Comment by hattar

1 day ago

> Putting the (very valid) reasons for not having human-readable game saves aside,

I don't follow. What would the reasons be?

14 comments

hattar

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gsinclair  1 day ago

A human-readable game save file is presumably human-editable.

  • kadoban  1 day 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  1 day 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  1 day 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.

      2 replies →

trinix912  1 day ago

Mostly to prevent people and programs from editing them, obfuscating implementation details, reducing file sizes (say had they used XML vs. binary)...