[Terrarium] What impact will the up-coming source release have on the community?
I was asked this question which of course was followed by an hour long discussion of the impact of a source release on just about any game. I want to try and keep things short (less than an hour), so I'll focus on a couple of topics:
- Can a user play with a modified client?
- Are you safe from users using modified clients?
- Is there any global game-play value remaining?
- What can we do as a community once we get our hands on the source?
First things first. Yes a user can modify a client and play. To tell you the truth, I've often connected and played on the global EcoSystem in order to test out new game features that I've been adding to the source. We have some marginal protections against this type of game-play hack, however, most make use of a statistical equation to guarantee that at least some large portion of the EcoSystem is not being played on corrupt clients. The source release ups this number considerably as people will want to make small changes. It will take some time to overcome various other protections that were built into the game that ensure a safe client, but an astute programmer won't have much trouble identifying the code-blocks.
Are you still safe, even with modified clients? Heck yeah, we did a great job making sure you were safe. The user on the other end may be hacked, and his EcoSystem can be all screwed up, but you still have the experience available to you on your machine. This is further protected by having your own personal IL verifier running over all incoming assemblies, network level anti-flood protection, and communications verifiers for all P2P interactions. You are definitely safe.
There may still be some gameplay issues available for the hacker to take advantage of. In fact the user now has full control over teleportation, whether or not they allow specific creatures to run on their machines, and a large number of other items. They can effectively become incubation chambers capable of only spitting out more and more teleported versions of their animals. We have some constraints in place to prevent too much of this, but they are generous towards normal playability, making them vulnerable to general attack. I think this spells the general death of global ecosystem play (don't shoot me, this is a general observation), since the possibility of an equal playing ground won't exist.
That means once the source hits the shelves we have to make some interesting changes as a community. Some of them I've already gotten prepared for you guys (check out my Terrarium category for more information), but you are going to have to keep aprised of the community movements in order to take full advantage of them. The main changes are going to be with the new community edition Terrarium server. I've detailed many of it's features, but it overcomes hacked clients through security channels, allowing friends to play with friends (aka, a true trust relationship). There is also the ability of the server to interact with clients through a control channel so competitions can be organized more easily. In prior versions of the Terrarium running pre-canned comps was tough, and we had to install a lot of creatures onto a lot of different machines, while the new server allows us to set up competitions and connect to a farm of clients. Again, a true trust relationship will have to be created here, and someone will need to supply a farm of machines. Time for the community to step up, else the Terrarium will just be another Starter Kit demo app with limited playability.