Facebook - Highscore List

I've been trying to implement the Facebook object, and its mostly gone smoothly and I'm happy with the way it works, but I've come up against a bit of a wall when it comes to making the highscores list work. At the end of my game, you can submit your score, and it automatically posts a message to your wall saying "I scored X points!" and it works fine.

The bit I can't work out is how to display a list of scores - say, the top 10, for example.

When the 'submit' button is pushed, it also "Requests Highscore board" - but what do I do with this? I'm guessing I need to link this to a text field and display the scores in that, but I can't figure it out.

Has anyone done this successfully yet, and if so, could offer some tips?

Thanks a bunch

'Request hi-score board' just requests the hi-scores - they arrive a moment later. When they arrive, the Facebook object's 'On hi-score' trigger runs once for each hi-score. In this trigger the HiscoreName, HiscoreRank and Score expressions in the Facebook object are set so you can get the current hi-score e.g. "#1 - Tom Gullen - 1337". A simple way to list scores is to append that to a string object in the 'On hi-score' event, so when it triggers for each hi-score you end up with a full list of scores.

Note that if the user is submitting a hi-score, it won't appear in the hi-score board until the 'On score submitted' trigger runs. So you might want something like "On score submitted: request hi-score board" to guarantee the score the user is submitting will appear in the hi-scores.

could you upload a example — I tried to implement facebook to, did no go so good.

Thanks for the response Ashley, that helped a lot. I've now successfully got the text field to load up the current user's score, but I can't get it to load up the other users. (to test this, I've got several friends to play and submit scores as well, so there's definitely a few scores being submitted).

I would totally appreciate an example file if you have one too...

FatRat - you have to use 'append text' and a text object big enough. If you use 'set text' only the last score will be shown, or the size of the text box will cut them off. E.g. a big text object with

+ On hi score

-> Append text Facebook.HiscoreRank & ": " & Facebook.HiscoreName & " - " & Facebook.Score & newline

Does that work? If not I'll see about making an example.

Aha! Yes, thanks a lot. Using 'Append Text' works. I now have a list of highscores, but they are all showing up as '0' score and in the wrong order, but I think that's something I can fix.

— Is there any way you could upload your capx, or a example one? This facebook thing is confusing me.. :S

Have you gone through the entire Facebook game tutorial on this site first?

scirra.com/tutorials/58/how-to-make-a-facebook-game/page-1

Unless you have the game hosted on a secure domain (https://) the Facebook API has very limited functionality. That was the first headache I had when starting on this...

Yeah i tried to upload my game onto facebook. I have a server. But as far as a know its not https, how do you get this?

I got a certificate from godaddy for about a tenner, but I got a friend to configure it as I don't really know how to set them up. If you have a hosting package, you'll have to look into setting it up on that.

FatRat, What did you do to get the facebook scores working, I have a facebook game(Working) But the scores are returning 0 still..

I didn't actually do anything, it just suddenly stopped giving me 0's and started posting the actual score. I believe the Facebook API was being updated, or was down for maintenance or something at the time I was initially testing.

I found a few little bugs like that which seemed to fix themselves - I think Facebook are always making changes to their API and it just causes little niggles. Nothing we can do about it really!

I had the same problem making the Facebook plugin itself - it's very frustrating, sometimes it doesn't work but if you come back a few hours later it just works again. Facebook are notorious for being annoying like that with their API, just something we have to put up with unfortunately.

Ashley, Are you planning on making a twitter plugin?

I know its not as useful as facebook, But Twitter and facebook are the two main social networking sites that HAVE to be incorporated in modern games.

smitchell not yet, but maybe in future - still, it's an ideal one for a third party plugin dev to take on!