N V2.0 replays

[bla687]

Now that I've finally seen that N v2.0 is out, I'm really excited, and I really like the majority of the changes, and what I've seen of the game so far, there's just one thing that really should just be a minor quibble, but it really bothers me.

My complaint is the fact that our personal scores and replays are now completely removed unless we manage to hit the leaderboards. The leaderboards are cool if you want to admire the people who have played the level till it's a science, and have solved it in really elegant ways, but sometimes I like to just go back and see how I did it. Whenever I was showing someone N who hadn't played it before, I would show off my replay for a particularly challenging level (usually MTI once 1.4 came out). It wasn't elegant or pretty, but it was mine, and I was proud of it. I miss having that. I realize that it would probably be too much data for an individual account, especially with free hosting, but I would really like it if the game could store my best score and replay for each level locally so I can go back and see them.

If it were to store my best scores and replays locally, I would also want episode replays to be saved, because I kind of miss episode scoring (though I understand and am ok with the decision to take it out).

Otherwise, N v2.0 is awesome and I love it!

Is anyone else with me on this?

[EddyMataGallos]

Im totally with you on that, I always loved to have my personal .sol with all my achievements/runs, which is the reason I basically back it up everyday to not lose anything. I presume they did that in order to improve the security by avoiding any possibility of .sol editing, which is great indeed, but ruins our point.

There's an official thread about N2 though on the forum announcements, you should post this in there so that they might read it, all bugs/suggestions go there. I doubt its going to be changed though. Off topic, I also miss the Top20 (rather than Top10) boards and the second format (rather than frames).

[ska]

Off topic, I also miss the Top20 (rather than Top10) boards and the second format (rather than frames).

Totally agreed.

To accentuate bla687's sentiment, this is 2013, not 1993, and I suspect hosting for finite plain text data is negligible and shouldn't really impact on server demand, and even if it did make a small dint, there are quite a few people, as evidenced in these forums, that are more than willing to cover the associated costs.

[bla687]

this is 2013, not 1993, and I suspect hosting for finite plain text data is negligible and shouldn't really impact on server demand

Right. Sometimes my brain doesn't properly acknowledge the passage of time. My main thought was that if people played a lot of user levels, it could slowly add up to a decent chunk of space (my 1.2 GB gmail inbox doesn't have that many attachments in it, though I also doubt anyone plays as many levels as I have received e-mails since the early 2000's). Of course, they could always make it so that only the metanet episode replays were hosted, but then the user levels go back to being second class citizens (though much less so). I just want to be able to see my score next to or below the high scores for the level, and be able to watch my replay, regardless of the feasibility of hosting them.

But to address the .sol hacking concern, I don't want these to be used in any way by my online account, or even to keep track of my progress in the game. I just want a big pile of level to replay associations that the game can read back and I can watch at my leisure. If I hack it, all I've accomplished is given myself a bogus replay to enjoy instead of the replay from when I played the level. Obviously, the game has already disassociated the player's local replay and score data from the scoreboards and from how the game keeps track of their progress (since it no longer exists), so putting it back in purely for the purpose of playing it back shouldn't be a security concern.

[EddyMataGallos]

this is 2013, not 1993, and I suspect hosting for finite plain text data is negligible and shouldn't really impact on server demand

Right. Sometimes my brain doesn't properly acknowledge the passage of time. My main thought was that if people played a lot of user levels, it could slowly add up to a decent chunk of space (my 1.2 GB gmail inbox doesn't have that many attachments in it, though I also doubt anyone plays as many levels as I have received e-mails since the early 2000's). Of course, they could always make it so that only the metanet episode replays were hosted, but then the user levels go back to being second class citizens (though much less so). I just want to be able to see my score next to or below the high scores for the level, and be able to watch my replay, regardless of the feasibility of hosting them.

But to address the .sol hacking concern, I don't want these to be used in any way by my online account, or even to keep track of my progress in the game. I just want a big pile of level to replay associations that the game can read back and I can watch at my leisure. If I hack it, all I've accomplished is given myself a bogus replay to enjoy instead of the replay from when I played the level. Obviously, the game has already disassociated the player's local replay and score data from the scoreboards and from how the game keeps track of their progress (since it no longer exists), so putting it back in purely for the purpose of playing it back shouldn't be a security concern.

