3 ms·

Putting the (very valid) reasons for not having human-readable game saves aside, are you sure it's worse than using a 3rd party library that's built to accept s

Putting the (very valid) reasons for not having human-readable game saves aside, are you sure it's worse than using a 3rd party library that's built to accept semi-valid input values, possibly evaluates user input in some way and has difficult to debug bugs that occur only under certain inputs? I agree that writing a stable and safe parser for a binary data file isn't easy, but there's less things that can go wrong when you can hardcode it to reject any remotely suspicious input. Third party XML/JSON libraries OTOH try to interpret as much as possible, even when the values are bogus. Also no need to deal with different text encoding bugs, line endings...

hattar 2y ago
> Putting the (very valid) reasons for not having human-readable game saves aside, I don't follow. What would the reasons be?
- gsinclair 2y ago
  A human-readable game save file is presumably human-editable.
  - RHSeeger 2y ago
    Most binary save game files are human editable, too; unless they go through a separate encoding stage.
    - hermitdev 2y ago
      Editting simcity saves was my introduction to hex editing...
      - RHSeeger 2y ago
        For me, iirc, it was Bard's Tale
  - kadoban 2y ago
    Require a hash in the file to match the rest of the file if you want to avoid effortless changes to the file. (There is no way to prevent changes by a knowledgeable person with time or tools, so that's not a goal)
  - mrguyorama 2y ago
    Before game companies earned all their profit through selling cosmetics and premium currency nobody cared if you cheated at your single player game and nobody SHOULD care if you want to give yourself extra money. It's only now that single player progress is profitable to sell that video games have taken save game encryption to be default. It's so stupid.
    - keyringlight 2y ago
      The trouble is that if some weirdness happens because of the edit, you've got to handle it even if you say it would be reasonable to assume that it's outside of being supported. Maybe you spend a bit more time defensive coding around what inputs it reads from the file, maybe a certain proportion of users doing the save edit see bugs in an apparently unrelated part of the game and seek support (and their bug report might not be complete with all the details), developers spend time to chase down what went wrong, maybe they bad-mouth it on forums which affects sales - there's going to be some cost to handling all of that. One of the anecdotes from Titan Quest developed by Iron Lore is that their copy protection had multiple checks, crackers removed the early checks to get the game running but later 'tripwires' as you progress through the game remained and the game appeared to crash. So the game earned a reputation for being buggy for something no normal user would hit running the game as intended.
      - mrguyorama 2y ago
        >The trouble is that if some weirdness happens because of the edit, you've got to handle it even if you say it would be reasonable to assume that it's outside of being supported. What? No. What even are you suggesting? Hell, games with OFFICIAL MODDING SUPPORT still require you submit bug reports with no mods running. Editing game files has always been "you are on your own", even editing standard Unreal config files is something you wont get support for, and they are trivial human readable files with well known standards. >One of the anecdotes from Titan Quest Any actual support for this anecdote? Lots of games have anti-piracy features that sneakily cause problems, and even could fire accidentally. None of those games get a reputation for being buggy. Games like Earthbound would make the game super hard and even delete your save game at the very end. Batman games would nerf your gliding ability. Game Dev Tycoon would kill your business due to piracy. None of these affected the broad reputation of the game. Most of them are pretty good marketing in fact.
- trinix912 2y ago
  Mostly to prevent people and programs from editing them, obfuscating implementation details, reducing file sizes (say had they used XML vs. binary)...
- egypturnash 2y ago
  Higher barrier to cheating.
  - hattar 2y ago
    It's a single player game. Cheat codes are built into it by design.
  - RGamma 2y ago
    HESOYAM
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
db48x 2y ago
You misunderstood. Game developers should use a _good_ third–party library, not a _bad_ one. At a minimum they should be able to read the source code so that they know it is good. Thus open source libraries should be at the top of the list. If you don't know what “good” looks like, take a look at [Serde](https://serde.rs/ https://serde.rs/). It’s for Rust, but its features and overall design are something you should attempt to approach no matter what language you’re writing in.
- vinyl7 2y ago
  There are no good third party libraries
  - db48x 2y ago
    I disagree. Serde is not merely good, it is excellent. The only C code that I have recently interacted with uses a home–grown JSON “library” that is actually pretty good. In particular it produces good error messages. If it were extracted out into its own project then I would be able to recommend it as a library.
    - trinix912 2y ago
      But how is that C project using a custom made JSON library doing better than Rockstar games doing the same? Because that library has good error messages? Apart from that, many of us thought that Java serialization was good if just used correctly, that IE's XML parsing capabilities were good if just used correctly, and so on. We were all very wrong. And a 3rd party library would be just some code taken from the web, or some proprietary solution where you'd once again have to trust the vendor.
      - db48x 2y ago
        It’s good because they have spent hundreds or thousands of hours polishing and improving it. It’s paid off too, because stable releases never have broken data files any more. Any mistakes that do get made are usually found and fixed before the code is ever committed. Even the experimental branch rarely sees broken data files. It’s more likely to see these error messages when loading save files, because the code to read old save files and convert them for newer versions of the game is the hardest to write and test. > And a 3rd party library would be just some code taken from the web, or some proprietary solution where you'd once again have to trust the vendor. Open source exists for a reason, and had already existed for ~15 years by the time this game was begun. 20 years later there are even fewer excuses to be stuck using some crappy code that you bought from a vendor and cannot fix.

