Enable leader board?

[brisdaz]

Would it be possible to enable google play games leader board based on number of wins. I think the API makes it easy to code? You could roll this in with the update to be compatible with Android L which it seems to be not compatible now as reported by google play reviewers.

Also how many enlightened, transcendent and masters are there? https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answer/3423625?hl=en shows how you can tell us this.

[eddybox]

Hi brisdaz,

Excellent question! We haven't added a leaderboard like this to Osmos for 2 reasons:
1) It isn't a true measure of skill, just a measure of wins, which can be brute-forced.
2) Leaderboards seem to get hacked A LOT, which seriously reduces their value.
But maybe it's worth adding after all. A player's win count can still give a rough idea of their skill (more experienced players are typically better), and if it gets hacked... oh well.
On the flip side I guess it'd be a way for experienced players to find one another...?

Thanks for the pointer on the achievements stats as well; I hadn't checked those before. Here are the current rank counts:
Transcendent: 14
Enlightened: 31:
Grand Master: 69
Master: 198
Expert: 494
Ace: 1340
Adept: 3879
Initiate: 7840
Neophyte: 16813

Thanks!

[brisdaz]

Yes it would make it easier to find worthy opponents. The Google Play Games leader board has an option to add to circles.

[brisdaz]

I guess coding for this was too much to make it into the minor update.

Also could you update the google play statistics? How many are from Australia or the majority from USA?

[brisdaz]

Any updates?

[eddybox]

Hi brisdaz,

Nothing new to report I'm afraid. It's been difficult to get any movement on the Android front lately. =/

In the meantime, here are the latest stats if you're interested:
Transcendent: 25
Enlightened: 44
Grand Master: 86
Master: 242
Expert: 595
Ace: 1,734
Adept: 5,255
Initiate: 10,754
Neophyte: 23,450

I don't see a way to get achievement stats per country/region, but over the last 60 days, Australia has accounted for 3.6% of Osmos HD downloads. (As opposed to 25.4% for the USA, with Russia as a close second.)

Cheers,
Eddy

[brisdaz]

Any updates? Nearly a year again.

Also someone on the Facebook Page was asking when the most popular time is to play multi player Osmosis HD.

[eddybox]

Hi brisdaz,

Sadly no updates. Apportable, the company whose platform we built the iOS-to-Android port on, appears to be dead unfortunately. Due to the way Apportable's technology works/worked, we would have to entirely re-port the game from scratch in order to make any updates. Sigh. We're considering that, but tbh it's probably a very poor idea financially. I'll post here if we decide to take it on though!

Time of day: Good question! I just checked in the Google Developer Console, but unfortunately they don't provide this metric on an hourly basis. The finest granularity is per day, and there doesn't appear to be a pattern there. (ie. weekends don't seem to be busier than weekdays, etc.)

Thanks a lot for your interest brisdaz – wish I had better news/info for you!

[chilinux]

Is there any plans to open source the game engine? I would be willing to buy the assets again (graphic textures, music, sounds) if the engine was available to play with. The inability to update the Android apps seems to indicate we will never see the game take advantage of newer features in Android (Vulkan Graphics API, Oreo neighborhood aware networking, etc). Having an open reference code for the game engine may also allow the community to help with other features on other ports as well such as supporting Wayland on Linux or performance tuning the emscripten/asmjs port.

[eddybox]

Hi chilinux,

If we had an Android codebase I'd consider open-sourcing it. Actually... if we had an Android codebase we'd probably just update the app!
As I mentioned, the Android version was built using Apportable's cross-compiling tech. We have Apportable's version of the Osmos project, which includes our iOS codebase, along with some additional custom #if ANDROID hooks and all of Apportable's meta project/config files. If anyone has any ideas on how to create a new build from that, either with new or rebuilt tools, or if you know anyone who has that knowledge, I'd be more than happy to hear it! (Definite potential for a paid gig there.)

I've considered open-sourcing our Linux codebase over the years, but haven't taken that on. (I'd have to revisit it and do a bunch of cleanup. Shipped code isn't always clean code. I should mention here that the mobile versions of Osmos (iOS & Android) are very different from the original Win/Mac/Linux versions: all the levels are different, in addition to a lot of the infrastructure, optimizations, etc. And multiplayer didn't even exist on desktop! So creating a new Android port from the Linux version would be a BIG job.

FYI I'm not keen to open-source our iOS codebase. That's the one platform that's actually still generating real revenue for us. (Not huge, but something.) Given how some other developers have gotten burned by open-sourcing their game project (a few bad eggs, I know), I'm reticent to do the same with a project that's still earning something. Maybe someday...

Cheers,
Eddy