I am making a game in Corona SDK in which I want to be able to save the player's high score to the device that they are using's disk, just so that it will stay saved even if the user restarts the app.
Problem is, everywhere I go online for help on this sort of thing I am told I should be using JSON, but I am not sure if there is a simpler way of doing things or even if JSON is the right approach.
Maybe try Introducing new preference storage features.
heres a neat thought that may work. make a new scene that contains the high score variable but dont erase the variable when exiting. then everytime they want to check their high score they just have to go to the scene.
option 2 - this one is a bit more tricky and im not exactly sure if you need permissions aka administrator rights (and if you are submitting your app on googleplay you may need to ask for permission. so review the rules before doing it), write a batch file that copies the highscore into a new file.
option 1 is better because you are not necessarily adding anything.
Related
Is it possible to create an automatically generated Rhythm game for Flash Action Script 3 ?
But not just randomly generated, generated from the notes of a song. Or is that something I have to do manually?
How would I go about doing either of these?
I am currently following this tutorial: http://www.flashgametuts.com/tutorials/as3/how-to-make-a-rhythm-game-in-as3-part-4/ so perhaps it can be made to fit around this? (Go to the final part and View Source to see the full thing)
Thanks!
Depending on what you mean by rhythm game, check out the computeSpectrum() function of the SoundMixer class: http://help.adobe.com/en_US/FlashPlatform/reference/actionscript/3/flash/media/SoundMixer.html#computeSpectrum()
There's an example of it working in the link, but basically what it does is take a snapshot of the current sound wave and puts normalised (-1 to 1) values in a ByteArray. What you do with those values is up to you - e.g. you might use them as a height field to generate terrain for example.
Repeat this every frame, and you get the gist
Welcome to SO!
First off, there is nothing already built in, to my knowledge. There may be something lurking around Google that someone else wrote, but you'd need to dig around for that (though I assume you already did.)
Generated from the notes of a song. Hmm, this will take some serious ingenuity and coding on your part. I'll point you in the right direction, but it is up to you to write the code. No one here will do it for you, but we'll happily help with specific problems in your code.
The crazy (yet potentially more fun) approach MAY BE to derive the data in a similar manner that an audio visualizer does...but I can't guarantee that will work. This would work best with MIDI-generated, single instrument songs. Here is a tutorial on visualizers.
A second approach may be to actually convert MIDI files directly. Again, I can't guarantee it will work, but it would theoretically be possible, seeing how MIDI files store data to begin with. Here's an answer on playing MIDI files, to get you started. Consider looking through their class.
However, the "easiest" approach would be to come up with some sort of system by which you store the note values for a song. You can manually enter the values in an array, or in a data file (such as XML) that you can load.
I put "easiest" in quotes because you'd have to account for a LOT of information - not just note values, but note duration, rhythm, and rests.
Anyway, those are just a few ideas to get you started. Good luck!
I'd like to start developing a "simple" game with HTML5 and I'm quite confused by the many resources I found online. I have a solid background in development, but in completely different environments (ironically, I started programming because I wanted to become a game developer, and it's the only thing I've never done in 13 years...).
The confusion derives from the fact that, although I know JavaScript very well and I have some knowledge of HTML5, I can't figure out how to mix what I know with all this new stuff. For example, here's what I was thinking of:
The game would be an implementation of chess. I have some simple "ready made" AI algorithm that I can reuse for single player; the purpose here is to learn HTML5 game development, so this part is not very important at the moment.
I'd like build a website around the game. For this I'd use a "regular" CMS, as I know many of them already and it would be faster to put it up.
Then I'd have the game itself, which, in its "offline" version, has nothing to do with the website, as, as far as I understand, it would live in a page by itself. This is the first question: how to make the Game aware of User's session? The login would be handled by the CMS (it should be much easier this way, as User Managememt is already implemented).
As a further step, I'd like to move the AI to the server. This is the second question: how do I make the game send player's actions to the Server, and how do I get the answer back?
