Feb 26th - showing up in search engines. Finally the site is showing up in google.com and yahoo.com which is nice. The total hits should be going up fairly swiftly. I have managed to get test data out of the database and am working on pulling it out in the right order. Lance had a new theory in the forums which should push the total score over the 110k mark once somone perfects it. Check it out here. Feb 24th - Database update You have probably noticed that While I have created a site for Nights high Scores, I havent acctually submitted and significant scores myself and certain aspects of the site are a tad messy. I am working on various aspects of the site on a daily basis but not really having done this before it is taking a while. I have got video editing under my belt which was a fairly large hurdle towards being able to provide all content I want. The last thing I want to sort out is a Database to manage the scores better and provide more detailed information on the players overall performance. Thus far I have constructed my database (although anyone who acctually knows angything about databases will probably collapse in paroxyms of laughter looking at it) and managed to successfully connect to it via php. I am currently learning how to query it and thus far have found numerous methods to make nothing happen in a number of interesting fashions but hopefully over the course of the next week I will get it sorted. I just wouldnt want anyone to think I am slacking, its all going on behind the scenes and once I get it sorted scores and movies will start arriving from yours truly. Feb 23rd - Miles Miles continues with some steady increases in his Mystic Forest and Twin Seeds scores but more impressive are his boss times with a 103 on Jackle just 1 second slower than Kraken and a very fast new site record for Reala with time of 108 seconds. Feb 22nd - Scoreattack.net, the first month I started this site a month ago yesterday and I thought I would just take a moment to let you all know how we are doing. We have had over 700 hits and 1500 page loads. There are 12 forum members contributing about 250 posts in 40 odd threads. I have uploaded 10 or so gameplay videos and used a couple of gigs of bandwidth serving them. Also we have broken 600 000 on 3 levels thus far due to the efforts of Lance and Kraken. Very promising members Kraken and Miles seems to be storming up the charts with new entries coming all the time it looks like there is a real potential for a serious community here. Not bad for the fisrt month of a niche site dedicated to a 10 year old game on an underdog system? Thanks very much to all you guys for contibuting so actively. Feb 22nd - Lance Way, Miles, Nights_91 This is what I like to see, movement from three different players over the night. First and foremost welcome to Nights_91 who enters with some good numbers over 300k on some levels including a 307 320 on Soft Museum which is well with in reach of the current best for this dream. Lance Way puts in some time on Christmas Nights with his second 600k plus score. Apparently there is still a fair amount of improvment possible here. Lastly Miles continues moving on up with some new boss times and and bettering most of his Twin Seeds and Stick Canyon scores. Feb 21st - Score update (Kraken) Well the answer to last nights question was apparently no. Kraken brings it home with a 630 480 on Frozen bell being the second highest score on the site, a 50 220 on FB4 and a very fast 100 on puffy. Apparently he is going after Lances Mystic Forest score next... Feb 20th - Score update (Kraken, Tabitha) Kraken continues to add numbers to his Frozen Bell total bringing it up to 615580 which he still says isnt his best. Where is he going to stop? Also improved a couple of my own scores on SC4 and SV1 although not by much. Feb 20th - Score update (miles) Truly impressive increases in almost every level from Miles. He put almost 200 000 on his Mystic Forest total and got a couple of very fast boss times. A future record holder? Feb 19th - 1st Puffy 2.0 I have added a puffy 2.0 video to the boss section leaving just Wiseman and Clawz to go. Did alot of preliminary reading on the planned Database which should make things alot easier to update but its going to be a long time coming as its fairly complex. Corrected a few mistakes curtesy of the ever helpful Lance and made a couple of very minor improvments on a couple of my own scores. Feb 18th - 1st Proof Video First site record proof video is up in the dream videos section which is a score of 103 540 on Stick Canyon 1. The link accutally breaks twice, both times in silly places as opposed to anywhere hard but seeing as its a level you need about 400 or so on to link perfectly and as its currently a site record I am going to put it up there for now. Also for anyone wanting to learn the infinite for Mystic Forest 1, a video is available here, right click