Some time back me and Lethal Illusion tossed about the idea of a controlled save system.

The map would need to be for a private population but the idea was that instead of a 32 character code you could make account/PIN.

At the end of day all achievements and progress could be recorded and added to accounts. This requires constant maintainance and uploading downloading.

The advantage is however you can update a character with ease by making DC's variables for all attributes. More Soon (char limit)

Sounds awesome and I think it could become a huge thing or more likely drop dead.
I don't think I would take part in a private population that does stuff like this, sounds like too much of a commitment
And what if people lie and stuff? You'd have to have proof and it all sounds like a lot of work for the person doing the map.
I think it might have some potential regardless. Maybe this would inspire someone else more than I because this could seriously be the next hot thing I think with a bit of luck and support from senners.
What a crazy idea.

In my opinion there's really no possible way that a map could be big enough that this would be required. Also, if it's for a private population, I'm assuming it would be single player for each game, as it would be messy for more than one. If the latter, then StarCraft's save feature is more than enough for saving.

Well it could even be spread across several maps. And this way you can play with 100 different people in the span of your character.
Maybe it's not worth it though..
Edit: wait, what would prevent the players from going in and changing the death counts on their own, and then playing the map, and posting a screenshot or whatever?

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Aug 12 2009, 10:40 pm by Madroc.

The idea was for a competitive RPG for SEN.

Trading would be easy as "switch X players sword with Y players sword if both agree."

Pylon DC goes from 1 to 38 on X Player account.
Pylon DC goes from 38 to 1 on Y players account.

It's a simple save/load with a trigger per account as opposed to a complex save/load with a trigger per ability/gold/hp/weapon/et cetra.

It also means a map can be released half done and 'patched' with better terrain and enemies with ease.

The idea was monthly pay of mins.

A person that wishes to cheat will find a way to cheat. But with a controlled population banning / prevention becomes a possibility.

Hm.. I must admit that the fact that cheating is possible and fairly easy to get away with is discouraging..

You might as well just leave the map open and have people just edit the triggers themselves so that they start out with whatever they had in previous games.

A) Cheating isn't that easy. The argument behind open source is you can improve upon a map. If the map is already being updated daily, who's going to need to improve it?
It's harder to cheat than a regular system as it is.

B) If you update the map yourself then cheating is A) easier and B) not going to work. The idea behind me updating it is creating a universal medium that all members can play without downloading off another person.

I think there was an RPG called Xuru RPG that had a save feature with a bunch of numbers that you'd input.
What's wrong with that? Honest question.

This reminds me of singleplayer/open-realm D2

I think the success of this depends on whether or not the map is worth playing and if there is a nice group of people willing to do this.

I think it would just be easier to have each person playing the map just update or load in their own information through a code system. Using you as a middleman would be too inconvenient and unnecessary. The integrity of the game already is in the hands of the people playing so it wouldn't make a difference, because if a player wants to cheat they would do it anyway. People would just play with the people they believe are legit.

What I'm saying is pretty much the way singleplayer/open-realm D2 works where all the person's character info is stored locally. Essentially the player is free to edit his own character info and "cheat" but if people use the honor system then they are expected not to.

Also how will the information be recorded and sent to you? If it's in the form of a code then that's the same thing a conventional save/load system would use. The user would still have to write all that info down and store it themselves. The only difference between your method and the conventional method is the input would be slightly easier. I don't see any difference in output, unless you're doing more work like watching replays of the game and getting the info yourself rather than having the player provide it.

One thing I thought of for sending information would be to set up a dedicated bot in a channel like op SEN and have people whisper them the output code when they're done playing. If you created some sort of script to go with it you might even be able to get it to output the triggers for you based on the code it receives.

And since people would report their progress using whispers the codes could even be somewhat lengthy and encrypted because the reporting would be as simple as typing /m rpgbot fa4325432iqjfasf

Post has been edited 6 time(s), last time on Aug 13 2009, 8:21 am by Pariah.

We toggled with a few ideas but at the end of the day no decision was ever truely made.

This is just an idea we came up with, if someone wished to fill the gaps and use it, they're more than welcome.

If you really want to get hardcore then get someone to program some kind of cilent that will automatically download new versions of the map. And also code a program that will automatically update the map based on information the bot receives from players reporting their progress and host the map somewhere for the other client program to automatically download.

That's not within my power until I come across the money for a laptop.

I'm not sure I totally understand this, but couldn't you have a map, probably an rpg, and it can be multiplayer. People dl the latest version, and input their code. It loads their character, and they play. When they save, it gives them a new number. When new versions come out, the code still works, but any new features are added when you next save. And if the problem is cheating in the form of unprotecting the map and changing stats, there are ways to fix that. Trigger-edits would be harder but still possible. If the map detects that stats have been edited, it gives a 'cheater' code. Next time the cheater loads his character, it tells him he is an idiot for cheating or playing edited versions, and then drops him or something.

if you want to make a fully save/load feature, you may have to input much, very much...

if I would do that with my D1 map, the people would have to type maybe 20 long numbers...

You could easily accomplish it via modding. When the player saves, store their code somewhere that can be easily read by a plugin, then have a plugin that reads the data and writes it to a file. In the same plugin, detect if the file exists at game start, and if so, load all the data.

Of course, it would be version-dependent, which pretty much limits you to single-player unless you want to force all your players to use Hamachi or SFR. However, the incredible flexibility the plugin would give you would probably outweigh this. eg. You could send the file to a website somewhere where people can trade items. Or you could edit unit stats on the fly, creating infinite types of enemies. If you were really clever, you could even make totally customizable items with no limits on what items can be created.

I would write this mod for you but I don't know enough C++ yet. I could probably learn, though.

Aren't codes far far less of a hassle, and pretty much all around better? And well to prevent duping, give each item a very unique death count (completely random from 1-like 100000 (you could use a single death count for this if you're good)) when it's dropped that sticks with it throughout the game, and if two players have an item with the same item, there's an extremely large chance one of them gave the item away and entered in the same code as before they gave the item away and thus you tell one of them to drop the item or they can't play together (it's all I can think of).
And you could show the number of times the item has been dropped as well so that people know if it was duped or not..
seems kind of nice right..

How is it better to make someone type in a huge long code instead of just loading a file? I'll admit there are some advantages (like not being version-dependent) but I think the advantages of the mod are better than the advantages of not using it.

TZ, because then you don't have to download anything right? Thus it has a chance to become a viral sc map?
Edit: But yes the modding idea absolutely has it's advantages too.. I was directing that last post more towards shocko but yeah the modding sounds like it could be crazy cool Learn how and do et!!.

Edit: oh and yes i think both of our ideas are infinitely better than the op's. No offense to shocko.

Post has been edited 3 time(s), last time on Aug 13 2009, 7:42 pm by Madroc.