Later on, I'd like to bring a PVP element to the game, i.e. one-against-one multiplayer (like the good old chess). This is the third question: how to send information from a client to another, and keep the conversation going on. For this, people recommended me to have a look at Node.js, but it's one more element that I can't figure out how to "glue" to the rest.
Here's an example of a single action in a PVP session, which already gives me a headache: Player 1 sends his move to the Server (how does the game talk to Node.js?). I'd need to identify the Game Id (where and how should I store it?), and make sure the player hasn't manually modified it, so it won't interfere with someone else's game (how?).
I'm aware that the whole thing, as I wrote it, is very messy, but that's precisely how I feel at the moment. I can't figure out where to start, therefore any suggestion is extremely welcome.
Too many things and probably in the wrong order.
A lot of the issues don't seem to me to be particularly related to HTML5 in the first instance.
Start with the obvious thing - you want a single page (basically a javascript application) that plays chess, so build that. If you can't build that then the rest is substantially irrelevant, if you can build (and I don't doubt that you can) then the rest is about building on that capability.
So we get to your first question - well at the point at which you load the page you will have the session, its a web page, like any other web page, so that's how you get the session. If you're offline then you've persisted that from when you were online by whatever means - presumably local storage.
You want to move the AI to the server? Ok, so make sure that the front end user interaction talks to an "interface" to record the player moves and retrieve the AI moves. Given this separation you can replaces the AI on the client with an ajax (although I'd expect the x to be json!) call to the server with the same parameters.
This gets better, if you want to do player to player you're just talking about routing through the server from one user/player to another user/player - the front end code doesn't have to change, just what the server does at the far end of the ajax call.
But for all this, take a step back and solve the problems one at a time - if you do that you should arrive where you want to go without driving yourself nuts trying to worry about a bucket full of problems that seem scary that you can probably easily solve one at a time and I'd start by getting your game to run, all on its own, in the browser.
About question one: You could maybe give the user a signed cookie. E.g. create a cookie that contains his userid or so and the SHA2 hash of his userid plus a secret, long salt (e.g. 32 bytes salt or so).
About question two: For exchanging stuff and calling remote functions, I'd use the RPC library dnode.
About question three: Use the same thing for calling methods between clients.
Client code (just an example):
DNode.connect(function (remote) {
this.newPeer = function(peer) {
peer.sendChatMessage("Hello!");
};
});
You don't have to use game IDs if you use dnode - just hand functions to the browser that are bound to the game. If you need IDs for some reason, use a UUID module to create long, random ones - they're unguessable.
I'm experimenting with P2P on Flash, and I've come across a little hurdle that I'd like to clarify before moving forward. The technology itself (Flash) doesn't matter for this problem, as I think this problem occurs in other languages.
I'm trying to create a document that can be edited "live" by multiple people. Just like Google Docs pretty much. But I'm wondering, how would you suggest synchronizing everyone's text? I mean, should I message everyone with all the text in the text field every time someone makes a change? That seems very inefficient.
I'm thinking there has to be a design pattern that I can learn and implement, but I'm not sure where to start.
Optimally, the application should send the connected clients only the changes that have occurred to the document, and have some sort of buffer or error correction that can be used for retrieving earlier changes that may have been missed. Is there any established design pattern that deals with this type of issue?
Thanks,
Sandro
I think your "Optimally" solution is actually the one you should go for.
each textfield has a model, the model has a history (a FILO storing last, let's say, 10 values).
every time you edit that textfield you push the whole text into the model and send the delta to other connected clients.
as other clients receive the data they just pick the last value from the model and merge it to the received data.
you can refine the mechanism by putting an idle timer in the middle: as a user types something in the textfield you flag that model as "toBeSentThroughTheNet" and you start a timer. as the timer "ticks" (TimerEvent.TIMER) you stop it, collect the flagged data and send it to other clients. just remember to reset the timer everytime the user is actually typing (a semplification coul be keydown = reset, keyup = start).
one more optimization could be send the data packed in a compressed bytearray, but this requires you write your own protocol and may be not so an easy and quick path :)
If the requirement is that everyone can edit the document at the same time and the changes should be propagated to everyone and no changes should be lost, then it is a non-trivial problem. There are few different approaches out there, but one that is quite robust is Operational Transformation. This is the same algorithm that Google Docs uses for collaborative editing.
