The Castle Doctrine Forums

Removed that.  Yeah, spam was a HUGE problem at first, even with robot-proof math and color questions.  Only a question that required real work (like a question about the game) stopped it. 

I think most spammers are humans!

Good idea!

To shoot a dog through a window, you must break it with a brick first.

Long before you came on board, we experimented with dogs that stopped moving after they could no longer see you.  We tried removing a lot of things, trying to pare house design down to a place were no "boring, too tough" security systems were possible.  It was never possible.  If we didn't have the magic dance thing, we'd have buttons that the robber had to hit.  Some kind of combo lock is always possible.  Even if you remove all electronics, people could make branching mazes with only one correct path.  That's effectively a combo lock where the answer is LLRRLLRLRL.

And, with each of these things that I removed, "interesting" designs got removed along with it.  If dogs no longer follow you when they can't see you, traps that "release the hounds" behind you (after you've already seen them through a window) become less possible.

Also, I recall people putting hidden buttons right at the edge of the screen with cats that would step off to hit the buttons (and you could see the cats across long pits).  So, yes the cat would stop moving after it went off screen and couldn't see you, but it was still being used to trigger hidden stuff!

In the end, I put most of this removed stuff back in (except for the "animals always follow you, even if they've never seen you at all" part), and shifted the income in the game to bounties, which encourages people to build houses that trick others instead of just scaring them away.

I've tweaked the shroud to "pull back" slightly on wired walls, which restores their visibility to roughly what it used to be.

Hmm.... I'm starting to come around to your "perfunctory bike lock" analogy.  It lets someone know that the bike isn't abandoned and that someone is probably coming back for it.  No one will ride off on it by accident.  Furthermore, two identical bikes, from different owners, can be parked side by side without any chance of a naive mix-up.

Right now, anyone, even a non-programmer, can mod the game so easily that they might stumble into doing so without realizing the implications of their actions.  At the most basic level, they'll end up dying when they submit a robbery to to the server after mucking around in the gameElements folder.  Oops.

Someone who is building from source, a programmer, might make this or that mod, maybe for convenience, or out of curiosity, without realizing the harm they might be causing to other players.

So, different approach would be to put a lock in place that prevents modded clients from connecting to the main server, but give everyone the key, with instructions about how the key is intended to be used (i.e., not for connecting to the main server with modded clients that violate the spirit and point of the game).  Sorta like the red safety box over the Launch Nukes button.

But if you just compile the source bundle, you'll find that you can't connect to the main server.  You have to read the instructions, where it explains how to modify the header file with the necessary key value, where that key value is something like, "Please don't abuse your power to mod the game by giving yourself an unfair advantage."

The same "key" could be used to sign stuff in the gameElements folder to prevent naive modding of those things.  And a script could be provided in the source bundle to re-sign those things (thus allowing cool, benign stuff like the Halloween mod).

Actually, in this case, the line passing between the center of the robber and the center of the dog crosses the wall, so the throw is blocked.  You can see the dog in this case because you have line of sight onto the corner of its tile, but throws require that you have line of sight to the center of its tile.

An imposter.

I've made quite a bit of progress here, not by "sharpening" up the edge of the shroud (which is really hard to do without it becoming ugly, based on the fast way that I'm generating it as a 52x52 pixel image that gets blurred to hide the pixels), but by fixing some logical flaws in where the shroud is drawn.

First, I moved the whole shroud "up" so that it lines up with wall tops instead of wall bases.  This makes more sense and looks better, because the robber's head is near the wall tops.  Also, it "evens" the visibility from above and below.  Before, you could see a lot more if you were standing NORTH of something than you could if you were standing SOUTH.  Now you can see the same (limited) amount from either above or below.

Second, I changed the way that the shroud reacts to visible walls.  Before, it was "eaten into" by visible walls, to make sure that you could see them.  But now that the shroud lines up with the walls better, this isn't such an issue.  So, the shroud can be drawn at full strength right up to the edge of every wall top (with some special cases if the robber is in a corridor, or for the end cap of a corridor).

These two changes have a pretty big impact on "stuff visible around corners" without shrinking the "cone of visibility" as you look through an opening.

Granted, if you amp the gamma, more stuff is still visible around corners.  But without amped gamma, it looks much better now.

