API for global leaderboard

[MaxGraey]

It would be great to have the ability to save scores in the global leaderboard, which would be available for all cartridges. Such a table could then be accessed either from the game itself or/and as a link on the cartridge web page. You could even add GitHub account registration as an option.

wdyt?

[aduros]

It sounds interesting, is there an existing backend service that we could leverage for this?

[MaxGraey]

I'm honestly not familiar with free online storages. Here's a list of the ones I've heard of

1. firebase (firestore)
   https://firebase.google.com/docs/firestore/quotas

2. heroku
   https://www.heroku.com/free

3. back4app
   https://www.back4app.com/parse-pricing

[peterhellberg]

This would require all runtimes to have access to a network connection, maybe something that is not desirable?
(Let's say this becomes wildly popular and a hardware device is produced which is able to run WASM-4 carts)

[Limvot]

If it was setup as just a leaderboards API, you could have different sections with progressive fallback from global (internet connected) to just local high score, depending on the runtime. On the other hand, given the open nature of these games and runtime, I'm not sure if there would be any way to prevent rampant cheating / faking of leaderboard scores :/

[aduros]

@peterhellberg @Limvot These are good points.

Speaking for me personally, I'm most interested in working on the "retro-computer" side of WASM-4 🤓 I'm not opposed to going in a direction that adds social features, but someone motivated to work on that would need to drive it, since it would be a non-trivial amount of work.

I would suggest maybe waiting until we have more games that would use such features.

[JerwuQu]

Since RetroAchievements now supports WASM-4, maybe that should be the go-to for this, rather than WASM-4 itself supporting it?