Over the past week I have been grappling with a simple problem: determining how to create a high score list for the Fangs Invader game. This seemingly simple problem gave me a complete mental block that took a week to thaw. I am happy to report that on Friday night I was finally able to solve this problem. Here is a simple sketch that displays the functionality that I created followed by an overview of my solution.

The Architecture
From an application architecture perspective, I decided to do most of the heavy lifting in Processing because I am know it better than PHP. Hence the PHP script only has two functions: (1) saving the high scores to a text file; (2) displaying the high scores from the text file. Processing takes care of the following functions: (1) Determining if current player’s score qualifies him to be added to the high score list; (2) capturing the player’s name, if he has a high score; (3) re-sorting the high score list to include the new score and name.

PHP Script
Two weeks ago I struggled with PHP to create a script that was able to read data from a query string and save that data to a text file, and read data from the same text file and display it appropriately. After much trial and error I successfully put together a short script that is able to accomplish this feat.

I found PHP to be a very temperamental language. I am not used to working with un-typed languages – I am not skilled enough to take advantage of the additional flexibility they provide while I seem to get caught up in many unknown and unexpected quirks and behaviors. Nonetheless, I have not been dissuaded from learning this language and hope to build my skills over the next three semesters.

Processing Sketch
Shortly after I finished the PHP script I started working on the Processing sketch. In no time I had the Processing application reading from and writing to the PHP script. I quickly lost steam when I tackled the sorting of the highscore list. This is not to say that this problem is particularly hard, however, in the road to solving it I encountered a major a blank.

At first the problem seemed simple, I created a short algorithm that seemed to work fine. I was actually very satisfied with myself for having solved this problem so quickly and simply. I had even started to integrate the solution into my fangs game.

So my solution did work fine unless there was more than one entry on the list with the same score. When this occurred the algorithm would select the name of one entry and apply that name to all others with the same score. Another issue was that the logic for the Fangs high score list is reversed – the better scores are the lower scores. Therefore, I needed to create an algorithm that is able to locate the lowest score that is above zero.

This is when I hit into a hard brick wall, head-on. The problem was back and I did not know where to even start. My attempts at writing pseudocode were totally unhelpful at first. My mind was so focused on integrating the functionality into the game and doing other things to the game that it just did not want to deal with this problem anymore.

In retrospect, I see how my initial approaches to this problem were overly complex (I won’t even try to explain it here). At first I had a hard refocusing and “seeing the forest from the trees” so that I could tackle the problem from a different perspective. It took me 6 days to figure out a different approach to solve this problem. Part of this process required that I stop working on this problem for a few days so that my mind could disassociate from it.

Here is a pseudocode-like overview of the solution that I developed for sorting the highs core list. All of the functionality outlined below is encapsulated in the changeList() function that is part of a class called PHPconnect. To support my algorithm I declared three array variables, each one holds eleven variables: a position for each from the current high score list and one position for the current player’s score.

The newLocation array is used to store the new location of each element on the top score list with references to their current location on the scoreList array, which holds the pre-sorted rank of each element on the old top ten list along with the new player’s score, saved in the eleventh position in the array. All elements in the newLocation array are initialized to -1 when the changeList() function is called. This is relevant because the newLocation array plays an important role in processing lists that feature multiple players with the same score.

The tempScore and tempName variables are used to temporarily hold the re-sorted top score and top name lists. At the end of the chageList() function the scoreList and nameList arrays updated by being assigned the values from these temporary arrays.

There are two other variables that play a crucial role in this function: locCounter and locCounter reverse. These two variables are used to determine the new location of each element on the top score list. These variables are incremented each time that a score is found which is lower than the current one being processed. The locCounter variable is used to hold the location of valid scores (any number higher than zero). This variable holds a score’s position from the first location in an array. The locCounterReverse variable is used to hold the location of invalid scores (0’s and -1’s). This variable holds a score’s position from the last location in the array.

Now let’s take a look at the algorithm. An outer loop cycles through 11 times to go through each score in the highscore array. A secondary embedded in the outer loop is used to compare each score with the others on the highscore list. The sketch determines the pre-liminary new location of each highscore list item by counting the number of scores that are greater than the current score.

Once the preliminary location is determined, the next step is to check if the current player’s score is repeated, and if so to adjust its position accordingly. To determine if a player has a repeated score we check the position “locCounter” in the newLocation array. If the position is not available (it is not equal to “-1”) then we loop through subsequent positions, using a while loop, until we find one that is available. This available position is then set as the new position for this list element in the newLocation array.

Once each position in the newLocation array has been assigned, a loop is used to input data into the tempName and tempScore arrays. Then these arrays are used to reset the scoreList and nameList arrays with the updated top score list.

Here is the code for the PHPconnect class that I created: