Map Files

You could do a number of things.. the first would be to include a header into the file, that way it'll make it a bit more difficult to find the data in the file... you could add a checksum-like feature that would count the number of a certain type of object, and store that.. so your program could calculate that number and check it against what it should be.... though if the geek has that little of a life, he could probably dig through the data and catch that... the third thing you could do would be to encrypt the data, or to disalign pieces of data that go together using a special algorithm, and putting it back together with the algorithm when you want to use it... though as long as there is access to the file, there'll always be the possibility of cheating




[edited by - falkone on May 24, 2003 10:39:44 PM]

Well, what I do is run a compression routine on the map file after saving it. Works well enough for me, though all you would need to do is inflate the file again to muck around with things, it stops most people from cheating.

Better yet, when you save the file, check the time of creation of the file. Save that somewhere else, and when loading the file again, make sure that the modification date on the file is the same as when it was saved.