So you may have (or not) noticed the lack of small game collab topics on the right.
That is mostly because I am working on none other than the alert games multiplayer 'API'. Seems that there is a lot of demand all of a sudden for making multiplayer games, so why not let them all use the same usernames, and give them the abilty for highscores, achievements, and friends lists? :DBut dont worry, I will bring back the Small Game Collab once it calms down a bit haha. At that time ill put out a nice gameplay engine, and combine everything into one blog to work with.And so i'll leave you guys with some minecraft pics from a little bit ago:
The piccadilly station… if you havent seen it
/rideYou know eventually i'll have to put together all the best screenshots on the server…
Single point of failure, expensive to run, dubious advantage, potentially quite limiting to what data can be stored serverside, a single malicious application can compromise all linked games, so on.
I do like the idea of having one account for all games (similar to Reflect and Steam). If you can work out potential security flaws and be pretty proactive, as well as giving developers some freedom for achievements, leaderboards, and rankings (custom/downloadable content would be awesome if possible), then you can easily outdo Reflect with the right technologies.
PY brings up some good points though. Whether or not you feel it's a problem, it's always best to be prepared than to suffer from hacking and instability. People wonder why Vista was so overbearing, and it's because Microsoft thought security was more important than anything (though they took a more annoying approach of course).I look forward to its completion.Well there is one issue. And that is that an "API" (in quotes) would have to be trusted to be given out and not distributed. So really its an exclusive API which is why i put it in quotes in the first place.
I think you were thinking that it would be open to all developers. I didnt mention that it isnt.Since this is a free service im only trusting that people dont abuse the system. And if they are, I can block their IP address. Im not expecting too many members, so if it really does get abused ill have to improve methods of stopping trolls.Yes I do have methods of stopping or finding cheaters though.So how do I log in? If I have to provide my details, then it's certainly a single point of failure. I suppose you could do it like OpenID which could solve a lot of the issues, but not all of them. If you allow games to store arbitrary data serverside you're opening a can of worms, if you don't you're limiting what the service can do. Expensive to run is obviously relative to how popular it gets, though.
Lol