Psuedo-Dedicated Slave servers hosted from client.

[Vargling]

For example, using a Seaworthy.

 

Would generate a pseudo-dedicated (my term for the forest+cave servers and how they boot like dedicated servers.) 'water world' that sets itself up as a slave to the original server. At this point, you have no admin or remote console to cheat.

 

What's the real issue with this? It would work, as far as I know. If the connection is terminated the world is terminated. Simple as that. It opens a lot of opportunities for mods, as well as DLCs. Allowing almost 'Nightmare Sequences' of parts that wouldn't fit in the lore.

 

Thoughts on why/why not this would work?

[Ecu]

If you're talking about another server akin to caves, this is already possible.  You can spin up multiple slave worlds, I believe, with connections to a primary world.  However, if you're thinking that the client would actually host a work in a singleplayer sense, and then then transfer everything back to the multiplayer world under certain conditions, that's a security issue.

It would be trivial to cheat anything you wanted into the game if the client could transfer resources to the server.  In addition, even things like score to determine if you win could be faked locally and transmitted to the server (so you couldn't have the reward on the server side based on local score).

The only way this is really viable is via a third dedicated server, which can already be done.

[Vargling]

15 hours ago, Ecu said:

If you're talking about another server akin to caves, this is already possible.  You can spin up multiple slave worlds, I believe, with connections to a primary world.  However, if you're thinking that the client would actually host a work in a singleplayer sense, and then then transfer everything back to the multiplayer world under certain conditions, that's a security issue.

It would be trivial to cheat anything you wanted into the game if the client could transfer resources to the server.  In addition, even things like score to determine if you win could be faked locally and transmitted to the server (so you couldn't have the reward on the server side based on local score).

The only way this is really viable is via a third dedicated server, which can already be done.

Psuedo-Dedicated means it can be locked up much tighter. It's certainly viable, especially optional.

[Ecu]

11 minutes ago, Vargling said:

Psuedo-Dedicated means it can be locked up much tighter. It's certainly viable, especially optional.

I'm sorry, but if it is running client side, you cannot actually secure it as you seem to think.  It is a golden rule of multiplayer game development, trust clients as little as possible.  Someone could sit down and write a proxy which can feed false information to the server.  In fact, I've done this myself for a social game in order to create bots or additional features.

The only way to implement this reasonably is to have it be on the server.

[Vargling]

1 minute ago, Ecu said:

I'm sorry, but if it is running client side, you cannot actually secure it as you seem to think.  It is a golden rule of multiplayer game development, trust clients as little as possible.  Someone could sit down and write a proxy which can feed false information to the server.  In fact, I've done this myself for a social game in order to create bots or additional features.

The only way to implement this reasonably is to have it be on the server.

It's optional and it is fully connected, anyway. The only things they could cheat are literally fish, technically. The server would reject everything else, if done right.

 

It can be done reasonably, you're just against anything with even the smallest hole in it, without realising DST has been hacked so many times already.... pirated, speed hacks, you name it.

[Ecu]

1 minute ago, Vargling said:

It's optional and it is fully connected, anyway. The only things they could cheat are literally fish, technically. The server would reject everything else, if done right.

 

It can be done reasonably, you're just against anything with even the smallest hole in it, without realising DST has been hacked so many times already.... pirated, speed hacks, you name it.

I'm sorry, but you're wrong @Vargling.  While you could implement such a system on the client, it is easy to abuse...so why?  It would be better to just spin up a dynamic instance on the server that a user uses to do whatever you want to do singleplayer and then destroy the instance again when it isn't needed.  This has the benefit of reducing the strain on the client, and reduces security risks.

Now dynamically spinning up new instances like this isn't something the DST engine handles by default currently (I don't believe), but it would be a much better avenue to look into when compared to your method.

Curiously, why is this even something that is needed?  Why do you want singleplayer content in a multiplayer game?