Scores and leaderboards

Personal bests, the per-game global tables, and what stops a fake score.

Two things are stored: a personal best per game in the player's profile, and a global top table per game in an ordered store.

Personal bests

Profile = {
    Store = "uxrAM_Profile",
    Version = 1,
},

The store used is Store .. "_v" .. Version, so the shipped values give uxrAM_Profile_v1.

Bumping Version starts everyone from scratch. It is versioned separately from the leaderboards so a profile-schema change does not have to wipe the boards.

A best is per game id, not per cabinet. Two Snake cabinets share one number.

The leaderboards

Leaderboard = {
    Enabled = true,
    TopN = 25,
    RefreshSeconds = 30,
    Store = { Prefix = "uxrAM_LB_", Version = "v1" },
},

One ordered store per game, named Prefix .. GameId .. "_" .. Version. With the shipped values, Snake publishes to uxrAM_LB_Snake_v1.

Field	Default	Effect
`Enabled`	`true`	Publish and read at all
`TopN`	`25`	Rows shown on the panel
`RefreshSeconds`	`30`	How often the cached top table is re-read

The board panel is part of the game-over screen and the framework builds it; there is no board model to place in the world for this system.

Bumping Store.Version starts a fresh season on every game at once without touching anybody's saved best.

What stops a fake score

The games run on the client, so the score arrives from the client. Four checks run on the server before anything is stored.

Check	Rejects
The game id must exist in `Settings.Games`	Scores for games you do not have
The score must be a real, finite, non-negative number	`nan`, `inf`, negatives, non-numbers
The score must not exceed that game's `MaxScore`	Absurd numbers
Submissions are rate limited by `SubmitCooldown`	Flooding the store

SubmitCooldown ships at one second, per player rather than per game.

MaxScore is the only ceiling, so set it deliberately

A client-hosted game cannot be fully verified from the server: a determined player can submit any score under the cap. MaxScore is what decides how bad that is.

The shipped values are chosen per game to be well above a genuine run and well below absurd. If you add a game, set MaxScore to a few times the best score you can achieve yourself, not to a round large number.

This is the standard trade for arcade games in Roblox. Server-authoritative arcade games mean replaying every frame on the server, which costs more than the problem is worth for a cabinet in the corner of a lobby.

If a game's score matters enough to be worth cheating for, do not pay it into your economy directly. Cap what a leaderboard position can earn.

What the submission returns

{ ok = true, best = 4200, newBest = true, rank = 12, top = { … } }

The game-over screen uses all four: the score, whether it beat the old best, where it places, and the table to show.

A rejected submission comes back with ok = false and the player's existing best, so a throttled submission does not appear to erase their record.

Messages

Messages = {
    GameOver = "GAME OVER",
    NewBest = "NEW BEST!",
    Empty = "No scores yet. Be the first!",
},

Three strings, safe to translate.

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