to save, I will put it on the research page at some point. Also updated my small increas on SC1 on the score page. This only just beat Lances number 2 score so I am not expecing it to last long. Feb 18th - New player Miles! Slight Hiatus due to me being under the weather but after work I had the pleasant surprise of a new player to update. Miles steps on to the scene with a complete set of score including SV and FB svores of over 300 000 and a very impressive 400k plus score on Splash Garden. His boss scores for Puffy and Gillwing are also top notch. Meanwhile Kraken continues to rampage through the Frozen Bell ranking further increasing his FB1 score. Feb 15th - Added reala and the research section. Another couple of videos, a 2.0 on reala and my current project which is getting an infinite loop on Stick Canyon 2. Check out the video to see how close I have gotten and feel free to post comments in the forum. Also a tiny increas on my Reala time. Feb 14th - Added Jackle Added a Jackle video to the Boss 2.0 page. The videos for Gulpo, Jackle and Gillwing are all much better quality than they were. I recendoed them at 640x480 which doubled the size but the videos are only a few seconds long as it is so I think the trade off was worth it. Also had a small improvement on my Jackle score after plenty of practice. Feb 14th - About page Did some general site related work on the HTML and added a new page explaining what I am trying to do here. Edit - ARGH, update page killing horror, hope nobody saw that. Feb 14th - New Glitch page Love it as we all do, I am sure everyone has noticed Nights into Dreams is a slightly broken game. I have added a glitch page to the left hand menu to document any we find. The first one is a glitch allowing you to break out of Splash Garden 3 and "warp" back to Splash Garden 3. I know its dreadfully lazy but the glitch page is only linked from the main index page for now as I am adding another page this evening and I would rather do it all at once. As per some advice from the ever helpful members of the forum EVL and Lance I am making a few modifications to the HTML to make the site a bit more seach engine friendly, so with any luck we might start to see a little more traffic. Feb 14th - Videos reorganised After about a week of messing around I have all the videos encoded correctly in a way which I find more or less gooe enough for now although I will continue to play with them. They are also renamed along the lines of the suggestions from Lance and now watermarked with a little scoreattack.net logo in the corner. Feb 13th - Score update (EVL) Evl again with improvments on every mare in Splash Garden including a 34 530 on SG4 which is almost a 10 000 improvement on his previous score. Will his first 400k+ score come that soon after his first 300k+? Feb 13th - Score update (EVL) More steady improvments from EVL. he got good across Soft Museum (NOT an easy level scorewise) and Splash Garden, taking a couple away from Skaternights. Not only that but he broke 300k for the first time om Splash Garden! More improvements from EVL soon no doubt. Also for some bizzare reason I didnt include Lances SM scores. Now rectified. Feb 13th - Minor corrections Largely based on some suggestions from Lance I made several corrections and updates to various areas of the site. He also mentioned a slightly better thought out format for video nameing is in order. I was about to upload all these renamed files today but I FINALLY worked out the exceptionally stupid thing I was doing to stop all the files compressing correctly so I am going to sleep now and re do all this in the morning as I have been staring at this screen so long my eyes are bleeding. Feb 12th - Score update (Lance Way) Another player from the sadly defunct versusmode.com arrives. Lance way debuts (here at least) with some very very impressive scores including this sites seconds score in excess of 600 000, a very strong 636 260 on MF. Worth noting he scores are pretty much dominating the charts and are well worth a look. I am going to have snag me one of them 600k+ scores later I think! Well done and good to have you involved again! Feb 12th - Site update Video compression looking better and better, I have uploaded a reasonably nice video for SM1 coming in about about 40 mb for 3 minutes and a new Gillwing vid for anyone who is interested. I have found a really useful tool which will allow me to capture individual parts of a DVD which is good as I may have something like 2 hours of footage and only need ten minutes in total spread over 4 different places. Suffice to say I am very happy indeed. Worth noting that in addition to submitting his scores Lance has made a couple of noteworthy contributions to the forums including a thread about a glitch which gets absurd scores instick canyon. Read the FAQ carefully as it looks like it may damage your save file. -Edit- clarification from