Game/Mod Locking?

[JAnderson789]

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.

The developers are arguing specifically in favor of locking the game to prevent precisely all of those things.

 

[snoe]

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.

The developers are arguing specifically in favor of locking the game to prevent precisely all of those things.

prove it

 

[JAnderson789]

That's what DracoHouston has been saying they'd do, and he's a developer. Make it so you can no longer edit save text files. Now you have to make a mod specifically for what you want to do, and you'll never be able to trade the pokemon you hack in.

 

[DracoHouston]

That's what DracoHouston has been saying they'd do, and he's a developer. Make it so you can no longer edit save text files. Now you have to make a mod specifically for what you want to do, and you'll never be able to trade the pokemon you hack in.

yeah, the plan has always been to wrangle this into a real game and not just the pokemon playset. i'm doing everything i can to keep everything moddable, and allow as much interaction between the different game modes as reasonably possible without upsetting balance

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.

this will not affect modders

fly can take you back to towns

the saves will be text files until the game is out of indev, by that point you won't have to save edit out of glitches, and the save format will be stable and not prone to breaking on updates. saves can also be saved on the cloud when logged into gamejolt, so hard drive failures won't wipe out your progress

also, cheating doesnt affect me or anyone right now because there is no player interaction. this is going to change.

 

[Stereo]

I really enjoy being able to edit my party file and change what pokemon I have. Will be sad if that goes Even on emulators I like to give myself the pokemon team I want to raise them.

 

[DracoHouston]

I really enjoy being able to edit my party file and change what pokemon I have. Will be sad if that goes Even on emulators I like to give myself the pokemon team I want to raise them.

you can do a mod for that, would require changing 1 text file

 

[João César]

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.

is faire

 

[JG199912]

But the only reason many people play this version on the computer is that they can do what they like and not have the boundaries of a stupid Non-cheating software. My Togepi has gone missing because I wanted to change its egg steps, I was board of waiting for it to hatch. I personally would never use it in online battles and over trading because where'd be the fun in that, but in the main game which I have played before and just want to admire the beautiful hard work of its creators I don't like to be stopped every 5 seconds because I need something desperately and it is beginning to lag! Plus another reason you should just leave well enough alone is because sometime its good to have a laugh with friends and say "hay, look what I can do". Then see what clever things you both can unlock.
I feel that maybe awarding achievements and items should be blocked but not Pokemon, we are all old enough and responsible enough to be trusted.

 

[DracoHouston]

But the only reason many people play this version on the computer is that they can do what they like and not have the boundaries of a stupid Non-cheating software. My Togepi has gone missing because I wanted to change its egg steps, I was board of waiting for it to hatch. I personally would never use it in online battles and over trading because where'd be the fun in that, but in the main game which I have played before and just want to admire the beautiful hard work of its creators I don't like to be stopped every 5 seconds because I need something desperately and it is beginning to lag! Plus another reason you should just leave well enough alone is because sometime its good to have a laugh with friends and say "hay, look what I can do". Then see what clever things you both can unlock.
I feel that maybe awarding achievements and items should be blocked but not Pokemon,

this is also an unfinished buggy rough free indie pile, literally indev. i understand full well that people get bored of whats in the game and some, like me, play around with it more than actually playing it (i play pokemon games but my p3d save is at ilex forest). when i first played this game there weren't trainers, there were no gyms and there were 20 pokemon and a handful of moves.

there's tension in designing a multiplayer game between making a toy and a game (and i don't mean 'a toy' in a pejorative sense, i mean gameplay where you are playing WITH the game and not PLAYING the game) because the more you make it a toy the harder it is to provide a structured, fair and fun game for players looking to just, you know, play a pokemon game.

some of the best 'toy' games, like minecraft and garrys mod also allow for content creators to make new content, content that can be more structured. however, not even garrys mod and minecraft are about changing your save files. content creation goes through something. i havent paid much attention to minecraft modding since beta but at the time they were basically just forks of minecraft and you had to know java to do stuff like add more blocks. garrys mod uses LUA scripts to make garrys modmods.

