How to implement an online high score table?

[Cybermonkey]

I think that's exactly what I need. If you would be so kind to send me the script(s), I'll be more than thankful.
Oh, another question: on the Freepascal side, do you use Synaptic or anything else? (SDL_net?)
EDIT: Sorry, I meant Synapse ...

[Super Vegeta]

Sorry for the delay, I was a bit busy yesterday evening.

http://svgames.pl/trash/netscores.zip
I hope everything's commented clearly enough. As for the FP side, the game was made using SDL, so I went with SDL_net.

[Cybermonkey]

Sorry for the delay, I was a bit busy yesterday evening.

http://svgames.pl/trash/netscores.zip
I hope everything's commented clearly enough. As for the FP side, the game was made using SDL, so I went with SDL_net.

Okay, thanks a lot. I will have a look into it at this evening.

[User137]

Did you take security into account, so that not anyone can open the link and add nonsense-scores?

[Super Vegeta]

In the downloadable script there's no such thing. In my game I used a simple hash that was calculated by the game and attached to the values sent, the script then calculated the hash again and checked if they matched.

[WILL]

Very cool topic!

If you had purchased a web hosting package you could use the domain and access the database server that the hosting uses. There are a lot of libraries that will allow you to access various database servers. PHP is not really necessary unless you want to add some interaction with the game it's self and a website. ie. displaying highscores or some kind of weekly or monthly stats on a site you designed for the game.

You can however do a lot of neat things if you did setup a databse to receive data from your game such as hosting exciting screenshots from players once they hit a new top highscore and create user accounts for your game kind of like Blizzard does.

Free hosting can be a problem if you want stability so you should consider the low cost of paying a more solid hosting provider if you try this option.

Besides the web hosting options they do have other highscore/award system services for different platforms such as iOS, Mac OS X (with the new Mountain Lion 10.8 version) and Android. Using these would depend on the API or libraries they provide to developers to use. Only C-based headers/libraries would of course mean translation too.

BTW Would anybody be interested in such a library/service if it were provided to Pascal game developers as a simple library file they could add to their games?

[Cybermonkey]

Yes, I thought about using it on my web host (not free but paid).
And I would be very interested in such a simple library!