Straight to song shortcut - No need for menus

[W2k]

I would like to see an option added to go straight into a song by calling the FretsOnFire executable with a command line argument naming, for instance, the song folder.

For example, to run the tutorial I would write (from the FoF install dir):

FretsOnFire.exe /play "data\songs\tutorial"

Additional arguments could be added to select difficulty and to select lead/bass tracks. Without this info, the game would simply use the last played, as it usually does.

FretsOnFire.exe /play "data\songs\bangbang" /medium

(If for some reason the selected difficulty is not available for the chosen song it could just pick the nearest one, rounding up or down.)

Why do I want this? Because it would allow programming geeks like myself who don't care much for Python to write a "FoF launcher" that could do some cool stuff that FoF can't or won't do.

Also, this should be extremely simple to implement, as a mod or directly into the game.

Finally, if someone would explain to me how the high scores are encoded into the song.ini files, or point me at the right document, that would be cool.

[omganinja]

i think the high scores in the song.ini is encoded xml, but i could be wrong.

[W2k]

Well, the song.ini contains lines like:

scores = 63657265616c310a310a646963740a300a72300a

Which looks like hexadecimal code. If we convert it, we get:

c e r e a l 1
1
d i c t
0
r 0


For an empty high score. This is not XML. It looks rather like something apparently called Cerealizer. Could probably be reverse-engineered, but it would be much better if the FoF developers used an open format.

[osrenan]

Well, the song.ini contains lines like:

scores = 63657265616c310a310a646963740a300a72300a

Which looks like hexadecimal code. If we convert it, we get:

c e r e a l 1
1
d i c t
0
r 0


For an empty high score. This is not XML. It looks rather like something apparently called Cerealizer. Could probably be reverse-engineered, but it would be much better if the FoF developers used an open format.

wouldn't this afect the oficial score chart?

[ThatJon]

Looking at the source code, you can see the comment

Code: Select all

# Read highscores and verify their hashes.
# There ain't no security like security throught obscurity :)

The encoding code is

Code: Select all

def getObfuscatedScores(self):
 Ã‚    s = {}
 Ã‚    for difficulty in self.highScores.keys():
 Ã‚      s[difficulty.id] = [(score, stars, name, self.getScoreHash(difficulty, score, stars, name)) for score, stars, name in self.highScores[difficulty]]
 Ã‚    return binascii.hexlify(Cerealizer.dumps(s))

So basicly, it is a dictionary of scores, cerealized and then translated from ASCII into hex.

The scores are quite easy to read, but do include hash checks - this means it should be quite easy to reverse engineer the output, but a bit more difficult (without access to the source) to create a working scores line in the ini.

EDIT: Oh, and btw I think the idea of adding command line arguments is a good one that shouldn't be too difficult for someone who knows their way around the source to implement.

[Rogue_F]

Command line starting has already been suggested and it's on my TODO list.

-Alex

[W2k]

The scores are quite easy to read, but do include hash checks - this means it should be quite easy to reverse engineer the output, but a bit more difficult (without access to the source) to create a working scores line in the ini.

The application I was thinking about would be more like a high score logger, not editor. So I wouldn't need to break the hash.

Command line starting has already been suggested and it's on my TODO list.

You're awesome. Can I suggest that the game will also exit after the song has been played and the high score recorded? Otherwise, the user would be required to manually exit to use the "launcher" again. Obviously, there could be a command line switch to enable/disable this function.