So there’s a new project on the horizon, like I said in the more from yesterday. A score tracker that’s StepMania-friendly. And I’m gonna be honest, this is mostly for my benefit. I want to have some visual indication of how I’m approaching my goal of “95% of all available DP in DDR Extreme” as a cool-ass graph and all those bells and whistles. But honestly, when using a Framework like Laravel, making it so others can also use it is really the easiest part of the thing. I’ve gotten quite proficient in the framework, and I should be able to knock it out before the domain is registered.

Oh yeah, the domain.

I don’t remember if I actually talked about wanting to register full.com.bo here before. But I did. And I had ambitions of it being a unified score tracker, so one tracker for all your games you play. I did a score tracker for PIU for a while thinking it worked like DDR. You’ve got a set number of DP available, score it how you want, whatever. It turns out you can employ a few little tricks to actually game free perfects out of the song on the arcade versions. Which is neat, but also makes this kind of hard.

A unified score tracker for many arcade games also introduces a number of issues in sourcing reliable data, and is generally shaping up to be a tremendous pain in my ass. So I’m not doing a unified score tracker. I’m doing one centered on StepMania, and making use of StepMania’s way of handling things. E.g., fields in the database for marvelous, perfect, and so on use the Stepmania code conventions of W1, W2, W3, W4, W5, Miss, Held, and LetGo. Tier01 instead of AAAA, Tier02 for AAA, and so on. Why do all that crap? Because, I can still make it a unified score tracker for the different games that Stepmania can emulate. So Pump is still doable, provided you’re playing it on StepMania.

Going this route, I can use a much simpler database schema that totals about 13 tables for the whole system, which covers everything from user authentication, authorization, and preferences to password resets, to metadata about each game, full localization support, room for rich details for each song, and the scores themselves.

I mentioned on Facebook yesterday that people are going to ask about cheating/proof/etc., and there will be only one question on the FAQ, and it will be:

Q: What if I suspect someone is posting fake scores or cheating?
A: Who cares? Shut up.

Let’s be real, a lot of people that are still in the game own their own machines and there’s not a goddamn thing stopping them from adjusting the timing windows in the operator menu and then taking full credit for an MFC. And I really don’t give a fuck. Like, if they’re cheating, they’re cheating, they know they’re cheating, why should it bother you? I might give people the option to hide all scores for a user, but it’s way, way down my list of things to give a shit about.