also the above 2 games are also much better at being a toy, minecraft let me play with a bunch of internet friends on a server together where we carved out a little empire of islands and defended it from other little towns. we don't have fully destructible terrain and crafting, or a randomly generated persistent world. garrys mod, in its most pure form, just lets you place stuff and do things with it. its a big open toolset for source engine and thats fantastic, but p3d isn't like that either. there are very clear rules and limitations to player power, intentionally put there by designers who know this game better than i do. its a pokemon game. you catch pokemon and beat gyms. people have asked for more sandbox stuff but there's just not much we can do with pokemon. its a JRPG lol

we absolutely don't want a total walled garden though, so nils and i are both spending a lot of time ensuring that when we make something work it can work for community content creators as well. what i don't need is a bunch of 'clever' players doing things like decompiling the game (been done already) or trying to do things that aren't intentional. i'd rather 'creative' people instead, that can take the tools we use and make their own pokemon games and art assets

one of my goals is by the time we are 'done' the maps, scripts, UI, game rules, items, abilities, attacks, status effects and types are all either data driven or can be handled in LUA scripts. there shouldn't be a need for people to be clever and find ways to do these things, we want to just give people what they need to do these things. cool, creative, fun, interesting mods are possible without editing save files. there's lots of stuff to play around with if you're tired of playing p3d. if what we give people is lacking we will fill feature gaps as we go. we only ask that people not mess with the base game mode.

it should also be noted that some modders support closing the save files, because they want people to play their game the way they want too.

we are all old enough and responsible enough to be trusted.

not every pokefan is a 20 something 90s rememberer, mate.

anyway, i don't know why someone writes a paragraph out about how people want to be able to be creative with the game and play it there way. i know, someone has said so every page now. it's getting a little tiresome explaining how this won't affect modding.

the other day in the staff forums nils was telling people how to use a moderation tool to remove invalid pokemon from the GTS. i said it wasn't even worth doing, too many ways to spawn a pokemon or dupe one, he then asked me what can we do about it?

basically, encrypting your save files isn't something nils thinks about a lot, lol. people worry too much. we don't have concrete plans on what will be done, but the rough ideas so far are
-consistency check the game files so the only mods are game modes and content packs
-encrypt the save files
-restrict trading to only between characters in the same game mode, meaning each mode has their own GTS automatically
-clamping player pokemon stats in battle so they can't be unnaturally high
-watch for trainers like cheat engine maybe?

none of this breaks mods. in the short term people are getting MORE cheats

i'm using this thing to teach pokemon moves and start wild battles while i stand around goldenrod

there's going to be a sandbox mode for testing purposes, which will turn on all the debug code like walking through walls and flying the camera around, but will only load a save file that will be kept the in the scripts folder and not let you go to main menu, but you will be able to launch this mode from a shortcut or the windows run thing, putting in what map and location to start at

but one day, and it won't be next week, it won't be next month, but one day i'm going to turn on cheat protection and you'll have to use a mod to cheat. it's a slight inconvenience. i might even make the cheat mod at some point to demonstrate the UI API i'm making

 

[exLightning]

Hmm Personally I'm on the fence about this based on 1 thing, I'm sure someone has already asked this and I'm sorry I really don't want to search through walls of text to find the answer, I understand that with trading and pvp battles(I think is coming out?) That you will need to limit what people can do to be fair, I'm just worried that since I have edited my main save to teach Gastly Thunder and I have a shiney that this means my save will be unusable in the future, I'm guessing the answer will be that my save file will be fine since A LOT of people have messed around with their data.

 

[Darkfire]

Hmm Personally I'm on the fence about this based on 1 thing, I'm sure someone has already asked this and I'm sorry I really don't want to search through walls of text to find the answer, I understand that with trading and pvp battles(I think is coming out?) That you will need to limit what people can do to be fair, I'm just worried that since I have edited my main save to teach Gastly Thunder and I have a shiney that this means my save will be unusable in the future, I'm guessing the answer will be that my save file will be fine since A LOT of people have messed around with their data.

