I'm very quickly approaching a finished YOG system.
Minus a few problems, like not actually being able to play ;) (for everyone else who doesn't know, the tests locally worked for Brad, but when I hosted and made a game (I live half way across the world from Brad), his client crashes when he joins my game, because of some garbage data it gets after sending the header, or something along those lines. Basically, his crashes, but mine and the server continue running. Once this is fixed, hopefully the system will be done and a small 2 minute game, and quiting should work. Then on to LAN games (should be a lot easier, faster connections on a LAN).
Cheating? Well as for in-game cheating, desyncs will detect anything. A player simply can't cheat without putting his cheat on every other system.
But for example a player could hack the code to allow them to type /make warrior 50 3 to make 50 level 3 warriors somewhere. They'll get added to the game, then thrown out to all other players. Bam! instant warrirors. As far as the game is concenered. He just made 50 warrirors (it cant tell it cheated ??).
Hacking? Well hacking i'm allot more worried about. I've made the unfortanate mistake of doing virtually authenticity checking for host messages. The current problem is, for example, kicking a player. Only the host is allowed. But anyone could send the NetPlayerKicked message to the server, and that player would be kicked. I dealt with this specific instance and a few others but an experienced hacker will most likely find a loop-hole.
Kicking is the least of the problems :P No one will kick if they have the power to win by cheating else how :P See the warriors example above. Can you imagine making 1000 warriors (or even just 200?)? The player would be unstopable.
I wonder if we can find some white-hat hackers who would gladly rip apart the protocol and tell us all the flaws.
Lol. I think you can find some around. scriptlance would be a good place. You can ask for free jobs (seen the windows installer images? done for free). Just ask for an experienced c++ hacker willing to help finalize an internet gaming protocol for free (name credited in credits for advertisement) :D
On a different note, I've got some scripts that I've used for development. They allow me to add NetMessage classes easily, taking advantage of the amount of redundance. They are simply intelligent template scripts. Anyhow I don't have them in mercurial yet, and I'm wondering if I should put them there. It would made it vastly easier to add new NetMessages (or YOGEvents) in the future (by anyone), as the scripts take what was 30 minutes and shrink it to about 20 seconds.
These scripts are done in python. If I keep them, where should I put them?
I'd just commit them to Mercurial. Thats what its for isn't it?? :P Plus then you wouldn't loose them again and have to ask me to send my copy to you :P