Sync more types of data to online account

[M4r5]

Hello SuperTuxKart community! Thanks for developing this fun kart racing game.

I think a useful feature to implement into SuperTuxKart Evolution would be enabling new types of player data to be saved to an online account. In addition to friends and achievements, could a player's

• Story mode progress
  
• Favorite karts and tracks
  
• Custom grand prix
  
• Installed add-ons
  
• Game settings and keyboard/controller configurations
  
• High scores
  

be saved to their online account? If the team decided to implement this feature, the synchronization should be opt-in, maybe by enabling a checkbox next to "Online" and "Remember password" on the in-game login page. That way, a player could decide if they wanted their data synced on a per-device basis. Also, display and graphics settings should be excluded from synchronization since they would likely be set differently among the devices a player is signed in to.

Please let me know what you think.

[Alayan]

• Story mode progress
  

That would be possible I suppose.

• Favorite karts and tracks
  

This data is much less limited in scope than story mode progress, and could contain data about various addons that are not part of the main addon repository.

• Custom grand prix
  

On paper it doesn't seem so bad, but there is also nothing that'd prevent a player from having 100 different custom grand prix.

• Installed add-ons
  

There is again the issue of storing data about third-party addons. I suppose your idea is to store a list, and then to have the synced device install whatever it is missing. Some may not be possible to install at all if it's not on the official addon repo.

It's unclear how to handle the case of addon removal. If one synced client removes an addon and it gets removed from the remote list, the other client is going to add it back to the remote list unless instead of fully removing the addon you've added it to a removal list. But then there is no good way to know when to get that information off, what if you've a third device to sync too?

• Game settings and keyboard/controller configurations
  

There are very few settings that should obviously be the same across devices, and those are quick and easy to adjust.

There are some settings not present in the UI a player might want to share, but it'd be strange to sync extra values from the config files that the standard game UI doesn't allow to tweak.

• High scores
  

At first glance high score are one of the top candidates for this sort of thing, because unlike settings you can't just spend 2 minutes to set them up. Although it means the game would need to merge local state with remote state, so if you do something like sync desktop and phone, you'd mostly get desktop highscores... More importantly, the highscores could be using arbitrary addons for the kart and the tracks, and you could easily get hundreds of highscores per player. Also arbitrary names for the player that got the highscore.