Possible to Prevent Cheating?

[iamchairs]

I'm writing a mod that adds state funding to your space program. I think it would be neat to be able to automatically upload the state of your space program and have a public score. The only way I'd do that is if I could avoid cheating but I'm not sure if that's possible since everything about the state of your save is editable in a plaintext file. Even if it wasn't easy to edit it would still be possible through other means be someone who was particularly savvy.

Without validating and processing every keystroke on the server to ensure validity. Is it possible to prevent cheating?

[kStrout]

There is no real reason to, It's a singleplayer game, people can do whatever they want and challenge themselves. Besides, if someone had the urge to cheat they wouldn't download an anti-cheat mod now would they?

[Motokid600]

Neat idea. I'm pretty confident an honor system would work well enough around here.

[iamchairs]

There is no real reason to, It's a singleplayer game, people can do whatever they want and challenge themselves. Besides, if someone had the urge to cheat they wouldn't download an anti-cheat mod now would they?

I don't think you understood my post. I'm not trying to police peoples single player games, if I add an opt-in public scoreboard then I wouldn't want it to be susceptible to cheaters.

Neat idea. I'm pretty confident an honor system would work well enough around here.

Perhaps. Maybe an on-forum signup would be needed. Sounds like a lot of work to keep updated though.

[MrHappyFace]

You could just add limits to the scores, so that unrealistically high scores get filtered. Anybody good enough to legitimately get scores that would be considered "cheating" would probably be happy about it.

Otherwise, I think an honor system would work here, maybe with some manual moderating if that's not enough.

[Stoney3K]

Or you don't use a scenario module, but your own persistence system. You could f.e. write the data as a binary file, which is not easily editable, or something like that.

I think he's more looking for a way to find out if someone is using the "ALT+F12" debug menu cheats, ie. infinite fuel, gravity hack or infinite RCS.