hattar 2y ago

> Putting the (very valid) reasons for not having human-readable game saves aside, I don't follow. What would the reasons be?

gsinclair 2y ago
A human-readable game save file is presumably human-editable.
- RHSeeger 2y ago
  Most binary save game files are human editable, too; unless they go through a separate encoding stage.
  - hermitdev 2y ago
    Editting simcity saves was my introduction to hex editing...
    - RHSeeger 2y ago
      For me, iirc, it was Bard's Tale
- kadoban 2y ago
  Require a hash in the file to match the rest of the file if you want to avoid effortless changes to the file. (There is no way to prevent changes by a knowledgeable person with time or tools, so that's not a goal)
- mrguyorama 2y ago
  Before game companies earned all their profit through selling cosmetics and premium currency nobody cared if you cheated at your single player game and nobody SHOULD care if you want to give yourself extra money. It's only now that single player progress is profitable to sell that video games have taken save game encryption to be default. It's so stupid.
  - keyringlight 2y ago
    The trouble is that if some weirdness happens because of the edit, you've got to handle it even if you say it would be reasonable to assume that it's outside of being supported. Maybe you spend a bit more time defensive coding around what inputs it reads from the file, maybe a certain proportion of users doing the save edit see bugs in an apparently unrelated part of the game and seek support (and their bug report might not be complete with all the details), developers spend time to chase down what went wrong, maybe they bad-mouth it on forums which affects sales - there's going to be some cost to handling all of that. One of the anecdotes from Titan Quest developed by Iron Lore is that their copy protection had multiple checks, crackers removed the early checks to get the game running but later 'tripwires' as you progress through the game remained and the game appeared to crash. So the game earned a reputation for being buggy for something no normal user would hit running the game as intended.
    - mrguyorama 2y ago
      >The trouble is that if some weirdness happens because of the edit, you've got to handle it even if you say it would be reasonable to assume that it's outside of being supported. What? No. What even are you suggesting? Hell, games with OFFICIAL MODDING SUPPORT still require you submit bug reports with no mods running. Editing game files has always been "you are on your own", even editing standard Unreal config files is something you wont get support for, and they are trivial human readable files with well known standards. >One of the anecdotes from Titan Quest Any actual support for this anecdote? Lots of games have anti-piracy features that sneakily cause problems, and even could fire accidentally. None of those games get a reputation for being buggy. Games like Earthbound would make the game super hard and even delete your save game at the very end. Batman games would nerf your gliding ability. Game Dev Tycoon would kill your business due to piracy. None of these affected the broad reputation of the game. Most of them are pretty good marketing in fact.
trinix912 2y ago
Mostly to prevent people and programs from editing them, obfuscating implementation details, reducing file sizes (say had they used XML vs. binary)...
egypturnash 2y ago
Higher barrier to cheating.
- hattar 2y ago
  It's a single player game. Cheat codes are built into it by design.
- RGamma 2y ago
  HESOYAM
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

db48x 2y ago

You misunderstood. Game developers should use a _good_ third–party library, not a _bad_ one. At a minimum they should be able to read the source code so that they know it is good. Thus open source libraries should be at the top of the list. If you don't know what “good” looks like, take a look at [Serde](https://serde.rs/ https://serde.rs/). It’s for Rust, but its features and overall design are something you should attempt to approach no matter what language you’re writing in.

vinyl7 2y ago
There are no good third party libraries
- db48x 2y ago
  I disagree. Serde is not merely good, it is excellent. The only C code that I have recently interacted with uses a home–grown JSON “library” that is actually pretty good. In particular it produces good error messages. If it were extracted out into its own project then I would be able to recommend it as a library.
  - trinix912 2y ago
    But how is that C project using a custom made JSON library doing better than Rockstar games doing the same? Because that library has good error messages? Apart from that, many of us thought that Java serialization was good if just used correctly, that IE's XML parsing capabilities were good if just used correctly, and so on. We were all very wrong. And a 3rd party library would be just some code taken from the web, or some proprietary solution where you'd once again have to trust the vendor.
    - db48x 2y ago
      It’s good because they have spent hundreds or thousands of hours polishing and improving it. It’s paid off too, because stable releases never have broken data files any more. Any mistakes that do get made are usually found and fixed before the code is ever committed. Even the experimental branch rarely sees broken data files. It’s more likely to see these error messages when loading save files, because the code to read old save files and convert them for newer versions of the game is the hardest to write and test. > And a 3rd party library would be just some code taken from the web, or some proprietary solution where you'd once again have to trust the vendor. Open source exists for a reason, and had already existed for ~15 years by the time this game was begun. 20 years later there are even fewer excuses to be stuck using some crappy code that you bought from a vendor and cannot fix.