Highscore List

[mjaun]

Highscore List

[jkufner]

Drop cheating protection. Simple list without protection is fine as long as there is no motivation to cheat (prices, benefits or so).

Replay would be nice to show how the score was achieved. The automatic verification on the server is not neccessary, at least not now.

A basic protection can be done using a hash with hidden sallt. The salt would be compiled into the application, so it would be hard to find for ordinary users and script kiddies.

[goldencut]

yup, highscores would be lovely, gives the game a goal

[mjaun]

Actually I would like to have an online highscore list. Any ideas about how to prevent cheating? The only way I can think of is that a client has to send the entire replay which then gets validated by the server. But this is quite expensive to implement.

I will look into implementing a local high score list this weekend. I wont attempt anything online as you are right, preventing cheating is a whole different set of problems. At least it makes a nice goal to try and do better than your past attempts.

[goldencut]

Can't wait to see the high score list. I'd actually prefer local high score list (at least at this stage) as the online ones tend to introduce bloat and delays to most apps. And not everyone have internet at hand all the time. Maybe add at later stage to the local high score list a button 'Upload best score to server'?

[zmk4]

Sign score submissions

Accept scores from current build

key rotation

[notpokey]

An on line high score list could be kept in an Atom feed, like a podcast. The game could check the feed periodically, and only download the new list if the feed had been updated. Then it would only need to check the current high score against the local list, and offer to upload if/when appropriate.

If cheating were a real concern, perhaps the game itself could keep a log file of the player's moves. If the player choses to upload his/her score, the log file would be uploaded as well. If the player does not upload the score, then the log file would be deleted. Any score that was questioned could be replayed, or simulated using the log file, and the results should be the same if the game was valid, right? Maybe this would take too much processing power to validate.

[mjaun]

Local highscores for each level implemented. Solve online highscore lists in a separate issue.