extremely ambitious might-not-even-work school club needs ideas and help

[chopperdudes]

okay so here's the thing.

we, a group of soon-to-be gr12 programmers are planning to start a school club next year. Our idea is to program competitive games for which students of the whole school can play (ie. during their spare, lunch etc), and possibly the highscorers can win a pizza party at the end of the month or something.

this first of all leads to the question of how to store the scores of the students in one central place--a place where the program can have access to somehow but the players cannot cheat. our school computer is on a network where such works are not rly feasible. our current best idea is something such as the netchat.t example which turing comes with. at least 2 of the computers at home will be running and hosting and whenever a gameplay is done the score is sent to all of those computers at our houses. this could be rather unreliable if the connection screws up in our houses during the day. if anyone has any possible ideas, however crazy, please tell me. (i once thought of using a javabot to send an email lol).

secondly, we need ideas for games. games with a highscore, that are fast advancing, appeal to the general gr10-12, and games which are relatively easy to program (so 3D games would be out of our league). we currently do not know java graphics, but will learn it ourselves later on. we do plan to build the game with OOP (and turing's OOP is weird...).

we are in the most part good and competent programmers, http://compsci.ca/v3/viewtopic.php?t=20083 is my ISU. so any and all ideas will help us.

thx

[Dan]

It will be rather hard to store the scores securely as there are many many ways that some one could manipulate them. Even if scores are stored on a remote server a user could use a RAM editor on the program to make there score realy high before it is sent or manpulate the protocal between the game and the server.

If you don't care much about the security, the easyest way would be to make the server in PHP so it could be hosted on most free webhosts that offer PHP and MySQL. Then you could either comunicate with the server by using turings NET comands or simply passing URI varibles with Net.OpenURLConnection. I would then store the scores in a DBMS (data base mangment system) of some kind like MySQL or PostgreSQL.

This would not be the best posible set up by far but it would be the easyest to make and maintain assuming you have knowange of or could learn about PHP (or any web lang realy) and MySQL (or any DBMS).


As for game ideas i would try to remake alot of the clasic arcade games like pong, snake, break out, etc.

[Alexmula]

i use http://scores.paulleduc.com/ to record high scores lists online. you just need to register and it even sorts the scores for you

[Dan]

Alexmula @ 26th July 2009, 4:55 pm wrote:

i use http://scores.paulleduc.com/ to record high scores lists online. you just need to register and it even sorts the scores for you

That sounds intresting, how do you send scores to it once you register?

[Alexmula]

they give you a URL, for example
[url]
http://scores.paulleduc.com/members/Alex_Velazquez/Bulls_and_Cows.php[/url]

you can read your scores from there and to write to this php file you have to change the ending of the url with a bunch of other characters and a password + the score so that people have a harder time hacking it

the write file would be something along the lines of http://scores.paulleduc.com/members/Alex_Velazquez/Bulls_and_Cows.php?password=(insert password here)&name=myname&score=(insert score here) &country=mycountry

[Dan]

Well it's not realy secure at all but it's prity much waht i sugested he makes, so it could work if they are not too woried about security.

[ecookman]

Save them to a separate partition on the HDD and have a fingerprint password on it?

[andrew.]

ecookman @ Sun Jul 26, 2009 8:19 pm wrote:

Save them to a separate partition on the HDD and have a fingerprint password on it?

It's a school computer. It doesn't have a fingerprint scanner. And setting up another partition could be risky because everytime I do that, TDSB comes in and wipes it with my Linux installation (my teacher told me I could do this BTW). It would be best to use that service stated above.

By the way, you should try doing it in Python with PyGame. It's OOP and it's simple to learn.

[chopperdudes]

thanks alot guys, we will look into that website. as far as security goes i'm not worried at all. if they do manage to hack into that, then by all means they do deserve the prize LOL. by secure i mean like... they can't open up the score file and change it, or have themselves drop the scores into a drop-off folder or something of the likes.

well seems like that problem is mostly solved.

so game ideas. classic arcade games, mario sidescrolling platformer games, battle city (tanks), maybe a tower defense game, but our general criteria came down to this:

more or less level based (and therefore highscore based)
easy to learn
quick to play
have save points (encrypted in home drive according to student number perhaps)
if simple game, then be able to get highscore quickly if you're skilled.

or anything that would appeal to the highschool population.

[ecookman]

would you like the asteroids game i made in Java?
it has levels, scoring system and some really cool effects (spinning ninjastar bullets, angular exhaust, and everything that is apart of the ship flashes!) and it is called RAINBOW NINJA STARFIGHTER!

[andrew.]

Try Super Mario War. You can do tournament or single games and it's extremely fun. I remember spending all year in grade 10 compsci playing this. The only thing is that it doesn't have a highscore list so you would have to manually update your score on your computer when you win.

[chopperdudes]

can you possibly send the information in turing without opening the default browser and the webpage? such that the users won't get access to the writing URL and inputing scores themselves? can turing Net commands do this?

[Dan]

chopperdudes @ 5th August 2009, 1:03 pm wrote:

can turing Net commands do this?

Yes. It can be done threw Net.OpenURLConnection as well as some other Net commands. However a smart user could still find out the url that was loaded/connected to even if the program is complied.

[tjmoore1993]

Take a piece of paper, write down a chart of the contestants and their scores. Update it weekly or perhaps consecutively based on your decisions.

When you have finished creating/updating your chart simply give it to a teacher to keep inside their desk?

Simple as that, because storing data on a computer can be easily reached and using passwords can easily allow others to gain access...

Maximum security would be not to use passwords and whatnot and just stick to ordinary value storing by using PAPER =D?

[andrew.]

Yeah, but most teachers don't keep there desks locked. Also, ina ddition to that, they also leave there desk unoccupied for long periods of time. My compsci teacher left her desk so long that people went on her account and started blocking screen and cotrolling other computers with the schools software. She never found out.