Game/Mod Locking?

[Shou Liengod]

great! i guess my idea was already in Dracs head xD

 

[snoe]

This is how i feel in the matter:

This game is in the early phase right now, there is still a lot of work that needs to be done. Knowing this, we come to situations such as Moves and bugs in the scripts that are minor, but still affect the game play.

In this early stage it is almost crucial to allow players access to these scripts and these files of the game. Understand that the Dev team only has so much people working on the game at a time.

Also, remember that it isn't unheard of for people to know how to code LUA scripts, this allows those players to be able to fix these minor issues. And then what happens? They come here and share their discoveries!

In a game such as Poke3D where there is a very social community there must be a combining of the smarts of the players and the skills of the Dev team.

That's why we have Suggestion/Feedback, that's why we have Community Support, etc etc. The people make the game, the Dev team makes it a reality.

Allowing open access to the files now is important because while the Dev figure out layouts and fix huge bugs with new towns and trainers, pokemon and wild encounter rates. We as players can do our part and help with the minor issues and fix them.

Also, i have faith in the Pokemon Community as a whole. We are people that understand that the game isn't about having superpowered PokeHulks. No. That's not pokemon at all.

Pokemon is about raising a team and showing that you understand how pokemon works. It's an honor thing. Sure we can cheat, GameFreak knew fully well that the capability to cheat was always easy. But it's not how pokemon works.

It's that hardwork, the determination, the struggle to be the best trainer you can that defines pokemon. That's why we play, for that challenge, for that glory.

That's why we don't cheat.

and that's why we leave the files open

 

[JAnderson789]

Why are the Mods opposed to letting people hack their save games? I can understand keeping online play fair for everyone by only allowing legal pokemon, but if people want to hack their save games to give themselves a starter party of legendaries, they're the ones who will be suffering by destroying challenge of the game and removing any fun.

But trying to regulate the game is silly. If shinnies are a dime a dozen, so what? Then they become worthless unless the seller can prove they were captured without cheating. The official GTS for the Nintendo games is full of hacked shinnies, and it's a waste of effort to try regulating counterfeits when the community will do that by itself. (Unless you decide to run an MMOG or something.)

Then again, I hate the metagame and the ridiculous amounts of effort you have to go through to create competitive parties. I play the game for fun.

 

[DracoHouston]

Why are the Mods opposed to letting people hack their save games? I can understand keeping online play fair for everyone by only allowing legal pokemon, but if people want to hack their save games to give themselves a starter party of legendaries, they're the ones who will be suffering by destroying challenge of the game and removing any fun.

But trying to regulate the game is silly. If shinnies are a dime a dozen, so what? Then they become worthless unless the seller can prove they were captured without cheating. The official GTS for the Nintendo games is full of hacked shinnies, and it's a waste of effort to try regulating counterfeits when the community will do that by itself. (Unless you decide to run an MMOG or something.)

Then again, I hate the metagame and the ridiculous amounts of effort you have to go through to create competitive parties. I play the game for fun.

i dont know why this is so controversial, here's some other games that don't use text files for their save games
-all of them

if you really wanted to cheat up a legendary at the start, make a mod. we're going to try and keep mods that use the same pokemon, item and attack/ability datasets compatible for multiplayer so you could just overwrite elm's lab :\

 

[JAnderson789]

There are "save editors" for lots of games.

 

[snoe]

There are "save editors" for lots of games.

the point is, cheating is easy and can be done for any game.
it's whether it's worth it or not to cheat.

and 10 times out of 10 it really isnt

 

[DracoHouston]

There are "save editors" for lots of games.

but people have to reverse engineer the save format to do that, no dev just hands this stuff out on a silver platter. save editors only exist because of a lack of will to break them as they appear.

There are "save editors" for lots of games.

the point is, cheating is easy and can be done for any game.
it's whether it's worth it or not to cheat.

and 10 times out of 10 it really isnt

no one makes it as easy as opening a file in notepad

 

[JAnderson789]

Then have an MD5 hash check to make sure that both connecting players have the same files, preventing incompatibilities.

 

[DracoHouston]

Then have an MD5 hash check to make sure that both connecting players have the same files, preventing incompatibilities.

that's the plan, mate. We'll be doing a bunch of things

-consistency checks
-encrypt saves, and probably break save editors as they show up with patches
-compatibility checks for multiplayer
-restricting player pokemon to only being able to have stats that are attainable through very diligent EV training for that nature, these values are easy to find out

we can also check if popular trainers are running like cheat engine. eventually if the community is connected to an online service we'll have some records we can search for suspect behaviour and mitigate any damage in the next update (like blizzard's 'rust-storm' in diablo 2 that took out a lot of duped items). because a mod's map could give you a party of shinies in your bedroom if it wanted to we may only allow trading with players of the same game mode.

cheats might still happen, but we have to make an effort to deter it or everyone can and will do it, like now. like i've said before, it's not ruining the game right now and allows people to test things and get around bugs, but when we aren't indev we'll be putting measures like this in place.

