When playing on PlayStation, you get notifications when you're friends just played a game and whether they won or lost that game. Is it possible to get this information stream using a PlayStation Network API?
I found some unofficial PlayStation Network API's, but none seem to offer this functionality.
I'm not aware of any API, but my first idea would be to use some sort of web scraping/crawling to accomplish this. And if you're lucky they might be utilizing HATEOAS and that would expand your options of where to branch your crawl/improve performance etc.
It would kind of be a niche API to create but it could be worth it.
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I apologize if this is not the right place to ask this but I am new to IOS development and I can not seem to find any information about this topic anywhere. Maybe I am just not looking in the right places, but I would appreciate it if you could point me to some resources or provide me some suggestions.
I am looking to construct an app clip which can handle api communication. I believe this is possible because a lot of the app clip examples online seem to suggest the technology is useful for quickly completing a transaction (ex. Panera bread app clip) and I don’t assume they are completing the entire transaction locally in a 15 mb application. So that makes me assume at some point in the application they are communicating with an api. I read the apple documentation and they mentioned that the urlsession library is not available for app clips, so I was wondering how else would we communicate from the app clip with the api, ideally in a background scenario as to not bother the user experience. Thank you in advance!
I'm trying to figure out if game center is the right tool for me. Here's my situation:
I'm building an app which allows users to create their own musical compositions. I plan to make the compositions exportable and loadable via text file (xml or json format, probably). I'd like to allow users to share their compositions with friends. It seems to me that game kit is the default social network for iOS, so it seems worth looking at. However, the social aspect of game kit seems to be designed mainly for real-time, simultaneous play. Is there any way to share data with friends in a non-realtime way via game center? Is there even a way to send game center contacts a message?
If you look at the documentation for peer-to-peer networking in GameKit, you will probably find exactly what you are looking for, with a tiny exception. It is only for wifi/bluetooth connectivity.
The way I would go with your description is a private server that hosts the compositions. If you are familiar to Java and/or Python, I'd recommend using Google App Engine for the server. That would make the headache a little bit less.
You can use GameKit too, but as you describe it, it's more for real-time communication.
If you implement invitation handlers, you could "invite" another player to receive the composition, but if they reject you will have to retry manually at a later point.
The contents of what you sent over an open "GameKit connection" can be "anything" you like, stuffed into a NSData object, so there is no limits there.
I hope this helps you a tiny bit in the right direction, good luck!
Is there currently a way to read GameCenter leaderboard data from the Web?
I'm looking for a read only way to display a leaderboard on a companion website. I do not need to post scores or otherwise manipulate the leaderboard off the device.
I have a feeling the answer is going to be no and I'll need to use OpenFeint's because they have a JSON API available.
I have been trying to find an answer to this as well.
I came across an interesting article Game Center via Openfeint
that discusses using Openfeint and Gamecenter together by using the new Openfeint SDK
Then using their JSON API publish results to the supporting website. I cant see any other way around it and feel this is what we need to do. Not the nicest, but you do end up with a game that sits in both communities.
Hope it helps.
If you are the author of the app and your web host provides PHP and MySQL you could roll your own server-side script to process score submissions and another script to generate a dynamic HTML page to display the scores in any way you like. Many web hosts offer PHP and MySQL for free.
There is no ready made solution that I am aware of.
To be honest I don't think there is much to gain from doing this, since players already have access to the leaderboard from within the game, and visitors to a website might not care about high-scores of a game they haven't played. Thats just my opinion.
I am asking this question as a small part of my question series regarding game programming .
Refer this question as the main one .
Now suppose I want to develop one small board game on iphone that is multiplayer . so how it will handle how many users are online and displaying them .
Suppose it is an online multiplayer casino game .
Then suppose it have to show currently playing tables and users on them .
So what can we do in iphone to do this sort of thing .
Thanks .
You're essentially asking what is referred to as 'matchmaking' in PC and console games.
The notion of displaying all currently online players or active matches is an early one in online multiplayer gaming, and I think it's seen its time. Instead, try and offer your players two options: Play with your friends or play against people of your skill level.
Showing someone a complete list of tens/hundreds or even thousands of games/players is just going to overwhelm them. People are much more comfortable knowing they're playing against people they know (and trust not to be unsportsmanlike) or at least that they're playing against someone of comparable skill level. These 2 concepts are often called 'buddy based matchmaking' (or friend lists) and 'automatch' or skill based matchmaking.
Unfortunately, from what I've seen in the GameKit framework, neither are fully supported, at least as far as playing on non LAN connections. You're going to have to either develop that yourself (and very few iPhone developers are going to have the resources to create and host it), or see if someone like OpenFeint, ngmoco (plusplus), Chillingo (Crystal) etc match your needs. OpenFeint seem to be talking about matchmaking on their site and plusplus offer buddy based challenges. The OpenFeint signup process is the easiest and you get access to their SDK right away for development without prior approval.
Now here's one final thing to consider: smaller games aren't going to have the player base to have enough concurrent players around so that everyone will always find a suitable match at any time of the day/week. Unless you have promotion and publisher backing, or a breakaway hit, picking an automatch based solution is not your best bet and shouldn't be your only mode of matchmaking. Ideally your game should allow for some turn based form of game play, so you can play asynchronously. That model has worked great for games like Words With Friends.
You need a server, you gameclient will contact it to get assigned to a partner. This is call matchmaking (google it to learn more).
I think there are OpenSource solutions (or at least frameworks) for this. But I don't know them. I know however Exit Games Neutron and Photon and I think there are free licenses for private / educational use.
I have a pretty basic challenge-based iPhone game, and I wanted to know what my options are for player discovery & matchmaking. I may end up rolling my own server, but if I don't have to, even better.
So far, I've found OpenFeint and Scoreloop, but I don't really care about the social part or discovering other games, I just want a simple system with matchmaking, win/loss, and global rankings. CocosLive has the global ranking part, but not the matchmaking.
Also just found RakNet.
Thanks.
Check out the Google App Engine for a free to cheap alternative to setting up your own server. It also has the added benefit of being Google, which to me spells reliability.
I expect that RakNet and similar companies will want a bunch of money for this solution - one of their clients is Sony Online Entertainment which to me spells money.
Also as you search around for solutions I would focus more on searching for open source code to put on your Google App Engine rather than a service. Online services require bandwith, which costs money. Information is free.
Good luck!