[Enigma-devel] ratings system

[Tacvek]

Some questions and comments about the rating system. That details behind the 
rating system was never very clear to me,
so that is why I wish clarification.

As far as I can tell, the ratings system will eventually be some form of web 
service, through which players can submit ratting/score information, which 
will appear on the level inspector? The game is will also be able to 
download updated rating from this service?

It appears that the ratings file will be stored in "~/.enigma/ratings.xml", 
this file is currently generated from the indices, but presumably that will 
be changed at some point in the future.

The update line in the rating file will give the information nessisary for 
enigma to download the updated file.

I assume that the ratings information and par information currently in the 
indices will eventually be removed, as they would be obsolete.

The Par value will apparently no longer be have a name attached, which 
implies that it will be calulated. What sort of formula will be used? 95% 
percentile? Average of the top 10% of submitted scores?

To avoid really low statitistics in the '% of users who have solved this 
level', some sort of filtering should be applied. For example a minimum 
number of levels be completed before the user can be considered. This avoids 
poeple who download the game, play it a bit, and decide they don't like it 
from tainting the percentages. It may also be wise to exclude people form 
consideration for that statistic who have not participated recently, as they
may have abondoned the game, and would definately drag down that statistics 
for levels introduced after they stopped submitting information.

The interface allows users to change rating values. Are those editable just 
to support development, or will that be an interface to allow users to rate 
the levels?

Also there appears to some sort of generic rating value, that will apear at 
the bottom of the Inspector, along with an average (from all users). I 
assume this will be user supplied via an interface not currently avalable?

Finally there is the annotation field, which I assume is intended for the 
user's own private use.

The rest of the data on the inspector screen all appears to be metadata that 
will be extracted from the XML files.

Is the above all correct? I dpn't intend to be a bother, but knowing the 
purpose of that code is somewhat important should i decide to participate 
more actively in its development. After all, I am capable of doing more than 
merely porting Enigma to Lua 5.1. (Speaking of which, lua 5.1.1 is availble. 
It is a simple bug fix release. It *Should* be possible to use the new 
versions as drop-in replacements for the old one. There are no language 
changes, and the scripts are unable to tell the difference.)