Understanding and Applying Operational Transformation and the attendant hacker news discussion are probably other good places to start.
The Wave Protocol was released as open source so you can take a look on how it is implemented.
You could of course forgo the tricky synchronization and just allow people to take turns and only one person can edit the document at a time and this person just pushes the changes to the remainder of the group.
As far as I know, it's really not possible, but I just want to be sure before I'm moving to flash.
can I make an html5 game secure enough so people won't be able to change their score and other variables while playing?
thanks!
There is no "depends", the straight answer to your question is "no" and I think my fellow answerers simply muddied the waters.
You cannot trust the client. With any language, whether you're writing assembly or HTML or Flash, you cannot trust the client. No matter how much you wrap your code in obfuscation and such, it can and will be figured out (and often quicker than you might think).
This is stressed everywhere and yet people keep getting bit by it. Online games get "speedhacked" because they don't check the velocity of players, or they get item duplication because they don't verify that a player actually has an item that they're trying to do something with, or the lame little flash games get hiscore entries of 9999999 because a simple tool like Tamper Data (a Firefox add-on) is all it takes to change the score as it's sent to the server.
You can't trust the client, whether HTML5 or Flash.
If it's a single-player game, let the player cheat. That is their decision. If it's a multiplayer game, the server verifies every step of the game and anything outside of the rules is thrown out. If it's hiscores, send a replay of the game to the server and analyze it for any cheating rather than sending just a numeric score.
since your users can see all the source code this is a rather complex problem.
they can easily change any function or variable at runtime without your script ever knowing.
even if use a complicated signing function to validate the results.
and i am sorry but i don't think colins way would work either. i could just change any input to make the server do whatever i want.
maybe a constant monitoring of the score thru the server would be able to detect any impossible changes. still someone cheating in the realms of "possible" results would be uncaught.
in the end i would say u can only make it rather difficult to cheat but not impossible for someone with a little bit of skill.
don't use it for any games where u can win something by scoring the highest.
since the matter seems rather puzzling to people:
flash delivers compiled swf files, that cannot (since flash 9) be decompiled to useful.smth
so u can put a secret in there which you use to sign the score.
i.e. send the score and the md5 of score+secretkey. so the server (which also knows the key, can check it).
furthermore flash variables are not so easy to temper with (you would have to find them in ram and alter them there, which is a very complex task), while javascript vars can be easily edited using, for example, webkit developer tools
update
actually i correct myself => all swfs can be decompiled
this just leaves us with code obfuscating and "encrypting"
i guess the world is a bad place after all ;)
Depends on the way your game is coded, but if all the logic is sent to the client and only the score returned then you have no hope. Only by returning the inputs and calulating the score on the server side can you try to prevent the users submitting any score they wish.
Don't forget, by definition the user must change their score or it could never be more than 0...
One Thought!!
You may use Knockout.js to modify your score and other variables as observable properties.
The steps are:
Create ViewModal for your game
Create observable properties for all the variables (i.e score)
You need to store the score in cache so that you can access it when new score arrives.
Attach custom subscriber to these properties and write logic to check the score should be updated by a "UNIT" at a time ( by unit I mean, how you suppose to update user's score at a time). The difference between the last score and current score should not go beyond the "UNIT"
update scroe as ViewModal.Score(newScore); //this would fire an event to the subscriber of observable property.!
I just got a mail saying that I have to change a config value at 2009-09-01 (new taxes). Our normal approach for this would be to to awake at 2009-08-31 at 23:59 and then just change the value manually. Which not is a big problem since this don't happens to often. But it makes me wonder how other people handle issues like this.
