Codes for the hosts
Posted: 18 Jul 2012, 18:43
People who regularly host games in the lobby without pre-arranging and are afraid of their room being faked by some other person might like such feature.
When the game name is entered by the host as "Blah Blah Blah!Some Secret Code", the lobbyserver should display it like this: "Blah Blah Blah!Secret Code's Hash", and it should be displayed in the game setup window in a similar way for all clients. The hash should probably be written in a different color. The hash is calculated for the code only. Other clients should not ever receive the code, but only its hash.
Thus, unless you know the code, you can't host a game with the same name and the same hash. If the hash is compact enough to fit the interface (it should use as many different characters as possible), and hard enough to decrypt, this allows to avoid name faking for the hosts. On the other hand, this doesn't require forum credentials to be entered or stored, unlike the previous method.
Not sure this requires any support at all on the game code side (this boils down to: does the client receive the game name from the lobbyserver or from the host when he already joined the game?), but if it does require changes on the game side after all, than probably 2.3 users should somehow be warned not to use this feature on 2.3 to make sure their code isn't posted.
When the game name is entered by the host as "Blah Blah Blah!Some Secret Code", the lobbyserver should display it like this: "Blah Blah Blah!Secret Code's Hash", and it should be displayed in the game setup window in a similar way for all clients. The hash should probably be written in a different color. The hash is calculated for the code only. Other clients should not ever receive the code, but only its hash.
Thus, unless you know the code, you can't host a game with the same name and the same hash. If the hash is compact enough to fit the interface (it should use as many different characters as possible), and hard enough to decrypt, this allows to avoid name faking for the hosts. On the other hand, this doesn't require forum credentials to be entered or stored, unlike the previous method.
Not sure this requires any support at all on the game code side (this boils down to: does the client receive the game name from the lobbyserver or from the host when he already joined the game?), but if it does require changes on the game side after all, than probably 2.3 users should somehow be warned not to use this feature on 2.3 to make sure their code isn't posted.