Re: Cheating in OS games?

[Jan Ekholm <chakie@infa.abo.fi>]

On Mon, 15 Dec 2003 madsdyd@challenge.dk wrote:

>On Mon, 15 Dec 2003, Jan Ekholm wrote:
>
>> IMHO developers should focus on the game, leaving all these tuning issues
>> for later. It's far too easy to focus on totally irrelevant things when
>> there is a game to get done. Nobody will care if your game has a nice
>> effect or something else if there is no game to begin with.
>>
>> I'd actually consider it a measurement of success that someone would
>> bother to create a cheat for something I had done. That would mean that
>> the game is more or less mainstream and actually has an audience,
>> something very few OS games actually has.
>>
>> Comments and/or flames?
>
>OK, I'll bite.
>
>The moment people starts cheating in your fancy game, the game goes dead.

I'll counterbite. :)

The moment you start considering adding extra complex bloat that adds
basically nothing but draws tremendous amounts of developer time, the game
goes dead.

>IMHO, you need to at least _consider_ cheating, and understand what
>you need to do to prevent, very early on, or your design will have a hard
>time fixing the problems. So, if people start cheating, you can change
>your program to fix as much as possible.

This I can agree with, you can add an empty method call to a antiCheat()
method and fill it in later when the game has reached 1.0 and is released.

--
  Shadwell hated all southerners and, by inference, was standing at the
  North Pole.
                           -- Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman, Good Omens