Anything that is made before the files are sealed, etc will be safe.
Also I believe that when we move out of indev(long ways off yet) you will have to restart any way(many system changes/organizational changes will likely break the game...)

 

[exLightning]

Hmm Personally I'm on the fence about this based on 1 thing, I'm sure someone has already asked this and I'm sorry I really don't want to search through walls of text to find the answer, I understand that with trading and pvp battles(I think is coming out?) That you will need to limit what people can do to be fair, I'm just worried that since I have edited my main save to teach Gastly Thunder and I have a shiney that this means my save will be unusable in the future, I'm guessing the answer will be that my save file will be fine since A LOT of people have messed around with their data.

Anything that is made before the files are sealed, etc will be safe.
Also I believe that when we move out of indev(long ways off yet) you will have to restart any way(many system changes/organizational changes will likely break the game...)

Well thats good new I guess XD , Hmm about the indev ,Out of indev save thing,
Explanation gone wrong (See below for a better explanation)->

Spoiler

We will still be able to complete the game using the indev data right? Because if we continue playing in indev before it finishes it will have to include everything... Urghh sorry I don't have a clue how to explain this

(Ignore the dots >.>)
............Story complete
..................................v
|----|-----------------|----|
........^............................... ^
Current ..........................100% finished (out of Indev)

So if this weird picture thing is correct we should be able to complete the story before its out of indev due to small fixes and tweaks that will be the finishing touches

 

[Darkfire]

Anything that is made before the files are sealed, etc will be safe.
Also I believe that when we move out of indev(long ways off yet) you will have to restart any way(many system changes/organizational changes will likely break the game...)

Well thats good new I guess XD , Hmm about the indev ,Out of indev save thing,
Explanation gone wrong (See below for a better explanation)->

Spoiler

We will still be able to complete the game using the indev data right? Because if we continue playing in indev before it finishes it will have to include everything... Urghh sorry I don't have a clue how to explain this

Story complete
v
|----|-----------------|----|
^ ^
Current 100% finished (out of Indev)

So if this weird picture thing is correct we should be able to complete the story before its out of indev due to small fixes and tweaks that will be the finishing touches

indev is determined by features...
If we finish the game itself before we finish Kanto we might still move to alpha.
From what nillzz has told me the biggest thing will be structual changes and locking the save files
So everything will mostly be as it is now except where you see the save folders now there will instead be one encrypted file.

 

[exLightning]

Well thats good new I guess XD , Hmm about the indev ,Out of indev save thing,
Explanation gone wrong (See below for a better explanation)->

Spoiler

We will still be able to complete the game using the indev data right? Because if we continue playing in indev before it finishes it will have to include everything... Urghh sorry I don't have a clue how to explain this

Current 100% finished (out of Indev)

So if this weird picture thing is correct we should be able to complete the story before its out of indev due to small fixes and tweaks that will be the finishing touches

indev is determined by features...
If we finish the game itself before we finish Kanto we might still move to alpha.
From what nillzz has told me the biggest thing will be structual changes and locking the save files
So everything will mostly be as it is now except where you see the save folders now there will instead be one encrypted file.

Now I'm getting a little confused shouldn't you get out of indev when you have finished the main aspects of the game , eg the story,So it is completable ? Ah nvm whatever happens happens.

Ps. why is there a ad at the bottom of my page saying Hack but is about I.T Training courses lol

 

[Darkfire]

indev is determined by features...
If we finish the game itself before we finish Kanto we might still move to alpha.
From what nillzz has told me the biggest thing will be structual changes and locking the save files
So everything will mostly be as it is now except where you see the save folders now there will instead be one encrypted file.

Now I'm getting a little confused shouldn't you get out of indev when you have finished the main aspects of the game , eg the story,So it is completable ? Ah nvm whatever happens happens.

Ps. why is there a ad at the bottom of my page saying Hack but is about I.T Training courses lol

The biggest thing about this is the engine not the game. I doubt that we will finsh the engine before Kanto is done so no worries there.

ADDS?

Oh thats right Daniel added those..... But staff and donators don't see them