it is used at all.

OpenFeint etc work because the social networking actually raises the publical awareness of your product drastically and because it allows kiddies to pose with their result (similar to facebook games).
Did you think they link facebook and twitter just for the matter of fun or "coolness factor"

Either you have Social Networking components or you have a highscore list.
There isn't much inbetween today and you won't be able to get much inbetween actually because it won't be too well received.

#25 Since all the existing systems out there only work on one specific platform (except for Scoreloop, but it's targeted to mobile-only), I've been considering just rolling my own solution and improving it with each game we develop that uses it. Would probably be a Torque-specific product, but it would easily work with any Torque product. Actually, this would be an interesting thing to try and develop and either integrate into the various Torque engines, or for me to develop and sell as a codebase... I need it anyway, might as well share it.

Doesn't Google have some sort of an open database framework that any developer can use for free? Seems like that would be gold for something like this...

#26 A torque global solution (ok near global as it wouldn't work on the consoles) would surely be an interesting thing.


Don't know of any google framework.
But perhaps I'm just thinking of something totally different.

For the client -> webend communication part though, I would likely attempt to use libcurlssl

#27 Actually, I can imagine a solution that is server independent. So it would be possible to use that Google solution (whatever the heck I'm thinking of), or you could just host it on your own server. I'm sure some of us have the funds to have our own company servers, and some of us don't have that - so keeping it more open would be in the best interest of all developers.

As it is, all Torque engines come with standard web communication stacks built into them. That could work, although 'out of the box' it would not be encrypted, and this would certainly need to be encrypted of a solution to prevent players from easily watching the data transfer from your games, and transferring their own data into it to easily hack the games. So I'd imagine we could just use Torque's existing web communication protocols rather than integrating anything new like libcurlssl, but just implement an encryption system.

If I were to build this, the end result is something that's easy for the developer. You shouldn't have to much around in web code - you just tell the system what to post and what to retrieve. The system then takes care of how it is organized and maintained, and gives you a lot of standard setups for handling the different kinds of data (IE: achievements vs. save game data vs. inter-game user data information, etc...)

#28 Yeah anyone should have a webhost and more isn't really required to handle the whole server end and presentation of the "community features" however they would look like.

#29 Gee, Marc, do you ever have anything cheerful to say? :P

Don't take my cashcow comment seriously, though. All I want is a frickin' highscore list, and I know damn well how to make it :)

We should put together some simple resource to jumpstart just that for the copious amount of newbies without serverside knowhow.

#30 > "Gee, Marc, do you ever have anything cheerful to say? :P"

NO. :)

#31 Hey ...
Sure I'm cheerful from time to time :)


And yeah a simple highscore system is more or less trivial.
I've my own hosted on OnRev (wanted something to train the language a bit), which works through POST with validation, including support for levels and submissions

#32 The day when Marc is cheerful is the day when all of iTGB's bugs are fixed. :P

#33 Oh, we'll all have iT2D by then, with new and interesting bugs ;)

#34 Its already iT2D as you see on the account ;)
Don't think that the new T2D will actually be ported as it will be geared towards modern computers even more, making it even less likely to work nicely on the iphone.
iT2D would actually need to move the other way.
While adopting the T3D / T2D architecture in some aspects, it would have to move away from other things that are just to computational heavy with very little gain

#35 My prediction will be true, in other words - iTGB will now never be fixed ;)

#36 It's sort of like the Duke Nukem Forever of game engines .. .

EDIT: Well, maybe not that bad, but you get the idea

#37 I promise not to get into it too much, but I think it's worth noting that even with its handful of bugs, iTGB (and all the Torque engines) are quite a deal better than a lot of what is out there. I've worked with a number of engines for hobby and professional reasons... I worked on a team to produce a full game in Gamebryo, I've helped to evaluate the Vicious Engine, I've played around with both ShiVa and Unity, just to name a few of the engines I've used. There is a reason that I always return to Torque engines for projects that I make, for projects that my company makes, and for projects that I do for clients. ALL game engines are bug-ridden and have problems. Hell, when my development team was using Gamebryo, we were fixing bugs in their engine just like we're fixing bugs in Torque, then submitting those updates to Emergent.

Anyway... not gonna get on a soap box here or anything, but I guess what I'm trying to say is that all of the Torque engines - including iTGB / iTorque2D, when compared to the big super expensive engines, it holds its own very well - and in many ways it comes out above them. It gets shat on a lot, sure, but that's only because a lot of the people working with it haven't worked with the big engines yet and experienced similar problems, and most very big game companies have their own in-house engines, so they don't talk about their problems anyway as its no one else's business.

I've talked to a number of people to who really, really, really hate the Torque engines - and as a result,they went off to write their own engines. Some of those people have also used the big-name engines and were equally displeased with them. All engines have a purpose, and Torque engines attempt to be multi-purpose. For the most part they do a good job of that - as long as you're a solid programmer, or have a solid programmer on your team. Otherwise, they've got a smaller usability set - but even that is still better than what you get with a lot of the competition. And this is really the best part about all the Torque engines - its built to let you build it into exactly what you need. Every single professional project I've ever worked on took a build of a game engine, branched it off, then turned it into something unrecognizable, because it was turned into what was needed.

Anyway... looks like I found a soap box, lol. Lemme step off it and burn it now so we can go back to our regularly scheduled game development. (And so this post can continue, as I suspect my response here will get some interesting comments, some curious comments, some angry comments and some out-right odd ones. 5 points for the first person to include bacon in a statement).

#38 BACON

#39 Yes, some people will never be happy with anything they didn't invent themselves. Sometimes a project they have in mind is better off with a custom engine. But some people just want bacon, but hate it when they find out it's still pork ;)

#40 Ha, I beat you to it!