Play My Game

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Original post by TANSTAAFL Go.

Check.

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Play.

Check.

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Make accounts.

Check.

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Report Bugs.

The cake was a lie.

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Beat "FlowerPicker".

Fail. :(

I played, however it was in Jerk-o-vision in that there was a good second delay between each step forward which made the game stupidly easy for me to play (I had FlowerPicker's score beatten and probably could have just kept on going if I hadn't got bored).

IE7, WinXP Media Center Edition SP2, 1gig ram, P4 3.6Ghz.
I had 3 other tabs open at the time, HydraIRC, remote desktop, ftp program and Visual Studio express edition running at the same time.

I'd like to call this... ethical cheating. You should probably delete my account because the 2 highest scores I submitted were not real.

I've always wondered how secure some of the popular sites with online high scores were but I never played with it much. Yours was easier to spoof than I expected, and I'll post or pm you what I did if you'd like.

I'm honestly not sure how to really secure something like this though. With the game running completely client side, how can the server know a submitted score is real?

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Original post by sYn pHrEAk I'd like to call this... ethical cheating. You should probably delete my account because the 2 highest scores I submitted were not real. I've always wondered how secure some of the popular sites with online high scores were but I never played with it much. Yours was easier to spoof than I expected, and I'll post or pm you what I did if you'd like. I'm honestly not sure how to really secure something like this though. With the game running completely client side, how can the server know a submitted score is real?

that is, indeed the trick.

To others who plan on beating the highscore:

Register before you play!.. My 1944 score went down the drain :(

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Original post by phantom I played, however it was in Jerk-o-vision in that there was a good second delay between each step forward which made the game stupidly easy for me to play (I had FlowerPicker's score beatten and probably could have just kept on going if I hadn't got bored). IE7, WinXP Media Center Edition SP2, 1gig ram, P4 3.6Ghz. I had 3 other tabs open at the time, HydraIRC, remote desktop, ftp program and Visual Studio express edition running at the same time.

I have the same issue, but my setup is Firefox, Win XP Pro Sp2, 512MB RAM, athlon xp 2800+

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Original post by TANSTAAFL that is, indeed the trick.

will you attempt to prevent it in the future? any plans or ideas on how to accomplish that?

Nice work, I love these DHTML/AJAX type things.

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Original post by sYn pHrEAk Quote: Original post by TANSTAAFL that is, indeed the trick. will you attempt to prevent it in the future? any plans or ideas on how to accomplish that?

Yes.

I assume that you simply made a form or some other method to post data to the appropriate page (which was very similar to the way I tested it in the first place).

I'm not certain yet what I can do to prevent it, but rest assured, I'll be working on it.

It's several seconds per frame on IE6 for me, but perfectly playable under Firefox 2.0.0.8 (after disabling search-as-you-type; it's fairly smooth, but with fairly regular drops of about 10 fps).

Windows XP SP2
Athlon Sempron 2800
512MB RAM

Why is this thread taking up valuable lounge space? I believe it is supposed to be in the less popular but more appropriate "Your Announcements" board.

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Original post by TANSTAAFL Quote: Original post by sYn pHrEAk Quote: Original post by TANSTAAFL that is, indeed the trick. will you attempt to prevent it in the future? any plans or ideas on how to accomplish that? Yes. I assume that you simply made a form or some other method to post data to the appropriate page (which was very similar to the way I tested it in the first place). I'm not certain yet what I can do to prevent it, but rest assured, I'll be working on it.

What I have done in the past, is registering the start and end of each game. This doesn't completely eliminate the element of cheating, but for time-based games it allows to filter out at least the most ridiculous scores.

It basically worked liked this: once the player is ready to play the game, a request to server is made for a unique game code (in my case a GUID generated by MSSQL). The server inserts a record with the game code, a time stamp and some other potentially useful information. When the game is over, the client sends the final score to the server together with the unique code and the record is updated. The difference in time shouldn't be too far off the actual time played, otherwise is flagged for review. It is still possible to post your own form, copy the return code, wait for the appropriate time to pass and send the score together with the code, but it involves a lot more work.

I also hashed/checksummed the data send to the server. And because the games where made in Flash, someone had to take the effort to disassemble the flash file in extract the hashing algorithms to beat the system. In pure &#106avascript reverse engineering would be a lot easier of course. I have used this system in localized viral games for one of the major American film studios where players could win actual prizes, and it was easy to pick out any cheaters. It not a 100% secure, but it worked well enough in my opinion.<br/><br/><i>Edit: noticing the extreme variety in performance, a somewhat more predictable frame rate would be necessary in this case.</i><br/><br/><!--EDIT--><span class="editedby"><!--/EDIT-->[Edited by - WanMaster on October 25, 2007 5:09:27 PM]<!--EDIT--></span><!--/EDIT-->

This ran so fast on my computer. If I waited more than half a second before changing directions the snake thing would hit the sides. I still kept playing though, was so unexpectedly fun.

The fact that this does not have the Jetlag themesong, the greatest song of all time, makes me sad inside.

"Joel" here - I eventually got bored and drove myself into a wall. It ran as slow as a one-legged sloth - less than a frame per second.

I also only got about one frame per second. It made the game incredibly easy and somewhat boring. I wasn't running any other programs, but the task manager showed my cpu usage jumping up to about 98%.

This was with:
IE 6
1GB ram
2.21 GHz processor

Greggles

Authman@500

okay, i think i've fixed the haxoring of the scores (HTTP_REFERER is my friend)

i've also locked the framerate at a maximum of 20 fps(setInterval with 50 ms).

for the slow framerates, I'm going to have to examine what I'm doing each frame, and see what I can do. it has thus far appeared to be an IE issue, no?

The slowdown problem was a result of doing 1200 document.getElementById calls per frame. It has been somewhat improved, but is still choppy in IE.