Titan Attacks Save Games

[Davaris]

I was wondering if anyone knows how they did the save games in Titan Attacks? I backed up a save game to a zip file and when I restore it the game deletes it.

[svero]

That's probably to stop people from using save games to cheat on the highscores. Not that it much matters.. all the top highscores are cheated. I submitted a real score that was several 10's of millions past the ones listed and then shortly after someone put a fake score up just above mine so I stopped trying. If you're clever you'll realize you can tell the fake scores from the real ones just by looking at them.

[jankoM]

that's sh*t.... Is there not any way to make scores reliable except recording the whole gameplay and posting it to web (1) ... I am making something score based too.. and with cheating - point of it all looses greatly. :(

edit: (1) which would in most cases take too long - ok even this could be hampered but would meen so much work to get just 1 gameplay that it most prob. wouldn't be done (and you have so much data that you can check some things and make efforts worthless)

[princec]

Hm, I'm a bit confused as to how this bit of code

if (**special check which I won' tell you**) {
throw new Exception("Cheat!");
}

is being bypassed... because it's on the server.... I will delete all the dodgy scores forthwith.
<edit> Hm, probably because I forgot to upload that particular bit of code in the first place! Haha. Well, fixed now.

Cas :)

[jankoM]

how about this idea. At the begining of the game (if player wants to go for online scores) tcp connection is open (you open like XML stream) with the server and then you send every 5 seconds changes from the last sending: <change score="30" shield="-2" kills="3" enemy-hits="20" level="10" ..../> into the stream.

For someone to fake this he would need to build an app to simulate it in real time which would not be so little work. And he would have to know all the levels (all enemies that are there...). You could do allmost none checks at the begining and if you see someone really made a simulator you can just add them up on server - if you have enougth of data you can do sanity checks for many things I think and I really really doubt someone would work on breaking that rather than just playing the game (and he would have no feedback or knowledge what server checks at all).

[princec]

Much more trouble than it's worth. However, storing a few other bits of information in the Score class would probably tighten it up a lot, such as shots fired, level attained, ticks elapsed, money spent, etc. and I could plot a bell curve of acceptable values and discard ones which don't quite add up.

Cas :)

[jankoM]

yes I wanted to add that it is a bit to complicated for the purpose but I didn't want to poke holes in my words and rather left you to :)

another minus is that you would maybe need a custom server somewhere because I don't know if this long time stream would work with http (well maybe it still would because it is not bidirectional like stream for chat or mp-game) - at least php ussually has max-execution time for 1 request - whixh is allways more trouble.

on the plus side this has some good points for flash where you allready have xml stream ready to pump and where making anything "secure" on client side is "funny". and you can write xml stream server in python and twisted in no time.

[Davaris]

Can someone message me (or post it) the save game is invalid if you die method?

I want to make a game where if you die, your save game is invalidated. But I don't know how to stop the players copying their old save games and restoring them.