Tim's Point About Humans Masquerading as Perlbots - A Solution?

Joel Meulenberg joelmeulenberg at yahoo.com
Sun Apr 22 18:11:28 CDT 2001


I'm finally getting around to at least thinking about Perlbots some
more.  Even though it's not a show-stopper, Tim Maletic's point
(brought up during the presentation) about people being able to
masquerade as Perlbots and spoil the game for others was bugging me. 
(As Tim mentioned this is sort of the opposite problem that we find
with FPS games where a programmed bot can spoil the game for human
players.)

The potential solution that occurred to me was to have the server delay
the "publishing" of the gamestate stream (which spectators would need
to watch the game) by, say, 10 seconds.  To do this, the server would
need to keep a history of the gamestate - at least 10 seconds worth. 
The more I thought about it, the cooler this idea have saving gamestate
history seemed since it would allow for the saving of entire matches
and maybe even more advanced viewing features like spectator rewind and
replay, instant replay, etc.

I think it could probably be done entirely in memory for typical
matches.  Even if there are an average of 15 actors (where an "actor"
is a bot, missile, etc.) in the arena throughout the game, and a new
gamestate is saved every tenth of a second, and each actor requires 50
bytes of state per clocktick (pretty generous), and a game lasts 10
minutes (unlikely), that's only 4.5 megabytes of memory.

Does anyone see any holes in this "delayed broadcast" idea?

+Joel

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Auctions - buy the things you want at great prices
http://auctions.yahoo.com/



More information about the grand-rapids-pm-list mailing list