[Scummvm-devel] hopkins, hiscore.dat

[Matthew Hoops]

This is a continuation of the conversation that happened on commit
dee719390c0bf6c966b99126f122c7a21e3b33a7. Paul wants it brought up
here, so a general consensus can be found.

I realize that Paul mentioned last week that he was going to go ahead
with this method if no one objected. I don't have time to keep track
of every mail that comes through my inbox, yet alone every ScummVM
mail, so I missed it last week. My apologies! The cost of having a
real job now :)

Now that that's out of the way, onto the commit itself. As was his
intention, the code was moved to save the high score per save file
instead of as a file that would maintain the high score between all
saves.

There are two big problems with this:
1) We no longer follow the original game's behavior
2) We broke backwards compatibility with the previous hiscore.dat file

In wjp's e-mail, he suggested renaming the file to
"hopkins-hiscore.dat" or "<target>-hiscore.dat". This would have
solved both problems with the original file naming. Even older
"hiscore.dat" files could be checked if they existed to maintain
backwards compatibility. Strangerke also suggested a fake save file in
his comment. Furthermore, this method would probably have been less
work than adding the high scores to each save slot.

Paul feels that having an extra file is a "potential annoyance", but
we already do similar stuff for ie. Indy3's IQ points. In fact, this
high score save rather resembles maintaining the score between Indy3
saves.

The game *is* supposed to maintain the high score file between, as the
original did. There is no doubt that is what the original game
designer's intended since it's the way it behaves. After all, we're
reimplementing games to behave like them.

Now that the case has been made, what does everyone else think? Since
this isn't an unreasonable original game feature (it's not like it's a
save dialog using the original Windows dialog box or something!), I
feel very strongly that removing this feature is the wrong thing to
do.

Thoughts? :)

-Matt

On Fri, Jul 26, 2013 at 10:15 AM, Paul Gilbert <paulfgilbert at gmail.com> wrote:
> Apologies, it completely slipped my mind, what with all the excitement of
> making progress in R2R. I'll devote some time this weekend to look at it,
> promise.
>
> Paul.
>
>
> On Fri, Jul 26, 2013 at 5:50 AM, Willem Jan Palenstijn <wjp at usecode.org>
> wrote:
>>
>> On Fri, Jul 12, 2013 at 10:56:07AM -0400, Paul Gilbert wrote:
>> > For reference, the file is used to store the high scores for the
>> > Breakout
>> > minigame on Hopkins computer, so it isn't exactly a critical file. I
>> > don't
>> > have the code installation handy, and the Github web interface is a bit
>> > too
>> > clunky for me to check, but ideally, if it isn't already, the highscore
>> > file should only be created when someone actually plays the game. If
>> > that's
>> > the case, then the number of people who'll already have the file is
>> > minimal.
>> >
>> > Of course, when you get right down to it, I don't really see that much
>> > need
>> > to share the mini-game scores across multiple saves.It could likely just
>> > as
>> > easily be refactored to be saved as part of the standard savegame (I
>> > presume), and be done with the separate file altogether. That would be
>> > my
>> > preference. Unless there's anybody fervently in favour of maintaining
>> > the
>> > scores as a separate file, I'll have a look at weekend.
>>
>> Any news on this?
>>
>> -Willem Jan
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> See everything from the browser to the database with AppDynamics
> Get end-to-end visibility with application monitoring from AppDynamics
> Isolate bottlenecks and diagnose root cause in seconds.
> Start your free trial of AppDynamics Pro today!
> http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=48808831&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk
> _______________________________________________
> Scummvm-devel mailing list
> Scummvm-devel at lists.sourceforge.net
> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/scummvm-devel
>