quote:Original post by InsaneGenius
thank you for all the information guys. Cheating did not even cross my mind at first. I will for sure go with the client -server - client set up.

Thats probably the only way to go. Others had tried the peer-to-peer paradigm and some had failed spectacularly. Also if the state design or your game objects is good and you have a decent PVS calculation, server-to-all technique would not differ much in bandwidth to peer-to-peer at the client side.



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another thing to prevent weird behavior is this

lets say you know exactley how your messaging scheme works, and you know that when the client does something it sends something to the server

ok, lets also say your game has chat, and it has spam protection(this must be here for this example to work)

you then time each message that is sent. you will only let the next message happen if a certain amount of time has passed. you find out this amount of time by looking at your game (whats the shortest time that a client can consecutively send two messages). this way, if some stupid spammer decides to shut down your server by spamming a crap load of commands or something, youll be able to protect your self against it (it wont even work, first attempt!).

this isnt a likely method though, depending on the game because some games might require the client to send messages very rapidly. In that case, if you got some bytes to spare (i know that no one does), you can send a verify encrypted code with the packet. This way, the messages with this special code, or even a special format, will be accepted, all other messages are disgarded.

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Genetics 3rd Dimension Development