I am trying to figure out how I can retrieve the list of games owned by a person by their Google Play Gamer ID. I remember that I saw the exact answer and code example somewhere on Google's API documentation or n their help center but I have spent half a day today and couldn't find it again. It's probably somewhere here and I just keep overlooking it.
I know that it is definitely possible not only because I saw it but also there are some products that actually use this function. Like this one → https://www.exophase.com
It doesn't have to be a list of games, a list of achievements gained by a person is also fine (since you can link achievements to games).
Related
So at the moment I'm working on a PUBG stats website(I know it's been done a billion times but it's a fun project) but I can't seem to find the total player count in the official PUBG api. I know there is a way to get the player count but I've been going through steams and PUBG's official api and I can't find it. Anyone have an idea where to get this?
This is definitely not available through the game's API, or in any other game that I know.
There was a hole in the steam API a few months back that allowed that info to come through, but it has since been fixed. This is not the kind of data developers want you to have access to, really.
Give this article a read:
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/07/steam-data-leak-reveals-precise-player-count-for-thousands-of-games/
I am trying to apply some APIs so that I can display and save Title, Image and Description of Latest Movies, Music Charts, Books & TV Shows on my PHP Website.
Currently I have come across the following APIs:
Movies: RottenTomatoes or TMDB API
TV Shows: TVRage or TMDB API
Books: iTunes RSS Feeds
Music: Last.Fm API or iTunes RSS Feeds
Could anyone please suggest me which one will be more helpful. Or if there are any better APIs than that ?
Also can I store the data returned by these APIs ?
I have been going through the Terms & Conditions, and everytime I read them I find something contradiciting. Please if anybody who has implemented these APIs can help ?
I can't recommend any for music or know of any API that gives you Latest Movies and such, but for the rest I'll give it a shot. I've been looking into this for weeks for a project I'm doing to teach myself how to program and I've came across a few.
OMDb API - Movies and TV
Free, no registration required, and easy to get started with data all retrieved from IMDB.
It returns Title, Poster URL, age rating, description, IMDB rating, etc.
Like I said, I can't see anything that would suggest it could show recent movies or anything, but until you find something to do that, take a look at this.
Google Books API - Books of course!
Also free with no registration requirement unless you want to use features that needs account access which probably isn't likely.
Storing Data
I originally misunderstood you here, so heres a quick edit:
You should be fine with storing it locally as it is publicly accessible anyway.
It's why the API is there in the first place.
I hope I've been able to help!
I think the iTunes Search API is what you need.
I can't make any recommendations for TMDB, however I have used OMDB and can recommend it. It's free and open source so you shouldn't have to worry about saving data.
For the others, I personally wouldn't be too worried about storing meta data for books, music, or movies/tv as long as you're not distributing the actual product in an illegal way.
For Movie and TV Shows you could have a look at Plex.tv - there are quite a few sources used for each of those, and the data is stored on the user's machine (which probably bypasses the question about rights).
For books have a look at Calibre - again, multiple sources of data stored on the user's computer.
There's the obvious answer of finding sources of data and then contacting them directly - T&C are often obtuse and unreadable, but having an email reply that says you can do something gives a plain and simple yes/no answer (even if it contradicts the T&C - but generally you'd only argue if the T&C says yes, and the reply says no)...
Finally, an API is good for consistent data, but technically HTML is similar to XML, which isn't unknown as API results - so any website can be a source of data if it's easily parsed :-)
I have been integrating the Games Services APIs into my games for a few days now and having a weird problem that can possibly qualify as a bug.
So I've setup a few test players with Gmail accounts and have added them to each other's circles. The problem I am having is that when I start the activity with the leaderboard's intent the "My Circles" tab doesn't show the other players in the current player's circles, even though the players show up on the Public tab.
Is there something obvious that I am missing?
A couple months late, but, considering I've recently run into the exact same problem, I figure I'll post my findings to aid anyone who stumbles upon this question in the future.
I'm assuming that you're still in the testing phase and haven't actually published your game via the Google Play Developer Console. Publishing is the key. There are two tiny sentences buried in a NOTE on this Google developer page:
https://developers.google.com/games/services/common/concepts/leaderboards#creating_a_leaderboard
Note: Social leaderboards will initially be empty until you publish
the corresponding leaderboard by using the Google Play Developer
Console
Social leaderboards won't be useful until after you publish. i.e. You'll never see social leaderboards during testing.
Do you guys know any API that provides access to episode air time? I want to make a little app that will remind me of episodes coming out from my favorite shows. (Something like a rss feed of what episodes came out since my last check.
(Feel free to link me to an existing app if existing).
http://thetvdb.com/ does that. Alot of larger projects, such as XBMC use it as their main API for such things.
FYI the API can be found here
Has anyone found a way to avoid leaderbaord hacking on Game Center or at least make it more complicated?
You can see a video of HackCenter, a Cydia app that lets you submit any score you want here: Hack Center
Even though that application is not supposed to be available on the Cydia Store we've all seen scores that are obviously fake on several games on the AppStore. Unlike the score submitted on that video, the fake scores are usually ridiculously high and they discourage other players, since they can never reach the top of the leaderboard.
I haven't been able to find out how the hack is accomplished (I presume they intersect the http call and just replace the score parameter with whatever they want?).
Any insight is appreciated.
The problem stems from allowing users to generate their own score data device-side. This would be a lot harder if all the score related calculations were done server-side and then posted to the score-board (I don't know how your app works, so I can't recommend a specific technique).
I think the BEST thing you can do is record data about HOW they got the really high score for review later by you. That may be impossible depending on your game's structure. It also might be forge-able depending on your games structure. For example, some game scores are impossible to get in-game just due to the physics on how the game works. This in my opinion is your best defense against it. Sadly, that requires monitoring it all the time....
Also, even if you can verify fake scores, someone could continually forge fake scores all day long and you'll never be able to keep up with it. Someones score submission bot will win in the end. It's not human, you are. It can post fake scores all day, you can't watch for fake ones all day, you can't verify 1000s of fake submissions. Trying to verify anything that is generated user-side (such as device ID, app being installed, etc...) is pointless. It can be forged. IP addresses are meaningless too. Your app is a on a mobile platform that can get a brand new IP all they want from the cell company. Tracking single legit real users is very hard if someone wants to hide from you because of this.
Maybe you can have some kind of app purchase verification with the help of Apple too. That would make it easier for you to ban offenders. They would have to pay you to forge your leaderboard, lol.
That's just my 2 cents, I hope it helps.
Because they're doing a http intercept, there's unfortunately nothing you can do. I've even found setting the max score for the leaderboard in itunes connect has no effect.
A game I worked on never serilaised the score to disk - so it couldn't have been changed there - and set max score to 30m. Yet the leaderboard was full with IntMax scores within hours of launching.
Hopefully Apple will have some fixes coming in WDC13 because as it stands, the worldwide leaderboards are useless.
You could try checking if the user has that thing installed I guess and then disable them from entering a high score if it they have the app.
I personally would just check for Cydia:
[[UIApplication sharedApplication] canOpenURL:[NSURL URLWithString:#"cydia://"]]
I am not sure what the url for Hack Center is exactly but, maybe you could try guessing it a couple times. I would guess 'cydia://hack_center' or something like that. And then once you find the url replace it 'cydia://' with it.
Have two hi score tables:those with cydia, those without :P
You can also set up your own server and use proper authentication and encrypted channels to upload score and then just compare whats in your server vs whats in GameCenter... You still need to clean up the leaderboard, but at least you will know what to remediate and which users to put on blacklist.