So! How do you handle date specific config changes?
(We are working in asp.net but I don't think this has to be language specific)
Br
Carl Bergquist
I'd normally store this kind of data in a database table like this
Key, Value, EffectiveFrom, EffectiveTo
-----------------------------------------
VAT, 15.0, 20081201, 20091231
VAT, 17.5, 20100101, NULL
I'd then use the EffectiveFrom and EffectiveTo dates to chose the value that is effective at the given time. If the rate is open ended then the effecive to could either by NULL or 99991231.
This also allows you to go back without having to change the config. E.g. if someone asks you to recalculate the tax for the previous month before the rate change.
In linux, there is a command "at" for batch execution.
See "man at" for details.
To be honest, waking up near the time and changing it seems to be the simplest and cheapest approach. All of the technical solutions are fine, but it depends where you work.
In our environment it would be cheaper and simpler to get someone to wake up and make the change than to redevelop the functionality of a piece of software that already works. It certainly involves less testing, development overhead and costs which means we would tend to solve the problem as you do, manually.
That depends totally on the situation and the technology.
pjp's idea is good, if you get your config from a database, or as metadata to define the valid time for whole config sets/files.
Another might be: just prepare a new configfile with the new entries and swap them at midnight (probably with a restart of the service/program) whatever.
Swapping them would be possible with at (as given bei Neeraj) ...
If timing is a problem you should handle the change, or at least the timing of the change on the running server (to avoid time out of synch problems).
We got same kind of problem some time before and handled using the following approach.
this is suitable if you are well known to the source that orginates the configuration changes..
In our case, the source exposed a webservice (actualy a third party) which will return a modified config details. And there is a windows service running on our server which keeps on polling the webservice and will update the configuration file if there is any change.
this works perfectly in our case..
You can make use of this approach by changing the polling webservice part to your source of config change (say reading changes from some disk path). But am not sure how this is possible reading config changes from email.
Why not just make a shell script to swap out the files. run it in cron and switch the files out a minute before and send an alert text if NOT successful and an email if successful.
This is an example on a Linux box but I think you get the point and can do this on a Windows box.
Script:
cp /path/to/old/config /path/to/backup/dir/config.timestamp
cp /path/to/new/config
if(/path/to/new/config exsits) {
sendSuccessEmail();
} else {
sendPanicTextAlert();
}
cron:
59 23 31 8 * /path/to/script.sh
you could test this as well before hand just point to some dummy directories and file
I've seen the hybrid approach. Instead of actually changing the data model to include EffectiveDate/EndDate or manually changing the values yourself, schedule a script to change the values automatically. Also, be sure to have a solid test plan that will validate all changes.
However, this type of manual change can have a dramatic impact on reporting. If previous transactions join directly to the tables being changed, numbers in historical reports could change in a very bad way. There really is no "right" answer.
If I'm not able to do something like pjp's solution, I'd use either a scheduled task or a server job to update it automatically at the right time.
But...I'd probably still be awake checking it had worked.
Look the best solution would be to parameterise your config file and add things like when a certain entry should be used from. This would negate the need for any copying or swapping of files and your application would simply deal with it. (That goes for a config file approach or a database)
If you cannot change the current systems and you have to go with swapping the config files, then you also have two options:
Use a scheduled task to kick off a batch job or even a VBScript or PowerShell script (which ever you feel comfortable with) Make sure you set up the correct credentials to be able to do this at the middle of the night and you could also add some checking and mitigation into this approach.
Write a windows Service that does this for you. Here you have all the flexibility you need. Code it to do whatever it needs to do, do all the checks you need to (so that you can keep sleeping rather than making sure it actually worked) etc, etc. You service would then even take care of the scheduling aspect and all will be good. Here you could use xml DOM object and xPath and not replace the file, but simply update the specific entries as required.
Remember that any change to the config file would cause your site to restart, so make sure you take care of all the other housekeeping stuff that this could cause. (Although this would be exactly the same if you where sitting there in the middle of the night copying file around)