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Hello..I'll try to help as best I can.
I have a game out called Hairy Legs that tracks the top 50 scores. I'll explain how it works in game and what goes on behind the scenes.

The game tracks the top 5 scores locally. Every time you play it checks if your score is higher than one of the top 5 scores and if so, it arranges the scores accordingly. There is a High Scores button on the title screen. When you click on that it looks for the web server that hosts the scores. If it can not find it, it continues on to show you the top 5 local scores along with the option to reset them. It tracks their name and score. For a keyboard I made my own. Took a screenshot of the actual iOS keyboard and then used it along with checking the mx,my position on a mousestate check to get which key was pressed. May be an easier way, but at the time I didn't know of one. If the device does find the server it then uses netwebget to download a data.ini file that contains the data in the format of name and then the score underneath it. I use readline to read each line and assign it to a variable..example "HighScoreOneName$" for the player name and "HighScoreOne" for the actual score.

If it finds the server it adds a button to the options to Submit Scores. This will submit your top 5 local scores to the web server. Here is where you almost need to know some PHP. Really I was very much a novice at PHP, but doing some searching I found some great sites that cover everything you need. I used netwebget to submit the scores. The server looks at the top score on your local scores and checks if it should make the top 50. If not it does not even bother looking at the rest. If it does it looks at the others and then rearranges scores accordingly. Once it rearranges the scores it then rewrites the data file with the names and scores. After you submit your scores you can click on the global scores button and see the changes right away, because whenever you click on global scores it retrieves the data file each time so that it can get any updates. The server does not change your local scores. You can reset them, but they are stored on the device. Global scores are not stored on the device. You are simply looking at them when you are on the Internet.

Here were some of my hangups. Again I was very new to all of this and there maybe or probably is better ways of doing it.

How to get the keyboard to work- Ended up using mousestate to determine what key was pressed and then assign the appropriate letter to an array. I allowed for 13 characters within the array, so if a person entered say 6 characters I had to account for when they pressed enter to have it fill out the remaining 7 slots with spaces.

Speaking of spaces- Netwebget would not work with PHP sending spaces. So before I sent data to the server I had to use a replace command and replace all spaces with underscores. Then when the file is retrieved because the user presses Global Scores I would reverse the process and turn all underscores into spaces before showing them.

To do what I did you need a server with PHP. I had a domain name through one of these cheap places that offer a domain name and web space, so I just made a folder to contain the PHP program and the data file. If you can get access to a PHP server it is not that hard to figure out.

Hope this helps some.

Christmas Rush-   http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/christmas-rush/id409499277?mt=8

You play as Santa who has been sabotaged in an attempt to prevent a merry Christmas for the children. Rather than repeat the details, check out the link for some screen shots and a more detailed description of the game. We are in the works of adding additional levels that wrap up the story as to who is behind the sabotage. We plan to release the update after Christmas. We are quite proud of it and excited about the update planned for it.

Thanks,
Gary Gindlesperger



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No sooner did I post this reply and I got word from Apple that Christmas Rush is approved and up for sale. This game was made with GLBasic.

Here is a link to it if you are interested. http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/christmas-rush/id409499277?mt=8

For Appannie I never put any info into it. I just use what they offer for free. I go to the site and put in the app name and it tells me where it ranks in the different markets.

Hello,

     I have one game out as of September. Hairy Legs and Hairy Legs Lite. I consider it one game although technically 2 apps. The paid version is selling 10-20 a day. There are some days it gets up in the high 20's and 30's. I've done no advertising at all. Just posted in some App forums about it. One thing I did that really helped was the free version. The free version did not come out until about a month after the paid was out. Daily sales were starting to dip below 10 a few times a week before the free version was out. Once the free version came out sales more than doubled for awhile. Now they have been 10-20 for about 3 weeks. I tend to put a minor update out each month just to refresh it on the "What's New Lists" such as App Shopper.

     One thing that helped me, and I cannot explain it at all, is that the free version became a hit in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Singapore. In those markets it was within the top 10 downloaded free apps and the free version was getting 5k+ downloads a day, which in turn translated to more sales. www.appannie.com is a great place to view how well apps are doing in different markets.

     Hairy Legs was about learning GLBasic and the whole App Store process. I would have been happy to sell 50 copies, so I am very pleased with what it has done. Took about 20 days, working a few hours a day to make. I have a more serious game under review right now called Christmas Rush. This is the one that more thought and time went into and I am hoping it does well.

     If you are looking to get into apps there is no easier way than GLBasic if you have limited programming experience. I've gotten better support here than you do some pay support plans. It is a great community. The biggest issues I had were getting the Apple side working with all the code signing and provisioning. If you are new to the whole thing, that part is very intimidating I think. My only drawback at all with GLBasic, and it is not the fault of the developers, is that Android is taking off in a big way and I would like to see support for that. In the meantime I am developing for Android with another software package, but GLBasic is by far the easiest and quickest way to develop of the 2 packages. Android support is something I hope GLBasic can pull off in the near future and I hope the developer is not afraid to charge a little extra for the time involved to create an Android version. Folks should not expect something like that in a free upgrade. Whatever the price, you will make up the cost in no time developing for the 2 most used platforms.

Take Care and Good Luck,
Gary

Has anyone here used GLBasic along with in app purchases?

Does GLBasic support in app purchases? I searched through the threads and could not find anything on it.

Thanks in advance,
Gary

Grats to you I got my first one 4 weeks ago. It has been taking 10-14 days for me. Usually about 7 days to go to review then 3+ days in review. I say usually because I have since updated it and am waiting on approval of a Lite version.