Then again, I hate the metagame and the ridiculous amounts of effort you have to go through to create competitive parties. I play the game for fun.

i hate grinding too but there are better ways to mitigate that than making it a diablo 1 style wild west where everyone cheats to compete.

when nils has the multiplayer more fleshed out i want to make sure we have a variety of rules options for matches, including flat battles. i also want to allow players to swap moves on their pokemon, out of a pool of moves they have learned or could have learned, after the match your pokemon would have the move set they had before the match. flat battles could also give pokemon max stats for that level, we could even let flat battles change a low level pokemon to a 100 or 50 for that match. i wanted to put in a rental pokemon thing too

 

[JAnderson789]

Why is it so important to stop people from editing their personal save games that exist for their personal use? If you're worried about people cheating in a team of shiny legendaries in multiplayer, then put the restrictions on multiplayer only, don't put them on personal save games. There's nothing people hate more than DRM.

 

[DracoHouston]

Why is it so important to stop people from editing their personal save games that exist for their personal use? If you're worried about people cheating in a team of shiny legendaries in multiplayer, then put the restrictions on multiplayer only, don't put them on personal save games. There's nothing people hate more than DRM.

because you use local saves in multiplayer. we aren't going to impose always on DRM on people. having your save files not be text files isn't DRM, tell gog to take all their games off their store because they have DRM

 

[JAnderson789]

Why is it so important to stop people from editing their personal save games that exist for their personal use? If you're worried about people cheating in a team of shiny legendaries in multiplayer, then put the restrictions on multiplayer only, don't put them on personal save games. There's nothing people hate more than DRM.

because you use local saves in multiplayer. we aren't going to impose always on DRM on people. having your save files not be text files isn't DRM, tell gog to take all their games off their store because they have DRM

Firstly, then place limits on what people can do in multiplayer (like no hacked pokemon), but don't place limits on which pokemon they can capture or how much money they can give themselves in save games, because even Nintendo doesn't do that. Yes, I do find it silly when people ask how to cheat, but I'm not going to limit them.
Secondly, this isn't about how saves are stored, but GOG doesn't release updates specifically to break save game editors, and neither does Nintendo. Their more popular games, like Baldurs Gate, have save game editors and trainers and what not that are used to edit save games. This isn't always used to cheat (wow, unbelievable, I know!), but many players use it to give NPCs a specific choice of character class, because there are a lot of character classes, especially in mods.

 

[DracoHouston]

because you use local saves in multiplayer. we aren't going to impose always on DRM on people. having your save files not be text files isn't DRM, tell gog to take all their games off their store because they have DRM

Firstly, then place limits on what people can do in multiplayer (like no hacked pokemon), but don't place limits on which pokemon they can capture or how much money they can give themselves in save games, because even Nintendo doesn't do that. Yes, I do find it silly when people ask how to cheat, but I'm not going to limit them.
Secondly, this isn't about how saves are stored, but GOG doesn't release updates specifically to break save game editors, and neither does Nintendo. Their more popular games, like Baldurs Gate, have save game editors and trainers and what not that are used to edit save games. This isn't always used to cheat (wow, unbelievable, I know!), but many players use it to give NPCs a specific choice of character class, because there are a lot of character classes, especially in mods.

you are aware that we have an open, data and script driven modding system that lets you do all that stuff, yeah? you can do it there, not in the main game. by the time i'm done with the LUA interfaces for everything someone can just make a mod that lets you open up a cheat menu. we're going to try and allow coop between mods that are compatible enough, some restrictions may apply (like no trading, or certain script events wouldnt trigger for you, this is undecided). consistency checks for the pokemon species data and attack scripts and a reasonable limit on pokemon stats (it would have to account for medicines, and not restrict the use of that too much) will keep pvp and coop battles reasonable.

we're just not going to have our save files as a bunch of text files at some point, i don't know why this is so bad

 

[JAnderson789]

Oh, that's okay then.

 

[Calzone]

Damn, long thread.
I'd hate to see the Dev's lock down the game in anyway, in fact I'd love it if the source code was MORE open, modders help build the community and are therefor an asset. And besides, what do you care if people can cheat a little? They can change their location to check out a town they kinda skipped through, they forgot something and need to go back, their save got corrupted so they need to rebuild their party, they want to replay a gym so the delete a few registries, the list goes on and on, and how does it really affect you? And even if people are trading legendary Pokemon for Caterpies in the trading room, it's honestly about as easy to trade a Pokemon as it is to hack it into the game, so nothing is really lost there. I say we stop arguing and let the developers keep it as it is.