Morning! have a double request / question (requestion?) regarding the leaderboards on Playdate Catalog.
Is it currently possible to set up multiple leaderboards with different ordering? (high->low, low->high)
Is there a plan to rework how the score value is stored or displayed? Could it be possible at some point to send a signed integer value or to format it as such on the Catalog’s front end? And if so, is there some point in time when it would be possible? (For example, via some pre-set or custom formatting function that would just subtract the signed half of the integer in my case.)
For a future game, I’d like to have two boards that show both the highest and the lowest scores. (I see an example in the docs with "Low Scores" board, but I’d think that’s just a foo/bar creativity outburst of the writer of the example )
I see in the docs that the score-saving api call contains a 32bit unsigned integer but I noticed hints towards additional improvements (in the Discord and/or Twitter) after P–Racing represented time as a miliseconds and it confused some folks.
In case that custom ordering or negative values aren’t possible, I could try to work around that — e.g. starting the game at the half of the 32bit signed range for some story reason, inverting the value at the end etc. …but that makes the whole idea quite more confusing for the players (and possibly less desirable than chasing the distance from literal zero in the either direction).
I won’t know if I make it to Catalog with this one, of course, but I’d like to know what the limits are before I get too invested.
I would also like a low-score-board option for a best time rank. I'm currently doing 10,000 - game completion time (in frames). Which is fine, but a little obscure.
I don't think so, as you mentioned the score is stored as uint32. You can manipulate it the way you want, but the Catalog leaderboards will just show the raw number.
It would be nice to choose a formatter for the leaderboard (time interval, signed number) or even better provide a custom formula/script, but this raises some security concerns.
Re the ordering, is it possible to set it up for each leaderboard individually?
I think that thanks to the highly curated nature of Catalog, it wouldn’t be too much hassle to review very simple formatters (e.g. no side effects, no deps, returning a string with defined max length), especially if these would be only evaluated on server (even by always adding them through support chat). Though of course, it’s always hard to estimate possible problems that stem from user input.
Thanks! I hope that in time, someone from Panic will check the thread. I’m not in a hurry and there’s a lot happening now, so I’ll see how it turns out. (And possibly I can ask more directly when I’ll be trying to get the game onto Catalog.)
Is there any update on being able to format scores for display on the game's web page? I'd also be interested in having the leaderboard display proper times instead of just an ugly integers...
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