Self destructing project: too far?

[Zekallinos]

That's the unfortunate thing with not being server-sided...

 

[Fireworksinc]

You could do this, but I don't see why you would go through the trouble.
Unless your game is amazing and has a large community of regular players, I doubt anyone would want to take the time to try and hack into it.  Don't take this as an insult, but until your number of players grows I don't think it's worth the effort to stop people hacking into it.

 

[Ellie]

People did in the Beta :thumb: though that was partially due to me accidently releasing the game unencrypted to the seven or so people that downloaded it. I.e. went into the unencrypted game and changed things such as player default stats, where the player starts, skill levels, etc. (Others actually unencrypted the game themselves).

 

[Fireworksinc]

People did in the Beta :thumb: though that was partially due to me accidently releasing the game unencrypted to the seven or so people that downloaded it. I.e. went into the unencrypted game and changed things such as player default stats, where the player starts, skill levels, etc. (Others actually unencrypted the game themselves).

But if you gave it out unencrypted, it doesn't take much effort for people to hack into it, so it wouldn't take as much time.

 

[Ellie]

(Others actually unencrypted the game themselves).

Anyway.

You could compress the exe and data another way that would make it more difficult to hack?

I've been searching a while but have yet to find one that would work with RMXP. The game has to access things within the encrypted file, so most wont work.

 

[rey meustrus]

You could use checksums for the data, and simply refuse to run the game if it fails.  I'm not terribly good at this though, so if anybody's got some ideas please do share...I definitely think a personalized compression/decompression system would be good though...something like, you have file "data.bin" which includes all of your data, including scripts...then the only script to be loaded in the game looks like this:

Decompress = Win32API.new('decomp.dll') #etc, I'm no good with win32...
Data = Decompress.call('data.bin')
$data_actors = Data.actors
# etc.
eval Data.scripts

 

[Anonymous]

Forgive me, I'm not 100% sure how the decompiler (or anything mentioned in here, really) works. But surely if something bad happened if the game was played while decompressed they'd just recompress it when they were done?

I'm not sure how/if this would work but if it's an online game surely there'd be a way to make the game monitor progress in the first area and if anything abnormal happened (the player had set themselves to a high level/given themselves a lot of money or put events to do one of those two things there or they'd changed the start area or something) it'd autoban them or something? I'm not sure how the onlineing thing works so it might be a lot of trouble to do it allthrough the game but if you did it in just the first area then it'd catch people who were cheating from the start.

 

[Ellie]

That's a good idea actually, testing for abnormal stats and such. The problem when people did this before was that they had to restart their character from scratch to gain the new stuff they'd editted in.

 

[rey meustrus]

Something else you could do is store more data on the server.  Collect some arbitrary data at the beginning such as appearance to build the character, send that to the server, and have the server calculate the Game_Actor object with properly initialized values.  Save the object server-side instead of client-side.  Store the database files server-side.  Anything that you can store on the server should be stored there, and maybe even encrypt the connection between server and client (decode it inside the client, so that the data can't be intercepted even by the computer receiving it).  Although as always, these are just ways to make cheating and hacking harder, not impossible.  What happens if the server gets hacked and a file silently replaced, and only the hacker knows that behind that one bush lies an invisible megasword?