Lance on the effects of the glitch: "it won't corrupt the file at all, but you *will* be stuck with the ridiculously high glitch-score as your top Stick Canyon score after performing the glitch, (because you'll simply never beat it with a legitimate score,) so the effects of the glitch are permanent in that respect;" Also this latest update of scores brought something to my attention, occasionally, especially with boss times, people may end up with identical scores, should this happen the person who registered their score with this site first will be placed higher in the rankings. Hope that is ok! Feb 11th - Codec Problem fixed? I think I might finally have cracked the problem with the video encoding. I am basically playing for a couple of hours while recording on DVD, then ripping and editing what I want. This is in essence a very simple thing to explain but its acctually VERY difficult in practice. There are so many factors involved in getting reasonable compression its not true and while I am not 100 percent happy with what I have, I am at least able to get some watchable footage up with only tedious amounts of hassle. I plan on refining both the quality and compressed size of these videos as time goes on but for now this is good enough as I want to acctually spend a little time working on my own scores and start looking at learning mySQL. For now, there are three videos available to look at, infinite links on SM1 and SG1 as well as a gulpo2.0. I have several more interesting bit and pieces recorded and full version of the program I want to use arrives I will add them to the site. Also updated a couple of scores for myself and added a little information to the FAQ as well as plenty of general tidying up like adding this link banner to the FAQ should anyone want to link to me: finally adding a link to Nightsintodreams.com. Hopefully Trippy wont get mad at me for making her server fall over with all the extra traffic thats going to generate... Just noticed an old face in the forums, this could be interesting! Feb 10th - Score Update(Kraken 600 000 plus!). Yet more improvements from Kraken on his Frozen Bell mares, well over the 600 000 potential now. Also an impressive 1 second improvement on Jackle. -Edit- About 10 minutes after puting up the above set of score for Kraken, I got a message saying he had broken 600 000 on FB. This is a Major achivement. He put lots and lots of work into this and the score is very well deserved. I have no doubt we will see more top quality numbers from him in the future. Feb 10th - Score Update(Kraken). Another massive FB improvement, adding nearly 7 000 points to his FB1 score. His potential dream toal for FB is now comfortably over the 600 000 mark! Just need a good run to come together for him. Feb 9th - Codec news. A little good news. I have FINALLY figured out what was wrong with my video encoding. The files are still MAY to large but I can now at least encode them in some vauge way. I just need to work out how to get the sizes down to something more manageable and find out how to de interlace them and things like bat. Another new page too. I am going to stick to a misc page for videos for all the dreams, until such time as I have one more vids for each dream anyway. Putting new menu buttons in is a pain and I would rather to them all at once and I dont want any of that annoying "comming soon" or "under construction" type stuff. Feb 9th - Score update (Kraken) Yet more improvements from Kraken, 2 seconds faster on Jackle and a further increase on his FB4 score. Looks like the link ball on the bobsled run is the key. This brings Krakens total pre boss score up to 295 060 for Frozen Bell which is just achingly close to the 300 000 mark required to be the first score over 600 000! Good Work! Feb 8th - If nothing goes wrong....continued Just so I dont feel like I havent achived anything at all the past couple of days, I knocked up an archive page, tided up the HTML a bit and made a videos page for the solitart Gulpo vid. I hope this isnt tempting fate. -Edit- Ok, have a right click of this video, its a 342 link on SG1 Its encoded in DivX. I am sloooooowly getting there. If anyone who plays these videos would be kind enough to let me know if they work allright? with sound and in sync and things like that I would be oh so greatful. Feb 8th - If nothing goes wrong.... Did I really say that? I thought I had a perfectly working system sorted, a nice 342 link video for splash garden 1 and I was already to start encoding stuff and then everything went pear shaped and gave me a giant stack of errors and stopped working. Not a fan. Its kind of irritating, I havent really had time to play the game in weeks cause of all the work on the site. Kraken is going to beat me soon. Feb 7th - Codecs hassle After about 4 days of fiddling about I have managed to get 40 seconds down to about 7 MB which is still fairly huge but finally