Developer-Controlled Online Game DB (Not Quite Dead Yet)

[darkenergy100]

So I suck at Flash... that much is true, but html? So after lurking for countless hours on this site and others, I actually want to do something cool. But I also don't want to madden the actual developers so I'll ask for your opinion first. I always hear about funny-games.biz and a lot of other flash sites getting bad reps because they steal flash, but would it be good if i made a compilation/database site and then turned the individual pages over to the developers themselves? Updating the game on the site could either entail a simple drag-and-drop to Google Drive, or the developer could re-code the entire page for the game to their own design. I think it would be nice to have a semi-active compilation of all the cool work I see on LoK, TFGames, ULMF, Fenoxo's forums, and a lot of other places. But yet again, if y'all think this is too far removed from yourselves, I won't do it.

Edit 1: I'm back after four years of silence. I'm driven, and I have a host and funding. Our site is going up, and I'm looking for developers willing to become the first content creators. This platform will be for both free-to-play and paid games - Flash, HTML, EXE, whatever. Just DM me if you want your game up there and I will give you a community space.

link: http://gammaxxx.com

[Terrantor!!!]

I'd be all for unifying the dev teams across the forums. Only problem is I don't know how to code in html, I only know flash, lol.

[darkenergy100]

With the way I'm hosting this, the back-end should be incredibly user-friendly for Flash devs. It'll just be a shared folder in Google Drive to upload games or edit your page.

[Terrantor!!!]

I see. Alright, I'm pretty excited.

[BlueLight]

Why would this help with sites stealing?
The swf isn't streamed from the server but downloaded so all you need to steal the file is a web broswer

[darkenergy100]

Why would this help with sites stealing?

Yeah, I'm not really saying that this would help with stealing. I doubt I can help with that. The purpose of this site would be to give y'all some free hosting and some actual control over which flash is posted and in what setting. Instead of ads for dick pills, think pay-pal donations for you guys or links to your blog.

[BlueLight]

Giving us a place to host our game that would look professional would be nice.

[darkenergy100]

It would be really cool if one of the artists on here could make a background for the page. The only limitation would be the aspect ratio... it would be 1:1. But yeah, if no one feels up to it, I'll just pick a color scheme and roll. It could really be a scene of anything, I just need something to pull a primary color from. I will, of course, give credit.

[inkhryptedQuery]

First post on the forums after much lurking.

I'm also full-stack web applications engineer and flash actionscript developer.

This is a good idea, not because it will stop others from stealing flash applications, but because it will nullify what they do. People will be able to have the option of placing a "go to developer-controlled online game library" button for the original flash file. And be able to get the original without seeing advertisements that are essentially AS3 wrappers.

Thereby, using the originators content to take them away from sites like funnygames.biz etc.

Also, by allowing a site that is a repository of all flash games willingly, you'll gather more people who want to play, comment and collaborate on these games. Rather than getting hit with shady ads and popups. They'll be able to speak directly to the developers.

There IS a game site that has already done this, and has a lot of flash games on it already. It's called http://gamejolt.com/
It's completely indie developer driven, allows for great collaboration.

However, there is no/little adult content and I don't think it's geared for a mature crowd.

You can use a lot of the ideas from their site for what you'd want for this online game library. Include listings for developers and designers so that they can collaborate.

[Enkidu]

I would really like to see a place like that being discussed that has support for html5/canvas game development instead of strictly flash. You can easily thwart theft if you are developing that way by serving your scripts over ajax so nobody ever has access to the full game at any one time. However that would take some extensive engineering. Some flash games designed to be used with subscriptions or function as desktop applications are also designed similar to this. Personally, I walked away from flash development about 6 years ago and started focusing on canvas, php, and java. I still like a lot of flash games, I just don't really code them anymore. If you can code well in flash (particularly AS3), you would be suprised how easy it is to move to javascript. They are both interpretations of the EMCA script library, and there are actually few core differences once you get the hang of it.

[BlueLight]

This is a good idea, not because it will stop others from stealing flash applications, but because it will nullify what they do. People will be able to have the option of placing a "go to developer-controlled online game library" button for the original flash file. And be able to get the original without seeing advertisements that are essentially AS3 wrappers.

Thereby, using the originators content to take them away from sites like funnygames.biz etc.

Except Funny games will remove the link to websites. Not sure how they do it.


I personally would want this site to support Java, Flash, HTML 5, and unity. pages for displaying the game would require that you be able to link to a blank page with no click able buttons or extra text; this is so we don't run into problem with SWF needing the user to scroll but not being able to because the webpage can scroll. For instances what Fenoxo does if you click download while maybe not giving complete access to the SWF. Their needs to be security for user to keep risky software off. Java has it built in already, flash is fairly safe, along with HTML so it might not be that bad. Unity should be as safe as HTML and flash.

Comments would be nice along with a feature reports if a file is broken, has illegal content or containing viruses.

[Enkidu]

Yeah, I'm not really saying that this would help with stealing. I doubt I can help with that. The purpose of this site would be to give y'all some free hosting and some actual control over which flash is posted and in what setting. Instead of ads for dick pills, think pay-pal donations for you guys or links to your blog.

