Multiplayer Game Listen Servers: Ensuring Integrity
- by Ankit Soni
I'm making a simple multiplayer game of Tic Tac Toe in Python using Bridge (its an RPC service built over a message queue - RabbitMQ) and I'd like to structure it so that the client and the server are just one file. When a user runs the game, he is offered a choice to either create a game or join an existing game. So when a user creates a game, the program will create the game and also join him as a player to the game. This is basically a listen server (as opposed to a dedicated server) - a familiar concept in multiplayer games.
I came across a really interesting question while trying to make this - how can I ensure that the player hosting the game doesn't tamper with it (or atleast make it difficult)? The player hosting the game has access to the array used to store the board etc., and these must be stored in the process' virtual memory, so it seems like this is impossible. On the other hand, many multiplayer games use this model for LAN games.
