evillive2

Even disregarding issues like password theft, letting anyone directly connect to your database server is a terrible idea.

 

Agreed.

 

Even a thin API wrapper between your internal applications and your database can be a positive thing. For the most part the main issues here are shielding yourself from malformed, incomplete and/or intentional malicious things - most notably the unintentional especially where quotes and special character escaping like $@!* are concerned. It is relatively simple to do since in most cases queries only require on a very small portion of information from the actual client side such as a function name and a date range or other criteria found in the 'WHERE' clause.

 

In most cases the only information a client should send is (authentication to your app server should be separate from the database login credentials and already complete at this point!) a few variables set to determine what function to call and the parameters it needs to reliably build the query server side. It is important to note that this forces you to an extent to validate the client requests and validity of their request before sending anything to your database and not rely solely on the somewhat lacking security features on various database engines.

 

This is not only ideal for security reasons but for maintainability. You can usually update/improve your query server side without having to update the clients in any way.

I am looking to use a free cross platform engine that has everything for the most part all ready done.

"everything" is a pretty generic word there.

What is it that you want to do? Tell someone your idea for a game and have it made for you - zero code? I was going pretty far in that interpretation but you get the idea. You must have some pretty specific requirements for your game that only you can define so please do.

So far I have:

• C/C++ is your language type of choice - or at least C# (.Net in general?) is not an option
• Sounds like your game is 3d oriented vs a 2d sidescroller...(elaborate please to the genre)
• Is it multiplayer?
• Does "everything" include physics, audio, networking?

Anyway - I think people have answered the original question which was "Irlicht any good?" as best they can with the limited parameters. It has proven to work for many different people in many different genres. The specifics of whether or not it is a good choice for your particular game will require some more specifics especially if you are looking for alternate libraries. I would be inclined to suggest SFML at this point since it potentially could offer everything you want.

Have you looked at ffmpeg?

http://www.ffmpeg.org

I use fail2ban to automate this at the load balancer/proxy level (Linux and iptables). I work for an ITSP and we get hammered on our public session border controllers all the time from all over the world. Not too many DDoS attacks but SIP REGISTER and ssh dictionary attacks are common in short bursts. Not much we can do about it except mitigate the load it puts on our systems as the source generally comes from countries where there is no recourse.

Lazy Foo has written some good beginner tutorials with SDL including collision detection.