Profiles

This tech tip covers profiles and savepoints.

Player profiles are documented in this article on the Multimorphic support site.

Overview

A profile allows a player to have different settings from other players.

A profile can be used to make the game harder for a skilled player; this way a novice player can enjoy a more balanced experience when playing together. A profile can also be used to adjust the settings according to each family member’s preferences.

Only some settings can be customized per profile, as determined by each application. For some settings, it does not make sense to have different values per player (like the number of balls per game or the number of credits per game), so these cannot be in the profile.

When there is no profile, all the settings are taken from the global settings in the service menu. This is what you get when you choose <None> for the profile.

When a profile is active for a player, the settings customizable per profile are taken from the profile, and the other settings are taken from the global settings.

The Default Profile is assigned to Player 1 if Player 1 does not have a profile yet. The Default Profile is not automatically assigned to other players.

The player can change his profile before playing his first ball. It is also possible to add players with a specific profile in the Feature Menu.

When Team Game is enabled, players with the same profile are considered to be on the same team and their scores are combined. Team Games are not eligible for achievements like replays or entering high scores. It is possible to have a single player on a team (if none of the other players have the same profile).

A savepoint stores the progress of the player within the game up to that point. A savepoint is tied to a specific profile. A profile can have many savepoints except the <None> profile, which does not support savepoints. The only time you can save a savepoint is when the ball is pending launch. When saving, you can create a new savepoint or overwrite an existing savepoint.

A savepoint can be restored when the ball is pending launch. This restores the progress within the game to the point when the savepoint was saved. The score is restored, but the ball number is not affected. If you restore a savepoint on ball 1, you get to play the full 3-ball game. If you restore on ball 2, your progress and your score are replaced by the savepoint and you continue to play from ball 2.

Feature Menu

The Feature Menu is documented in this section of the SDK Developer Guide.

To display the Feature Menu, hold one of the red buttons and press Start.

In the simulator, that would be: press a and while still holding a, press s. The Feature Menu is fully operational when running P3SampleApp in the simulator.

In Attract mode, the Feature Menu lets you:

• Start a game with a profile
• Set the default profile
• Create a new profile
• Edit the settings for a specific profile
• Reset a profile
• Delete a profile
• Connect Bluetooth Speakers (if USB dongle is installed)

On ball 1 pending launch, the Feature Menu lets you:

• Add a player with a profile
• Change profile
• Enable/disable Team Game
• Save/Restore a savepoint
• Remove the last player (same as pressing and holding the start button for 2 seconds)

On ball “2 or more” pending launch, the Feature Menu lets you:

• Save/Restore a savepoint
• Abort the game

Note: It is not possible to display the Feature Menu when the ball is in play.

The savepoint options are not available when the player has no profile (<None> profile).

You cannot remove a player if there is only one player left.

The operator can configure the contents of the Feature Menu by removing certain options through specific settings. See the Feature Menu Configuration section of the SDK Developer Guide.

Stock Profiles

A Stock Profile is a set of settings with factory-selected values. For example, a game can define Easy, Medium and Hard stock profiles. See the Stock GameAttribute Profiles section of the SDK Developer Guide.

When a regular (non-stock) profile is created, it copies all the profile-customizable settings from the base profile:

If the game defines no stock profiles, the base profile consists of the global settings.

If the game defines a single stock profile, the base profile is that stock profile.

If the game defines multiple stock profiles, the player must choose in the menu which one serves as the base profile.

The default profile and the currently active profile are not involved in the creation of new profiles.

The application decides if an attribute copied from a stock profile is read-only or not.

If the game is upgraded and it defines a new profile-customizable setting, that setting will be added to the profile when the game accesses it for the first time.

The CreateStockProfiles() method in <appcode>GameAttributeManagerMode is where the stock profiles are created. P3SampleApp defines no stock profiles, but the code needed is shown in comments.

WAMONH does not define Stock Profiles, so maybe this feature is obsolescent.

GameAttributes

A setting is implemented by a GameAttribute. For more information, see the tech tip “GameAttributes”.

A GameAttribute is customizable per profile if it has the GameAttributeOptions.ProfileOption.

The PRW and PTV constants also include the ProfileOption.

This example, taken from P3SASettingsMode, shows how to create a profile setting:

InitAttr(37, "BallSaveTime", "Ball Save Time", "Ball Save Time", "Service Menu/Settings/Gameplay/General", PRW, 15, 0, 20, 1, 15);

Active Profile

The player’s profile is activated when the player becomes active (it is his turn to play).

The profile assigned to a player is stored in the Player’s Data:

string profileName = data.currentPlayer.GetData(ProfileManagerMode.DATAKEY_PROFILE, ProfileManagerMode.NONE_PROFILE);

To determine if the player has no profile, compare the name against the <None> profile:

if (profileName == ProfileManagerMode.NONE_PROFILE) { … }

Unless you are coding profile management, this is rarely needed. To get the value of a GameAttribute that can vary per profile, simply get the game attribute as usual:

int numAliens = data.GetGameAttributeValue("NumAliens").ToInt();

The attribute is looked up under the profile first, and if not found, it is looked up in the global settings.

Player Name

The player name is the profile name. This can be <None> if the player has no profile. The method returns "PlayerNotInGame" if the player index is greater than or equal to the number of players in the game.

string playerName = data.GetPlayerName(x);

The following method variant will return "Player " + (x+1).ToString() instead of returning <None>. This is what the apron display does.

string playerName = data.GetPlayerName(x, true);

The current player number is data.currentPlayerIndex; the value ranges from 0 to data.Players.Count - 1

Event Profiles

To access Event Profiles, open the service menu, select “Statistics”, then select “Create an event profile”.

The name “Event Profile” is unfortunate because it has nothing to do with ModeToModes events, or player profiles discussed earlier. Event here means an event that brings people together, like a pinball convention, a pinball tournament, etc.; Profile here means data that describes the specific attributes, like a population profile.

An Event Profile gathers usage statistics for the duration of an event. You can have multiple Event Profiles gathering usage statistics at the same time. The difference from regular statistics is that the operator decides when to start and stop collecting data for each Event Profile.

Multimorphic Directory

Profiles and savepoints are stored in the .multimorphic directory under the user’s home directory. This is also where the high score database, statistics and the module drivers are stored.

** The only profile-specific achievement is: “100 Games Played”.