This is documentation for how to use the friend leaderboards
system in HOVALAAG.

HOVALAAG does not have a global leaderboard. Instead, it uses
"friend leaderboards" to allow you to compare your results to
those of your friends, peers, coworkers, relatives, favorite
celebrities, etc. You must explicitly add your "friends"
to your leaderboard.


1. Creating your account HOVALAAG assigns each user a unique identifier (UID) of the form stbid:<something>:. You create your user identifier by running the game with the "-u" flag and your desired username > hoval -u "My Name Here" Then you can share the UID returned by the server with your friends via social media, email, text messaging, signal flags, etc. You can change your name in the future by running the same command. If you want to use the same account on multiple machines, you can copy your user information which is stored in the file AppData/Roaming/Silver Spaceship Software/user_id.bin
2. Updating the leaderboard HOVALAAG only accesses the leaderboard server when you explicitly request it. You will only see your friends' updates, and your friends will only see your updates, after you explicitly tell HOVALAAG to update to/from the leaderboard. You do this with the following command: > hoval -s You probably want to run this at the beginning and end of each play session.
3. Adding friends You can add a friend by giving the game their UID: > hoval -f stbid:<something>: For example, you can add HOVALAAG's author to your leaderboard with: > hoval -f stbid:nothings: "Friend" relationships on most social networks are symmetric; if Alice is Bob's friend, then Bob is Alice's friend. HOVALAAG does not enforce this kind of relationship. If you add someone to your friend leaderboard, they are not asked if they want to be your friend, nor are they even told that you added them. They will only see you on their leaderboard if they explicitly add you as a friend as well. If want to remove someone from your leaderboard, just run the similar command: > hoval -r stbid:nothings:
Notes Your level statistics are stored in a directory "./data" relative to the directory in which you run hoval.exe. If you run the executable from multiple places, you will have different results uploaded to the server for each directory. The server assumes you're uploading all your results each time, so if you have multiple data directories with different levels, only the levels you solved in that directory will be uploaded and your other data will be erased. HOVALAAG uses a friend leaderboard to avoid having to deal with cheating. If someone cheats, they will only affect the leaderboards of the people who've added them, and those people can remove them. The HOVALAAG leaderboard tracks histograms similarly to Zachtronics games, but I wasn't able to get enough data during beta testing to test them usefully and figure out how to display them, so histogram displays may or may not be added in the future. HOVALAAG doesn't automatically connect with and update the leaderboard because the networking was not tested sufficiently to be confident in it working properly and not causing crashes/hangs etc.