Storing player data across play sessions

[Oliver Hope 261]

Hey

I would be interested in doing games that save your progress over different sessions without having to join the same server, like an FPS that saves what level your on or a base building game that saves your whole base and you can load it on to a plot in a different server.

my questions:

-will this type of player storage be possible?

-any idea when?

-how would it be implemented?(how would you work with it in editor )

It would be awesome if it could just be a feature of the entity storage, or maybe a separate logic, and it just has an on off switch to save the data to the players ID locally or the cloud.

Thanks 

Edited March 8, 2019 by Oliver Hope

[Shadow72 187]

This would be very useful to have. It would also be nice if the sessions were stored in a seperate file and be able to be hot loaded into another server. Maybe store them in a file in the DS called Sessions and then people can make a script to sync them together from multiple different servers.

[Igor Q. 519]

I believe if you start a game session, end it and then continue playing it in a new game session all old information will still be stored.

Things like player items, variables, entity storages etc should be saved too. Thr only issue with this is you have to continuously use the same game file.

Edited March 12, 2019 by Igor Q.

[Oliver Hope 261]

1 hour ago, Igor Q. said:

I believe if you start a game session, end it and then continue playing it in a new game session all old information will still be stored.

Things like player items, variables, entity storages etc should be saved too. Thr only issue with this is you have to continuously use the same game file.

thats interesting! however i am more talking about between different servers

[Igor Q. 519]

1 solution to that is creating a 36 digit code thst can be saved/loaded.

Although the following example is for the game warcraft3, the essence is the same...

http://world-editor-tutorials.thehelper.net/cat_usersubmit.php?view=37153

[Houp 237]

Hi, something to achieve this is planned (will not mention when but surely NOT in 0.12)

We want to allow you to store some information at least per player/user for each game(aka scenario) which would be shareable between sessions of the same game. Idea behind it is that you should be able to connect to different server with same game running and to have some progress there.

+ we want to allow you (not just you, us too ) to store some information per player but not per scenario but per creator. (for example to be able to have your own internal currency(like Oliver Q coins) shared between several of your different games)

Even design of that feature is in the beginning so do NOT expect it soon.

[Oliver Hope 261]

6 hours ago, Houp said:

Hi, something to achieve this is planned (will not mention when but surely NOT in 0.12)

We want to allow you to store some information at least per player/user for each game(aka scenario) which would be shareable between sessions of the same game. Idea behind it is that you should be able to connect to different server with same game running and to have some progress there.

+ we want to allow you (not just you, us too ) to store some information per player but not per scenario but per creator. (for example to be able to have your own internal currency(like Oliver Q coins) shared between several of your different games)

Even design of that feature is in the beginning so do NOT expect it soon.

Awseome! I LOVE the sound of the per player data!

[Shadow72 187]

7 hours ago, Houp said:

Hi, something to achieve this is planned (will not mention when but surely NOT in 0.12)

We want to allow you to store some information at least per player/user for each game(aka scenario) which would be shareable between sessions of the same game. Idea behind it is that you should be able to connect to different server with same game running and to have some progress there.

 + we want to allow you (not just you, us too ) to store some information per player but not per scenario but per creator. (for example to be able to have your own internal currency(like Oliver Q coins) shared between several of your different games)

Even design of that feature is in the beginning so do NOT expect it soon.

That system sounds pretty cool. It would be nice if the data is stored in plain text so we can parse it. That would allow us to make things like a website that can show a players in game balance.

[Indomitus 388]

Seems like a feature that could be exploitable, especially if it's stored in plain text.

[Oliver Hope 261]

2 minutes ago, Indomitus said:

Seems like a feature that could be exploitable, especially if it's stored in plain text.

yeah it would need to be encrypted well

 

[Houp 237]

We will take your comments at mind when designing the feature. Probably it will not be in a plain text. At least not all possible storable data (we will probably want to be able to store current inventory/equipment of a player with complete state of the items..)

[Shadow72 187]

It wouldn't need to be encrypted because you wouldn't be storing any sensitive information. You would be storing the users progress along with their bohemia id(which you can already easily get from the DS server for all players currently). So there is nothing to fear of this information being unencrypted. Of course storing it in plain text would be very slow and taxing on reads and writes but maybe have a way for us to read your proprietary file types so we can access the data as server administrators.

[Indomitus 388]

On 3/13/2019 at 11:29 PM, Shadow72 said:

It wouldn't need to be encrypted because you wouldn't be storing any sensitive information.

If they decide to allow storing inventory data, then it would have to be encrypted in some way or those servers would have trolls with Creator Cubes all over the place.

[Shadow72 187]

1 minute ago, Indomitus said:

If they decide to allow storing inventory data, then it would have to be encrypted in some way or those servers would have trolls with Creator Cubes all over the place.

It would be impossible for them to do that since it would be stored on the server side. Just like how a player cant open the servers map in the editor and change a few things and rejoin the server with those changes.

[Indomitus 388]

15 minutes ago, Shadow72 said:

It would be impossible for them to do that since it would be stored on the server side. Just like how a player cant open the servers map in the editor and change a few things and rejoin the server with those changes. 

For it to be portable between servers, something would have to be stored locally on the player's machine.

[Shadow72 187]

Just now, Indomitus said:

For it to be portable between servers, something would have to be stored locally on the player's machine.

No it wouldn't. The data the server stores would be handled somewhere in the cloud and there will most likely be some sort of key base authentication in order to access the data. I highly doubt they would store anything client side since it is trivial to edit encrypted data.

[Indomitus 388]

On 3/20/2019 at 10:55 AM, Shadow72 said:

No it wouldn't. The data the server stores would be handled somewhere in the cloud and there will most likely be some sort of key base authentication in order to access the data. I highly doubt they would store anything client side since it is trivial to edit encrypted data.

"somewhere in the cloud" =  on a server.

Doing that would require coordinating multiple servers, possibly across multiple hosts, which could be possible but is what my old boss would call a "$20 solution for a $2 problem."  If we're talking about making the client's data portable across servers, then the data is most likely going to be carried by the client, even if it's only temporarily.

[Shadow72 187]

5 hours ago, Indomitus said:

"somewhere in the cloud" =  on a server.

Doing that would require coordinating multiple servers, possibly across multiple hosts, which could be possible but is what my old boss would call a "$20 solution for a $2 problem."  If we're talking about making the client's data portable across servers, then the data is most likely going to be carried by the client, even if it's only temporarily.

It wouldn't be nearly as hard as you say for BI to setup external servers to transfer player data between servers. It would be a simple Rest API that requires a key to access the information. It wouldn't be multiple servers talking to each other sharing the data. It would be a single server connected to a database that acts as a front end for all of the stored player data. The big problem with storing it client side would be how easy it would be to edit it, even if it was encrypted. When you join a server you download the world, with that world you can run it on your own server where you have admin commands and give yourself a bunch of items and currency. All you need to do then is copy the encrypted data that was saved for that world and paste it into the file containing your player data for that server. They wouldn't be able to combat that with something like a GUID for each world to use as a encryption randomizer because you are using the same world as the server so they would encrypt the same. Yes it will cost them a bit more money but if you have done any networking you will know that the #1 rule is to never, ever, trust the client.