Re: Game idea....

[Christoph Reichenbach <creichen@rhein-main.netsurf.de>]

Hi,

> Once again, simple issues of walking through walls and bumping up your
> health are not a problem, as these are all controlled by the server. There
> is still the problem of inadvertedly revealing secrets or hidden plot
> elements by sending a little too much information though. For speed
> purposes the clients need to know what is coming up a little way ahead of
> them, to compensate for any minor lag, but someone can then just recompile
> their client so they can see a little further than other people.

Hmm, an improvement (though not a solution) for this problem might be to send
the lookahead data encrypted. The key will still have to be sent, but, since
it's usually considerably smaller, the server will be able to wait much longer
before starting the transfer, while actually transmitting more and better
lookahead data. (This might also help performance). Since even very weak
encryption (RSA with 128 bits or something like that) is quite hard to break
with conventional means, the client data is "almost safe"; updating it (with a
new key) regularly will make it "practically safe".

Unfortunately, this way of doing things only makes sense for objects which
change only rarely (such as the game's maps).

llap,
 Christoph