For a school project, I'm creating a game that has a score system, and I would like to create some sort of leaderboard. Once finished, the teachers will upload it to a shared server where other students can download a copy of the game, but unfortunately students can't save to that server; if we could, leaderboards would be a piece of cake. There would at most be a few hundred scores to keep track of, and all the computers have access to the internet.
I don't know much about servers or hosting, and I don't know java, html, or any other language commonly used in web development, so other related questions don't really help. My game prints the scoring information to a text file, and from there I don't know how to get it somewhere online that everyone can access.
Is there a way to accomplish such a task with just python?
Here I have the code for updating a leaderboard file (assuming it would just be a text file) once I have the scores. This would assume that I had a copy of the leaderboard and the score file in the same place.
This is the format of my mock-leaderboard (Leaderboards.txt):
Leaderboards
1) JOE 10001
2) ANA 10000
3) JAK 8400
4) AAA 4000
5) ABC 3999
This is what the log-file would print - the initials and score (log.txt):
ABC
3999
Code (works for both python 2.7 and 3.3):
def extract_log_info(log_file = "log.txt"):
with open(log_file, 'r') as log_info:
new_name, new_score = [i.strip('\n') for i in log_info.readlines()[:2]]
new_score = int(new_score)
return new_name, new_score
def update_leaderboards(new_name, new_score, lb_file = "Leaderboards.txt"):
cur_index = None
with open(lb_file, 'r') as lb_info:
lb_lines = lb_info.readlines()
lb_lines_cp = list(lb_lines) # Make a copy for iterating over
for line in lb_lines_cp:
if 'Leaderboards' in line or line == '\n':
continue
# Now we're at the numbers
position, name, score = [ i for i in line.split() ]
if new_score > int(score):
cur_index = lb_lines.index(line)
cur_place = int(position.strip(')'))
break
# If you have reached the bottom of the leaderboard, and there
# are no scores lower than yours
if cur_index is None:
# last_place essentially gets the number of entries thus far
last_place = int(lb_lines[-1].split()[0].strip(')'))
entry = "{}) {}\t{}\n".format((last_place+1), new_name, new_score)
lb_lines.append(entry)
else: # You've found a score you've beaten
entry = "{}) {}\t{}\n".format(cur_place, new_name, new_score)
lb_lines.insert(cur_index, entry)
lb_lines_cp = list(lb_lines) # Make a copy for iterating over
for line in lb_lines_cp[cur_index+1:]:
position, entry_info = line.split(')', 1)
new_entry_info = str(int(position)+1) + ')' + entry_info
lb_lines[lb_lines.index(line)] = new_entry_info
with open(lb_file, 'w') as lb_file_o:
lb_file_o.writelines(lb_lines)
if __name__ == '__main__':
name, score = extract_log_info()
update_leaderboards(name, score)
Some more info:
The easiest is probably to just use MongoDB or something (MongoDB is a NoSQL type database that allows you to save dictionary data easily...)
You can use the free account at https://mongolab.com (that should give you plenty of space).
You will need pymongo as well pip install pymongo.
Then you can simply save records there:
from pymongo import MongoClient, DESCENDING
uri = "mongodb://test1:test1@ds051990.mongolab.com:51990/joran1"
my_db_cli = MongoClient(uri)
db = my_db_cli.joran1 # select the database ...
my_scores = db.scores # this will be created if it doesn't exist!
# add a new score
my_scores.insert({"user_name": "Leeeeroy Jenkins", "score": 124, "time": "11/24/2014 13:43:22"})
my_scores.insert({"user_name": "bob smith", "score": 88, "time": "11/24/2014 13:43:22"})
# get a list of high scores (from best to worst)
print(list(my_scores.find().sort("score", DESCENDING)))
Those credentials will actually work if you want to test the system (keep in mind I added leeroy a few times).