I am a programmer and I find this game very addictive, the same as bridge builder but with nicer graphics. Just what I was looking for !

I would want to implement a new php file which would Show the tower of any user:
h__p://worldofgoo.com/leaderboardtower.php?op=LoadImage&pid={x}&sessionkey={y}

..where {x} is the ID for the specific user.

That script could be linked to the user info page as well: h__p://worldofgoo.com/leaderboard.php?page=pinfo&pid={x}, and show the Tower Image on that page too.

I was wondering if the tower is being sent to the server, from within the desktop client, or just the height and number of goos used.

At least 1 site that 1 know of http://hell.student.utwente.nl/~maks/wog/img/tallest-tower-large.png does this already, but they require the whole profile filer to be uploaded.

I would be happy to provide that script for free and you guys can upload it to the server. (In this case I would need a sample script, let's say leaderboard.php)

[quote author=c4xp link=topic=1047.msg7307#msg7307 date=1229336745]
I was wondering if the tower is being sent to the server, from within the desktop client, or just the height and number of goos used.
The latter is the case, so the leaderboard can't draw towers unless the client is changed to send it along. This would probably increase the server load and required bandwidth considerably (although these could be alleviated by sending tower data less frequently, and generating images on demand).

I was afraid of that. :D
Anyway I can only hope the new version includes this data. (even less frequently or on demand, or on quit like I will sugest further down)
Thanks for the quick answer, though. I apreciate an onest answer.

Just some thing to wonder on:
- on average 300 goos
- each space has about 1goo/100pixels (maximum, although that figure is way lower)
- so we have a resolution of 30000 pixels (lets say in each direction) (5 zeroes,lets max that to 6 zeroes)
- each batch of data is sent in vector format(120039X000233,120056X000233,...)
- lets add linkage (I've put 6 links on avearge [each goo is linked with 6 other goos]) information: (120039X000233L0011L0012L0013L0014L0015L0016)
- so we have (43+1=44 bytes sent for 1 goo) that means 44bytes x 300goos = 13200bytes
- Compressing that using zip, delivered me (What do you know?) 261bytes !

I did not trimmed zeroes, I did not trimmed recursive data(linkage) and I even did not try to send data in hex, or base64 !

So if one programmer tells you that 261bytes of data sent when the user quits 'World of Goo Corporation' adds large overhead, send me his/hers(:-\) email address and I will talk some sense into him/her(:'().

If it is a corporate decision, then I will swallow my pride and say to myself: 'Oh well, I tried'.

gootool 0.10.0 (unreleased) automates the upload of the tower to the server as a user preference, so this is something I'm actually working on.

The automated leaderboard upload happens every few seconds I believe, plus 2dboy only have the one server, so I don't think tower processing is something they'll want to do. GooTool gets around this by offloading the image generation client-side (as you can already see in earlier versions) at the expense of a larger (but more infrequent) uploads.

-davidc