Hi, I’m trying to decide whether to implement Openfeint or Game Center into my game. Which one do you guys think is better? On one hand, Game Center only works with ios4 so that leaves out all the people still on the ios3. But Game Center might be more attractive to the rest of the crowd. On the other hand, Openfeint has a pretty big community of games and you can get your game featured by them and advertised. Also, Openfeint says on its website that it’s “Game Center Compatible”, but I don’t know what that means.
@jingato, Game Center is a 100% requirement without a doubt. If you want to stand even a slight chance of getting put on one of Apple’s top lists in the App Store you absolutely must have Game Center support. They even have a whole section devoted to games with Game Center integration. It’s just not worth it to miss out on that.
Side note: you do know that you can have Game Center integration in your app and still target iOS 3.x? Just don’t show the Game Center leaderboards/achievements for older devices and it will work fine.
is it possible to have both integrated and have openfeint run if 3.X is detected and gamecenter run if 4.x is detected? would that be hard to do?
@jingato, it is totally doable. Just check for iOS version and then either post to OpenFeint or GameCenter based on iOS version.
But then when you’re on 4.x wont it still be running openfeint regardless of whether you posting to it? You’ve convinced me to use Game Center for sure, and I even know someone who has a pretty nice Game Center plugin I could buy 
that being said, do you think it’s even worth it to bother with adding openfeint at all?
I have a couple questions, maybe you could shed some light. I was wondering if Game Center had some specific features that openfeint does.
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The ability to save your game data to there servers so it can be retrieved later, or on another device.
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Offline leaderboards
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Ability to connect to facebook and post to there page
@jingato, GameCenter doesn’t have any of the options you are looking for. It sounds to me like a hybrid approach is the way to go for your case if you want to grab the OpenFeint features.
Does your game center plugin do anything to compensate for the lack of offline support? Like saving the score and trying to upload it again every so often?
The plugin doesn’t try to do anything without your concent such as retrying failed scores. It will tell you when a score post fails and then you can send it in the future if you would like. You can also grab the full leaderboard raw data and display it any way you wish.
I guess I could figure out a way to save it if it fails and set a flag to retry to send it the next time the game loads or something.
What about achievements? What happens if they get an achievement and they are offline? Do they just not get that achievement? is there a similar method for letting you know if it fails to unlock an achievement?
There is a similar event fired when an achievement fails as well. You can also grab the raw achievements and store them for offline viewing.
I was just reading over the Game Center documentation and I noticed this
Does that mean I can only have up to 25 total leaderboards? I plan on having 200 levels in my game. Does that mean I won’t be able to have a leaderboard for every level?
I also saw this
and
What would you suggest to be the best method to handle this? Is it possible ant future releases of the plugin might handle this automatically for us?
@jingato, there are quite a few people who fine GameCenter to now have enough leaderboards. I highly recommend sending a feature request off to Apple. That is the only way we will get the features we want. The plugin lets you know when a post succeeds or fails. If you want to support reposting, when you get a post failure message, just save the score and leaderboard then send it later. I doubt the plugin would ever get support to handle something like this. The main purpose of the plugin is bridging the gap to do things that are impossible to do from Unity. Saving a couple variables and calling a function at a later time is totally doable from the Unity side of things and it leaves the control in the hands of the developers to cancel resends if they wish.
Games like angry birds that also have a lot of levels, group the levels to worlds and have a leaderboard for each world.
Although having a per level one too would be nice.
That’s one options…well I guess the only option. I emailed them about it and asked if they would be increasing that limit any time soon. Limiting it to 25 is just ridiculous. I don’t think there should be any limit at all. Why limit it? Openfeint doesn’t limit you.
I already have it broke up into 4 worlds with 50 levels per world. It really sucks to have only a leaderboad for all 50 combined. I could break it up to 8 world with 25 per I guess. It just seems like a pretty lame “hack”. I really don’t understand apple sometimes. Why even bother making this big game center sdk and then cripple it with a 25 leader board limit. I can’t remember my last game I played that had less than 25 levels. I was gonna have more than that in my lite version!
Game Center isn’t still in beta right? It’s lack of features and crippling limits make it seem half assed. But yet I’m going to be forced to use it if I want any chance of being featured. So in essence, Apple is forcing me to make my game a lesser quality than it could be if I used the much more featured and non limiting Openfeint.
thanks apple
This is just my feeling, but gamecenter feels like an introductory release for me. Like “here it is, it works now, we’ll add more features later”…
But then again I might be completely wrong and apple might intend to keep this underwhelming feature list as the final one.
I think the only solution is going to be to integrate both. Have OpenFeint with individual leaderboards and all it’s extra features like social network integration, offline leaderboards, saving game data to there server. And then just include Game Center with a single leaderboard for each world, just so you can say you game supports it.
I think Game Center will be great in the future, but right now it’s playing catch-up with OpenFeint. OF also has GC integration, so both isn’t much more work. You can tell OF to submit GC achievements. The extra features of OF are definitely worth it, especially things like cross-promotion. But including GC makes the gods of 1 Infinite Loop smile upon you and feature your game 
I think Game center is oviously best. I em stuck on that position. what is the right way to use for leader board … at last I decided to use game center…