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MMORPG Idea
Occultimate
Member Posts: 7
When it comes to the topic of mmorpgs like gunz online, you might instantly think of a hacker that is hacking his machine gun to shoot rockets while he walks on the air and through walls. You might also think of someone who teleports everyone through the map and just generally hacks the game because it wasn't well thought out. Hackers do not require too much skill to hack a game that was made by people who just wanted to make a game and have no knowledge of actually securing that game. For the sake of argument, we will pretend that we have created some sort of encryption in order to prevent hacking the variables inside the game, even in single player, without the game detecting it as hacked and instantly deleting your character then closing your client.
So here comes my idea. With the recent uprising in the popularity of bit coins, I have thought of something. What if there was an MMORPG that didn't have a server and was peer to peer. Remember that for the sake of argument, we are pretending the game is encrypted with variables in some SHA-3 manner and still works somehow in order to prevent hackers. Now we have a peer to peer mmorpg that is playable with all the variables on our own computers and the server is equal to that of our own network speeds and computer power.
Questions that arise instantly might be, what about people who lag switch? You might also ask how any single computer will be able to peer to peer with a couple of thousand people at once. I have answers for these. Players who are online will be able to get an update on channels. Players can only make a single character in each channel and only so many characters can be log on to these channels at once. Once a channel reaches a certain number of players, each players client automatically creates a new channel. Players can still make new characters on the original channel, but, cannot connect if too many players are connected to that channel.
As for pings, the player with the higher ping will be the player who gets their actions read before the person with lower ping. The reason for this is that if a player with lower ping ends up lag switching, then they will be able to cheat. When a player logs out incorrectly, a penalty should be held against them, such as them getting the same penalty as if they died and everyone seeing them to have died even if they had just disconnected improperly. If players want to switch their characters to a new channel, they should also have that option, but, doing so does not add to the count of how many players were "created" on that channel.
With almost everything I could think of accounted for other then random monster spawns which could just be detected on someones client and everyones client nearby updates it to pick it up, I would say that pretty much finishes the suggestion I have just made.
Comments
http://ds.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/publications/2006/pdfs/2006-08-rieche-tr-mmog.pdf
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
;_; why can't I think of something original for once
XD
If anything, it means your idea has been looked at, studied and has some decent merit to it. I'd see that as a good thing!
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Without reading the paper I would say it is not a good idea.
Nowadays bandwidth is not really a problem for a centralized server solution but the higher complexity and overhead of a P2P-system will make the game far less stable (especially in a real time scenario).
As for "hacking": Exploits mainly exist due to bad server implementation and not due to the network model. Rather P2P would allow for even more exploiting possibilites.
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Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
SHA-3 is not a form of encryption.
Quizz
Your reference to Bit Coins makes me think of Tulip Mania back in 17th century Holland.
We never learn anything from history
"Be water my friend" - Bruce Lee
Actually, this deserves a longer reply.
The huge problem with MMORPG security is that anything that is accessed on the client needs to be decrypted on the client. Any encryption keys are sitting in memory where a player could find them. The algorithm is on the player's computer. The player can see all network traffic coming to and from the computer. The relative security merits of AES versus Serpent versus Twofish are irrelevant if a would-be hacker can find the key sitting there in memory.
Any client-side encryption is going to have to rely to a considerable degree on security by obscurity. If the worst that a hacker can do is bot for a while, that might be acceptable. But if you're trying to do a peer-to-peer system without a trusted server to verify everything, then a successful hacker can do basically anything at all, and you're asking for trouble.