Old:

New:

Okay, so put the new HMAC-based method (which includes the email in the generated key for each get_ticket_id call) in place.

I've also changed my own download code.

See if you can get my download code now.

Also, I know it was easy to get the first time because I made a stupid mistake, so I'm not sure if you have any experience cracking PHP scripts, but if you do, please give it a go.  I've done all the "right" things on the server, like passing every user-submitted string through a regexp, etc., so I don't think it's vulnerable to SQL injection, but I might have missed something.  If there's a weakness, having the source should make it easy to find.

During the design, I was really worried about people sniffing traffic in Internet cafes and getting people's game ticket codes, but I didn't want to use SSL for the whole thing, so I treat the game ticket codes as a shared secret between client and server and never send it back and forth.  Of course, the ticket codes are sent by email, but I'm assuming people are checking their email over SSL.

And the server itself uses Yubikeys for admin authentication, so even if you install a keylogger on my home machine and get my admin passwords, you shouldn't be able to get in (again, unless I made a stupid mistake somewhere).

But you don't know HMAC_SHA1( secret_key, email ) for a given email address.

And being able to compute it for your own email address (which you clearly will be able to do) won't help you compute it for my email address, unless you have the secret key (which you do not).

Examples, please!

Here's one that I'm aware of:

http://castledraft.com/editor/KGsMOn

So, if you're standing where the robber is standing, the vault is invisible, though on most monitors you can see some "empty floor" back there where the vault should be.

When you move up to where the son is standing, the vault has a non-blocked diagonal neighbor (upper right neighbor floor to vault) that's now visible, so the vault fades into view.

So, what are our options here?  Really, the vault should not logically be visible through that gap.  But... drawing a shroud that FULLY makes that square back there black would impossible without it looking really ugly.   A soft edge of any kind would be impossible in this case, unless you want the shroud to be even wider and make seeing the should-be-visible walls impossible too.

Any other options?  Essentially, you can see empty floor back there because "you don't know what's back there."  It could be empty floor, or something else.  Could I draw "?" blocks back in places like that?

It also sucks how every monitor is different.  On my two main dev machines, this example actually looks pretty great, and not so shocking when the vault fades in.  But on a ThinkPad with a higher gamma monitor, the shroud actually looks pretty ugly and striated, with the empty floor CLEARLY visible.

I'll try tweaking the shrouds a bit more...

Interesting points.

First of all, it wouldn't stop being an open-source game.  It would just be a closed key game.  The game source would ship with a key, but not the key needed to play on the main server.  The source already does this in many other instances in terms of protecting the server (the source ships with various dummy keys in place so that you can't, for example, trick my server into thinking that you've paid for an account when you really haven't---only I and the payment processor have the secret key needed to create new accounts on MY server).

For people who want to build from source and run their own servers, they could stick with the dummy keys, or generate their own.  Nothing would change there.  What would change is that you couldn't (easily) build from source and play on the main server.

Second, what evidence do you have that everyone has been honorable?  The problem with this particular kind of cheating is that it is impossible to detect.  Back when the server didn't check that you weren't walking through walls, several people were doing this (clearly not behaving honorably), but it was easy to spot.  How do you know that some people aren't peeking at where the vault is with a modded client?  I know that, for example, Herb and many others have modded their wire sprites to show the difference between on and off wires.

Essentially, I want more assurance that everyone who is connecting to my server is playing the same game.  Right now, there is absolutely no assurance of that.

Yes, I've been playing with ram dumps on this end.  I've already made some progress here (so that at least the text maps don't hang around in ram anymore).

And I fully get what you're saying about the challenge of breaking a system being tempting.  I myself am a hacker, and I've been on the other side of this fence many times.  I was the first guy to hack the iTunes store back in the day (to allow non-iTunes clients to search the store and listen to the sample clips).  That was a real thrill.  And the whole time, I was thinking, "You fuckers... this is impossible to lock, so why did you even try?"

On the other hand, there wasn't a good reason (that I could see) to keep third party apps from connecting to the iTunes servers.  It was just about exclusivity.

Here, there's a pretty compelling reason to ensure that the vast majority of people are playing with the same game client on the main server.  It's not just about protecting robbery.... so many other aspects of the game become slightly (or very) unfair if people are playing by different rules.  What if you never have to die in a self test?  Wouldn't that be nice?  What if you could run your self test with no shrouds?