its at least workable. I am going to put down a few hours of footage tonight and start making videos. Expect infinite loop movies of the first mare of everything bar Spring valley by the weekend if nothing goes wrong... Feb 6th - Score Update. Some very strong improvements from EVL. Adding almost 100 000 to his SV and MF scores. Very impressive indeed. Working on the video a little more but the codec thing is still a little on the confusing side but I am still slowly making progress. Feb 5th - Plenty of news. Things have been ever so slightly quiet on the score front for a day or two. I have been occupied with various other bits and pieces for the site. I took all the January news out of this page as it was getting a little unruly, an archive will be going up tomorrow, I added another section to the site on a friends suggestion for the breeding aspect of the game which I will confess to knowing nothing about but would like to learn. I also made a small modification to my Saturn pad to make it a little more comfortable to use. I will put up pictures on the morrow. Most interestingly, or for me at least, I did alot of research and decided to got the DVD Recorder route for getting videos for the site and after much messing about, ripping, re ripping, encoding, re encoding, editing, pc crashing and files being WAY bigger than they re meant to be I got a video. I messed about in the game for about ten minute and took this little snippet as a preview of things to come. I plan to have videos for all the bosses in the very near future then move onto the levels themselves. This was recorded using the DivX codec so google for it if you have problems but I hope it wil be ok. I still want to try to find a better quality of compression and get the size down a bit cause 13 mb for 40 seconds is still pretty big but its all part of the refining process. Let me know what you think in the forums if you are of a mind. Gulpo2.0 right click to save I hope to acctually put some time in playing the game soon.... Feb 4th - site progress. Im very pleased with the site thus far both in terms of how it looks and Very happy indeed that there are 4 or 5 active forum participants and several people submitting scores. I am slowly starting to publicise the site now, added myself to the NiD Wikipedia page and join the webring. I am trying to work out why we arent appearing on Google but I understand that takes time. In terms of things I want to do from now, the whole video capture thing seem very very tricky so I am going to look at the prices of DVD Recorders with an aim to just recording DVDs or gameplay then ripping reediting and re encoding them as AVIs or something. Also I really want to set up a MySQL database for the scores as if this place becomes as popular as I hope it will alot more people will be submitting scores so manual updates wont really be an option. I have also contacted a couple of people I have run across ever the years who were pretty damned hot at the game so there might be a high level player or two putting in an appearance in the not to distant future. Feb 4th - Score update First set of scores for Christmas nights. A very complete set at that from Sun Wukong, includes every mare, link attack, time attack and even a score for the utterly zany "sonic into dreams" mini game. Welcome to Sun and good luck with score on the full game. Did A little work on my FB times and submitted a first set of my own scores for Xmas nights. Feb 3rd - Score update More very impressive Frozen Bell scores from Kraken including a very impressive 79230 on FB3 and a total dream score of 563 360. Could Kraken be the first user to break the 600 000 mark? Also I realised I had entered a totally random score for my FB total. Now corrected. Feb 2nd - FAQ and irritating news Updated the FAQ and credits sections and the score submission page with news about the score submission forum. My video card arrived but it is so screwed it effectively shot my PC in the brainpan. I have no clue why but the software made my pc BSOD which is has never done before and it took me an hour to get all the horror off my HD. I am going to look into alternatives cause I REALLY want to get some videos out up ASAP. Also a set of scores for Skaternights for splash garden. Hope to see a complete set once a new battery is tracked down! Feb 2nd - Score update www.scoreattack.net is now open for business. Two users posted scores in the forums, EVL and Kraken. A promising set of first scores from EVL and some amazing numbers from Kraken particularly in the Frozen Bell dream and the boss times. Feel free to post any questions about the game or how we got our scores in the relavent forum. Looks like I need to work on my FB times... Feb 1st - Score Update The first high score update of the site is an improvement of my own, getting 100 240 on Frozen Bell 1. Pretty pleased with that as its a 5000 odd point increase!