PlayStation announced that they will stop making disks. People are rightfully mad about this, but it's not actually about physical media. It's about owning your games.
Ownership of software must include the right to maintain and repair it so it can continue to work - not only while the copyright holder’s servers says so. To be able to remove any digital locks as you would do to any physical lock found in your house. To do this we need the source code, and since not everyone is a programmer we need the right to share changes with others.
Support open source/software freedom respecting games!
Not really. Games have very similar security implications as any other server/client software.
You are right now reading on exactly such a system, which is open source, and still you don’t see massive amounts of hacks targeting lemmy or piefed.
The premise is simple: Never trust the client. The border you have to defend isn’t the border between the client software and the user, but the one between the client and the server. Always treat the client software as compromised.
In terms of games that means:
All game state calculation happens on the server. The client sends to the server what it wants to do, the server sends what happens. So instead of the client sending “The player is now at position XY”, it sends “The player is walking forwards”. The server calculates the speed, distance and new position and returns that to the client.
The server only sends the client things the player should know. If the enemy unit is not visible, it is not sent to the client.
And this is to go even futher beyond:
Ownership of software must include the right to maintain and repair it so it can continue to work - not only while the copyright holder’s servers says so. To be able to remove any digital locks as you would do to any physical lock found in your house. To do this we need the source code, and since not everyone is a programmer we need the right to share changes with others.
Support open source/software freedom respecting games!
Open source competitive multiplayer games would be catastrophically compromised.
Not really. Games have very similar security implications as any other server/client software.
You are right now reading on exactly such a system, which is open source, and still you don’t see massive amounts of hacks targeting lemmy or piefed.
The premise is simple: Never trust the client. The border you have to defend isn’t the border between the client software and the user, but the one between the client and the server. Always treat the client software as compromised.
In terms of games that means:
Why?
If you can’t write your game in a way to prevent cheating it really doesn’t matter.
I would argue that the only way to ensure trust in the competitive arena is to open source.
Could you imagine sports being played without defined rules?
Cheating is about a design challenge related to how clients and servers communicate and has nothing to do with the source code being public.