Oh, so you actually meant to have stored runs completely unlinked to the servers database, didn't quite get that. Because you know, your stored runs used to be submitted, so thats why I got confused. But yeah that would be a neat idea to implement.

[ska]

Yeah, that's what i was thinking. If the run stored locally has no link to the submission process and is instead server sided, then hacking would be pointless...

[otters~1]

i can't figure out exactly why they went so backwards on highscores. even using the old system would have been a huge improvement over what we got. did they comment on this anywhere?

[bla687]

From everything I've read, I'm pretty sure that the changes to level high scoring were made as anti-cheat measures. I think there were some complications with making episode highscores, and they had polled people to find out how much people would care if they were removed. I personally was pretty sad that they removed the episode highscores, since those were the only ones I ever held, and removing them actually made V 2.0 easier for me, because I no longer had incentive to try very hard to get a good score on the last level of an episode (or on any levels following one with a ton of gold). I can understand why they changed it so that replays are no longer submitted in order to determine when you've earned a high score. I think the new way is much more secure. I can't understand why the personal high scores and replays were removed entirely. Also, we seem to have lost the death statistics as well. I kind of miss seeing how many thousands of times I'd been killed by a mine.

[Fujita Seiko]

Yeay I would love to see the failures in my levels by other to.

btw.

Is there a way to get a link with a replay of someone?
Like you have link now to show your level in Nv2 online, I though maybe you can paste a code after that (like it was in N1..4 in the game) and than see a replay of it.

[james_S]

i noticed Metanet updated the online version to match the standalone version recently-ish. But if you click a map's link, you can see the map but u cant log in and you cant see its highscoreboard and hence any replays. A message shows up when you win the map 'press jump to retry, Back to exit' -lol what does that mean, press the backspace button?

[raigan]

hi,
Hm.. I don't know if either of us had realized that personal bests aren't accessible from v2.0!! I'm afraid most of the online/database stuff was a bit rushed.

I might be mis-remembering, but as far as I can recall, we do actually store one replay (your personal best) per user per level. (We specifically changed the level and replay formats so they compressed better so that we could store everything for everyone)

We are crazy busy trying to get N++ finished, but this sort of thing sounds like possibly we just forgot to add UI elements/code to query + show your personal best. (Or I might be totally wrong and for some reason we're not storing that stuff; for sure it's not stored locally anymore) It's been over a year.

I have no idea when, but we are definitely interested in soliciting feedback for improvements to v2.0, this is a great example: should be trivial to implement and adds a lot. Sorry we omitted it! Same with death stats... I would assume the problem is that we ran out of time -- we were actually months late starting N++ because we were getting v2.0 finished -- and we cut the killcount to save time. I feel pretty bad about that in hindsight, it was one of my favourite features too :(

Raigan

[999_Springs]

I have no idea when, but we are definitely interested in soliciting feedback for improvements to v2.0, this is a great example: should be trivial to implement and adds a lot. Sorry we omitted it! Same with death stats... I would assume the problem is that we ran out of time -- we were actually months late starting N++ because we were getting v2.0 finished -- and we cut the killcount to save time. I feel pretty bad about that in hindsight, it was one of my favourite features too :(

Raigan

hey Raigan, be sure to check out the bugs thread from time to time, it also has a suggestions section containing all the easy-to-implement things that you said you just didn't have time for. also there are some major improvements that could be made such as making the in-game userlevels interface similar to what we have on numa for v1.4, so things like commenting/featuring/viewing other people's profiles/favourites, otherwise it's sort of a step backwards

[raigan]

Thanks, will do.

[james_S]

Hi Raigan :D

There's also
Dream feature to include in N http://forum.droni.es/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=9826

If you could make a new enemy http://forum.droni.es/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=1913

But I feel a bit odd mentioning these because its probabably something you should only look at if you're drunk one time and most of the suggestions are by me (I think some are great though)

Good luck with N++ ! (is it going to be grey or coloured?)

Btw can someone tell me who is it that makes most of the metanet maps?