How reliable ARE client-side savefiles?
I'm not referring to security reliability, that's why God created encryption, hashing, and all sorts of other verification proceedures. I'm referring to their stability. In the Hood tracks a few minor character details between copies with client-side files. I know that my file is personally deleted on a regular basis. It seems to be at random, and other people's files seem stable enough. One person still has his 2000 kills on his file. I would have about 5000 now, but it keeps self-destructing. I was wondering if this is a fault in my programming (easily possible, Hood is a poor, poor source), or a fault with the system and instability. I won't provide source, I'm pretty sure I can fix it if it's my fault, I just need to know if that's the case or not. :P
~Polatrite~
ID:135074
 Mar 21 2005, 8:50 pm
|
|
I'll definitely have to take a look at it, then. Client-side savefiles are about to become quite a bit more important to me, as I have good encryption and such availible now, and I need to use them extensively for my current project.
~Polatrite~ | |
I've had odd problems with them where the client-side savefile isn't available for the first few seconds after the client connects; this is mostly a problem if you're trying to load things up immediately upon client/New() or mob/Login(). (In my case I was loading up client-side preferences for hub://Crispy.YetAnotherGenericSpaceAgeConquestGame.) I believe I reported it at the time.
I've always viewed them as being slightly flaky; partly because of the security problem (which, as you noted, can be fixed by the game developer) and partly because of the above bug. I think I ran into it while I was working on hub://Crispy.Yahtzee too, but eventually dismissed it as a code problem and promptly forgot about it. | |
There appears to be a bug causing this sort of thing, because it's been noticed in Lode Wars as well. Crispy's post in Bug Reports has the definitive answer as to why client savefiles sometimes get deleted, though, so hopefully with Dan's help we can get this fixed.
Lummox JR | |
A quick link to Crispy's post for any one else interested in the topic: id:318210
Thanks for the help, I'll just implement client-side loading at the latest point necessary in the login scheme. ~Polatrite~ | |
I was thinking... isn't there away for you to make them save to a remote website... then when needed it downloads them, and uploads them upon logout, and deletes it off the hosts computer. So that you could let anyone host, without worrying about hacking save files.
| |
There's nothing stopping you from doing that, in theory. There are a few caveats though...
- BYOND doesn't support POST HTTP requests, which means that the amount of data you can transmit from a BYOND game to a remote website is limited to less than 255 characters (as URLs are usually limited to 255 characters, IIRC). That's nowhere near enough for a savefile. You could transmit it in pieces using multiple requests. Either way, you'd probably have to transmit it as a text file rather than a binary savefile, and you'd definitely have to URL-encode it. - I believe there is a mechanism for transferring savefiles between BYOND servers, though I've never used it myself. This is probably the best solution, but you'd need to have a permanent and reliable BYOND server running at a fixed location. | |
I have been having that problem as well. Although it's very rare, a very few select people seem to sometimes get their client-side savefiles deleted. I'm not one of them, but I've known a few people who I've had to restore a number of times, and I know they didn't just screw up the file with hacking.
| |
Maybe it's something in your admin code? Or maybe it's because you're hosting?