Watching other games (specially D3 on consoles) I’ve seen that some processes are easily “hackable” through the gap between an action (E.G. Item Gabling) and the way/time the game saves such action to the savegame where the player progress is registered.
Of course this can be effect from console limitations (dunno) so if something goes wrong a simple quit to dashboard can save you from a bad gambling, a death, etc…
But on PC, well, we have at least 4 proc threads to spread game systems and I thought on implement a “constant” save file system, that will be registering all important things right when they occurs ingame. Of course I don’t want to “stuck” the entire gameplay each time this savegame is occuring (until because on some situations I predict that “savegaming” will almost occur on log like speed) so “threading” sounds like a good way to make all this happen on the game background without the player get noticed.
Is this a widely used solution or there is a most professional/cheap way to achieve this?
A “constant” save system like you describe cannot exist, there will always be gaps in between file writes as the data you want to save gets treated then buffered for writing. People trying to circumvent such a system can easily block writes to the file, introducing a “gap” to kill the executable. And you would want to avoid constantly writing to the disk to begin with – this is a guaranteed TRC fail on consoles, for starters. It’s going to bog down any other I/O you do (such as loading your actual game files). Not to mention people can still savescum the good old way by making a backup of their save and restoring it if things don’t go their way.
No matter what measures you put in place, people will find ways to circumvent them. The sooner you accept this, the faster you can move on to more important things.
Unless your an online game (which if you are all important data should be on the server) there is absolutely nothing you can do to prevent cheating (as the guy basically says above). All you can do is make it difficult enough so it can’t be done “casually” (such as avoiding text readable save files)
Besides people who hack your game genuinely love doing it- just let them enjoy the game in their own way. A lot of franchises enjoy success by enabling that.
I would love it if a game kept saving progress every second.
I would then just set up an LVM snapshot every second for my file system, and have my choice of when to rewind time to with per-second precision!
As the others have said: A user who cheats in an offline game is just cheating him/herself. If they’re doing that, then that’s probably what they want to be doing, and given that they paid you for the game, presumably you want your players to enjoy themselves?
If you have any kind of mechanism that depends on not cheating the rules, then you must implement those mechanisms entirely server-side, and not trust the client with any state or state updates.
The D3 Gamble Bug simply ruins the game (or at least what the designers thought), as example most of D3 is about get “a set”, IF you can gamble for it infinitelly…
I don’t have trouble on accept that a player will “cheat himself” offline, but it’s kinda hard planning any good evolution/endgame experience taking into account that a player could simply max himself out through cheating.
Any way, thanks by the advice, I’ll try to think on some mid term solution.
