The Significance of Keeping Score


When you think of video games, the word "achievement" might not be the first thing that comes to mind. You might not approach video games with the idea that you could be the best player of a particular game, but people are out there who do. In fact, the concept of a professional "cyber athlete" is already alive and real ”companies are paying the best of the best video game players to test and promote their games . If you aspire to such a unique career, I have to warn you that thousands of hours of game play await you.

I brought up the issue of "cyber athletes " because it has a lot to do with the topic of this hour , high scores. Nowadays, the best video game players are determined in national tournaments where people get together and compete head-to-head. However, in years past, the best players were known only by their three initials that appeared in the high score lists of arcade games. The high score list in a classic arcade game was quite important to many early gamers because it was their only way to show off their gaming achievements.

It's kind of sad really that high score lists aren't as popular as they once were, but we can't lament advances in technology. On the other hand, it doesn't mean that high scores are entirely a thing of the past. For example, many popular games, such as Tony Hawk Pro Skater, still rely on a score to indicate how well a player performed. So, the idea of using a numeric score to measure your video game playing prowess is still valid. What has changed is that the shift away from arcade games has made it less of an issue to keep track of high scores. However, I still like the idea of a high score list ”even if it's only shared between friends .

This hour focuses on adding a high score list to the Space Out game that you've worked on in previous hours. A high score list presents a new challenge to you as a game programmer because you must store away the scores so that they can be retrieved even when a game program is closed. This requires storing the scores to disk and then reading them back later, which is a unique discipline in game programming. The first step is to figure out how to model the high score data, which means that you need to determine what you're going to keep up with, and how.



Sams Teach Yourself Game Programming in 24 Hours
Sams Teach Yourself Game Programming in 24 Hours
ISBN: 067232461X
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2002
Pages: 271

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