Please do not take this as me pushing my game. I have a game called Hairy Legs that has been in the app store for exactly 4 weeks now. It is my first game and I have learned a ton in the process. One of the surprising things I find is how few people leave reviews. For this game every 1 person leaves feedback for 16 sales. I have gotten 2 feedbacks now mentioning crashing. I am asking if any of you have the game and are having problems? For all the sales and for only 2 people to say about it I can't believe it is too relevent, but non the less I want to find out what is going on. I believe they simply have too much running and the iOS is closing it down. I've noticed on my own testing once I get about 12-15 apps running it will not start up, but I am able to do that with any number of other apps I have. So if any of you have the game, I only ask because I did post about it in the app section, please let me know if you are having issues or not.

Here is something I did find out that surprised me. I work at a small school in a small town. I know exactly 13 people who have iPhones or iPod touches. All 13 of these iDevices can multitask. All 13 owners were clueless on how multitask works. When I showed them there was a huge amount of apps running on them. My game would not run along with many other apps the had. They would get frustrated and just not try anymore. Now things work great for these 13 people. Any suggestions on how to deal with that would be more than welcome. You can get bad rating simply because they do not know what is going on with their device. I debating putting an info page after load screens that mentions that. I guess as techie typer people we tend to assume the average person know how to use these things and I was stunned to find out not one person did. Two of the people were big time Apple geeks and principals at the school. Even the kids were clueless on multitask. Many didn't know it even had the ability.

Thanks for any input,
Gary Gindlesperger

To get it to email I just use the following command whenever a high scores is submitted :

mail ("YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS OR TEXT ADDRESS", "Score Update",$_GET[name]);
If you are unfamilar with this command, "Score Update" is the subject of the mail/text I receive and $_GET[name] is telling it to get the value of the variable name, which holds the players name that was submitted from the iDevice.


I am using IF statements to compares the scores. When someone gets a score that is a high score it has to adjust all the scores below. For example if the submitted score ranks 5th plac, then the old 5th place moves to 6th and so on and so forth. Within the routine that moves the scores around I include this to email/text me the name that was submited. Then if someone does something really inappropriate I can change it. The server does try to catch bad words and common ways of spelling them, but it can not get all of them.

Hope that helps you

First off I need to give a big thanks to all the people who have helped out on these boards. A big thanks to Gernot for a quality product. I really appreciate the help and quick responses I have received on these boards. OK..the thank yous may not be appropriate for this forum so I will get to the part that is

Myself and some friends put together a game called Hairy Legs. I know it sounds gross but is fun and addicting if you get caught up in the whole high score thing. We initially released it 3 weeks ago without global scores. In the time it took to approves it, I managed to get global high scores working. On Tuesday of this week the update was approved. I know in a post I started awhile back about this topic some folks wondered if they would approve the app sending and receiving using PHP. That is exactly what this does. In a nutshell here is what happens.

You go into scores and it checks for an Internet connection. If you have an internet connection it enables global scores. It downloads a file with the names and scores. The PHP server handles the arrannging of the scores. If you want to submit your local scores you go to Options and press Submit. It then uses Netwebget to submit all 5 local scores. The server reads them and compares to see if and where you should be in the ratings. The server does any rearranging of names and scores and then rewrites the file with the updated data. On the iDevice it reloads the file to reflect the changes the server made so you can immediately see the results. That is how it works and it is approved and up for sale. Another little trick I added was that every high score submitted is texted to my cell phone so if anything in inappropriate is sent I can change it or delete it. This is handled through the server and not the iDevice. I do not know if that helped in approval or not. One other thing it does is I have a text file it loads and scrolls across the top of the global  scores screen. This way I can get messages to the player about events or changes. I have the PHP server doing all the work. All the iDevice is does is read the files and submits the scores and names. This way I can make changes without needing to update the version of the game.

Thanks again,
Gary

The version is 4.1 . Real weird. I've never had the problem before. Even in the same program. The Sleep commands that were not working were not in a loop. I know most things are in a loop in one way or another, but these commands were used for an intro screen and only execute once. Ran fine in the GLBasic IDE when compilied and ran. Once on the iPod it did not pause at all. Went so fast you never saw the sprite change.

Hope this helps. I used a work around for the time being.

Gary

More to the mystery...The same app has Sleep commands scattered throughout and they all work but the one section. So I started looking at what the difference is. Here is what I found. All of my Sleep commands that are within a loop such as an IF or WHILE loop work fine. The ones that do not are the ones that are out on their own. Here is basically what I am doing in the section that does not work.

I draw and move a sprite to a certain point. I want the sprite to change to another sprite, sleep, then change back and continue to move. The effect is to produce a face winking. When I run in the IDE it is perfect. When I run it on the iPod there is no pause at all no matter what highly ridiculous number I can put in for Sleep. These sleep commands are not within any kind of loop. That is the only difference I can see between the ones that work and the ones that do not.

Hope this helps,
Gary

Thanks alot for that piece of code. I will try it out. Looks like that should do the trick.

Gary

The ones I am having the problem with are a 3rd gen 8 gig and a 3rd gen 32 gig. Any other way to easily make the program pause without requiring user input to continue?

Is there any known Sleep command problem when compiling for iPhone? I don't remember having issues with it in the past, but I have not tried using it since I have the latest build of GLBasic. Now it does not seem to work at all on the iPhone/iPod. When I compile and run within the IDE it works just like it should, but when I send it to the iPod there is no pause at all rather I make it Sleep 200 or Sleep 2000.

Any thoughts on this? Been trying different situations and sleep seems to always work in the IDE, but never on the iPhone/iPod anymore.

Thanks Much,
Gary