Food for thought: OF-like platform?

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Food for thought: OF-like platform?

(13 posts) (6 voices)

Started 1 year ago by JamesSmith
Latest reply from abitofcode

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JamesSmith
Member

I have integrated OpenFeint (OF) to one of our games, which uses Cocos2d & Chipmunk.
(Not sure this is true to others or not, in our case, less than 5% of players submit their scores to OF).

Personally, I think OF is great, not only for holding the scores but also introducing other games, help increase sale.

However, there are some issues left, a bit lag while OF's pop-up appearing, 'welcome back xxx' or 'your friend' is online.

OF is written in objective-C++, when integrated with Chipmunk, still leave a lot of warnings: deprecated conversion from string constant to 'char*'. Currently we just ignore these warnings, it relates to some features we do not call.

I'm thinking, should riq create an OF-like platform which also introduce only cocos2d games to players ?

Posted 1 year ago #
Mark Sawicki
Member

@JamesSmith,

I don't know about the other stuff, but regarding your issue with OF popup lag, there was discussion several months ago about @manucorporat 's implementation of a notification system wrapper that claims to reduce/eliminate that lag you describe. I haven't used it yet personally, but I've seen no complaints.

You can read a couple of things about it here:
http://www.cocos2d-iphone.org/forum/topic/5269
Cocos2d Iphone blog post about CCNotifications

and I believe the code is here:
http://github.com/manucorporat/CCNotifications

-Mark

Posted 1 year ago #
JamesSmith
Member

@Mark, I concerns about the lag but it's not an issue.

It's just my question, should riq make an OF-like platform?

Posted 1 year ago #
abitofcode
Moderator

If he starts eating 5 minute ready meals he could probably squeeze an extra 50 minutes a day of productive work ;)

IMO it would be a waste of resources, there are already a number of competing implementations such as GameCenter, Open Feint, Crystal. OF has now branched out into android (possible as a result of apples entry into the arena).

As well as the huge amount of development resources, maintenance and support there is also the cost of the servers etc.

As @Mark mentions above @manucorporat came up with an alternative notification system built in openGL that doesn't incur the pause when the OF popups happen. (I keep meaning to get round to implementing it)

Posted 1 year ago #
JamesSmith
Member

Should utilize cocoslive.net an option?
as for developer: cocoslive is good enough.
as for business: how to increase sales?

@abitofcode
There are always pros and cons for Game Center, Open Feint, Crystal.
Pros: they are famous, they have a huge number of apps.
Cons: Can people see yours in that huge number of apps? Your chance in 1000s is always much better than in 10,000s or 100,000s.

Posted 1 year ago #
abitofcode
Moderator

So what you want is a product that is successful enough to attract 100's of thousands of users to create accounts, but at the same time is not attractive to developers so the number of apps is limited.

The cocos2d games tab has only been up a couple of months and there are 300+ games there already.

"Your chance in 1000s is always much better than in 10,000s or 100,000s."

That may be true but its not going to help you much with your sales volume. We have had over 750,000 downloads of which 295,000 people are on our medium OF score board after a 5 day free promotion with Free App A Day. Sales are still low though.

In the end it comes down to the game and your promotion.

Posted 1 year ago #
riq
Key Master

In November/December 2008 I created CocosLive, a high-score meta server. I started it before OpenFeint / Crystal / etc... And for the first 2 or 3 months I developed it actively. But then I realized that I can't maintain 2 projects actively, it is very demanding. Also, maintaining a server is much more demanding than maintaining a library.

Nevertheless, a sort of game-exchange program could be added. Right now all the cocos2d games are stored in a DB ( http://www.cocos2d-iphone.org/games ).

Actually, @itl-games wanted to create this game-exchange program. And I think it is a nice idea, but since I don't have the time to develop / maintain / support it, if someone wants to develop/maintain/support it, please, let me know. I'll happily help him/her with technical/administrative things.

The idea would be implement something simple and light. The API should be very simple:
- "fetch 3 games of these categories: strategy, zombie game:game_id device:device_id"

simple: easy to integrate, easy to develop, easy to maintain. Non intrusive: users should not be forced to display a logo.
light: should be fast, and should only occupy a few kb. It should be able to co-exists with the other social networks libraries.

It could be an extension of cocoslive, or it could be a new service.

Posted 1 year ago #
itlgames
Moderator

Yes, Ricardo and I have been talking about using the cocos2d games (http://www.cocos2d-iphone.org/games) for a simple crossover promotion, we have created our own set of categories, that could be the link on the network.

As we don't want to compete with OpenFeint, Agon, Crystal,... I was thinking to do something really simple, just adding the cocos2d logo or any button really, somewhere accessible, with an http link to our server, passing the game ID. We would open the new window on a browser, so no need to implement anything special on the game, just a simple http call.

So basically would be a simple HTML mobile version of the actual games tab, but using the game ID passed we would display the X random games on the same categories than our game, or something similar. Would be something like this:
http://www.cocos2d-iphone.org/games/pick
This is just a small plugging we will include on the main website that display a X random games of the day.

Posted 1 year ago #
itlgames
Moderator

Other option maybe would be to create a very simple SDK to include on our games, maybe using a UIWebView to display the related games. Basically we would point the UIWebView to our server, instead of open in a new window. Maybe we could pass some more info apart from the game ID, like background colour or something, so we can personalize a bit the view.

But I reckon with iOS4 and multitasking open a new window shouldn't be too annoying.

Posted 1 year ago #
abitofcode
Moderator

The simple crossover idea I like as it can run alongside the existing frameworks. It also has the benefit of giving me something to link to the cocos2d logo I have on my credits page.

An XML version feed of the games pick link would be nice.

Posted 1 year ago #
asinesio
Member

I like the crossover idea. It would serve to promote cocos2d and it would help all of us get more visibility.

Since we are all using Cocos2d, IMO this would be a CCNode you could add to any place in your game.

I think it would be cool, though, if instead of a random game list, it offered 3 sections:

1) New releases
2) Suggested games (random selections from other games that also have installed this ad view)
3) Sponsored games

Devs could get their game listed on #3 by donating to cocos2d.

Thoughts?

Posted 1 year ago #
itlgames
Moderator

@abitofcode, yes, I would prefer the simple idea. For the XML you mean a standard RSS feed or just the list on any XML format?

@asinesio, thanks for suggestions, I think 1) is just like the site:
http://www.cocos2d-iphone.org/games

And 2) is like the selection:
http://www.cocos2d-iphone.org/games

Not sure about 3 to be honest, wouldn't like to give any preference to any specific games.

I prefer the idea of simple integration, so no need to further development on the Objective C (C++) side, as for existing frameworks like Open Feint we already do so and we don't want to compete/interfere on that side.

Maybe, maybe, your ideas come along more as a new project, either a mobile version of the site, or a cocos2d iPhone/iPad app that would be a mirror of the site. But don't think Ricardo has time for this, neither I have right now. But if someone interested on the app, I could prepare an XML or JSON API to access the database (so we would cover what @abitofcode was suggesting)

Posted 1 year ago #
abitofcode
Moderator

@itlgames Any XML, I can then use XSLT to convert to HTML/RSS etc

Posted 1 year ago #

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