There are two basic ways to prevent content theft, both need some interaction with the server. For preventing automated scraping, you basically create a server-side proxy script that insures the initial content request came from the server itself, (Look into how to use a nonce in whatever language you are coding the server in). Basically in a nutshell the server generates a distinct, single use hash and automatically fills a hidden form field with it, which will only match if the user is using the appropriate download links rather than directly scraping your directory structure, and anyone who doesn't have it gets a 403 forbidden error. You can do this similarly to prevent remote access to your images to prevent bandwidth theft and lots of other useful things, to make sure that anyone looking at your content is actually on your page and has followed the correct procedure to get it. That will keep your files from being automatically ripped, but it doesn't stop someone from manually loading it in the browser and saving the file by going through the actual normal links/buttons and then stealing it. So how do you do that exactly? Well it's pretty much the same deal, except you issue match nonces for each chunk of code you send to the browser, and send the request for them from within the game itself. So you might have a workflow something like this:

Spoiler (click to show/hide):

1) Server: create nonce hash for user. Store in session, cookie (try to avoid this if possible, the user can mess with their cookies), database, etc for that specific user and file combination.
2) Send preloader file
3) Send nonce hash to preloader, which gets stored in a variable (use json/xml/etc via ajax). Use previously defined method for server proxy to make sure that the preloader is actually from your site, and not ripped and placed elsewhere.
4) When a new chunk of your game code is required, the game file should send it's nonce hash with the request (which is NOT hardcoded in, it is initially obtained when the first part of the code loads directly from the server), which the server will match against their specific session before returning the next chunk of code or file. If there is not a match, the server returns false and never sends the rest of the code. You can also log the ip of the request to get a good overview of repeat offenders so you can blacklist them entirely if they have over a certain number of failed requests (like 1000 within a day or so). This usually means they are attempting to scrape your content with an automated script, as most regular human users will never make that many requests within one day. Then you redirect all of the blacklisted ip requests to a picture of dog poop or something equally annoying. If they are dumb enough to try and directly link your content from their site, then they have dog poop pictures all over their site

The trick with this technique is that it requires that you can either dynamically load multiple files, or that you write your code object oriented so that it can request specific objects from the server. You could theoretically do a similar thing with procedural code by requiring the nonce for specific functions to run, however a really dedicated thief could simply decompile your swf and just remove all the pingbacks to the server, which would take a ton of time and effort, but is still doable. If you pass each part of the code as an object directly from the server, they never get the code at all unless they are making a legit request from the correct project home. The other thing you can do is to have all of your code within the initial file, and load images and variables from the database using the ajax nonce pingback as previously mentioned. This will mean that if your code is ripped they can still theoretically run your game, however it's not really going to do anything unless they create an entirely new set of images/sound/variables to run it with. Again, this can be done, but it's a huge pain and not really worth the effort in most cases. The ideal solution would be to do both, so that not only does the game code not load if it's not correct, but the assets don't either. This also lets you very quickly customize game content without directly editing your code, so you can have a designer or animator working on your game without worry of them breaking anything in the codebase, or you could send a different set of criteria based on some user-triggered event (like changing jump physics if they level up or get an item or something, loading a specific animation set based on the character the user picks, loading level tilesets based on the specific level the user is currently on, or whatever else you can imagine).

This is a rudimentary explanation of how premium games and consoles deal with paid content, however it is also useful to keep your stuff in the right place without a thousand rips floating around all over the web.

So in the instance of building out a game hosting site, you would want to create an api that the game devs can hook into automatically so they don't have to tinker with your server code directly, as letting a million people write server side scripts is generally a very bad idea. So instead, you would issue them authorization when they first upload a game, and then create a nonce for them which their game can request over ajax without them having to write out the whole nonce stuff themselves on the server. The best thing to do in this case would be to provide a snippet of code that accomplishes this so they can just plunk it into their project and have it work. You would need to create one for each language you intended it to work with (i.e. flash, javascript, etc), and then just put them in the developer resources section so they can grab them when needed, or alternately create some generalized ajax url they can ping which will check to insure that their project is registered in the system and return their nonce if it is detected. In the case of flash, you could automatically have all games loaded via a preset preloader that already has this built in, so the game can just call the nonce function because it is already loaded by the preloader before the rest of the game loads at all. This would work for content that is only stored on that specific site, but they would need to manually check to insure they are on the right site within their game code or alternately strip it out for a version that would be anywhere else on the web. However if you are going to build a game using this kind of setup, you probably aren't going to store it in a million different places so that's a minor concern. The biggest problem is that this prevents games from being downloaded and played offline. There really isn't any way to prevent theft if you want them offline-playable, and if you intend to let users download your game, you probably shouldn't be worrying about what they are doing with it unless you want to give them some kind of auth key to actually play it, which is another huge effort to set up, and probably not worthwhile for free content.

It might tempt you to attempt some kind of authentication system using the REQUEST_URI variable. Do not do this, that can be easily spoofed browserside, and dedicated content thieves usually already have a means to do this (like the funny-games.biz guy).

[darkenergy100]

Lol a lot of the stuff that is getting posted is kindof going straight over my head. Though, in response to alternate game types, I was actually thinking in the beginning of adding support for HTML5, Twine, Java (Though it is being deprecated ), and Unity. If one of you guys wants to play around with the Muse file I'm using and try to add a bit more functionality, that would be awesome. I really suck at PHP, so user accounts would be a start. Right now, I'm working on getting a search engine in the header, and next I'll add the tags for alternate engines. If you want to look at the Muse file, just private message me, and I'll share it with you on Google Drive.

[Digfree]

It would be really cool if one of the artists on here could make a background for the page. The only limitation would be the aspect ratio... it would be 1:1. But yeah, if no one feels up to it, I'll just pick a color scheme and roll. It could really be a scene of anything, I just need something to pull a primary color from. I will, of course, give credit.

I think I might be able to make something pretty cool for yeah… Message me as I gonna need a little more details on the size and the borders

[Enkidu]

I really suck at PHP, so user accounts would be a start. Right now, I'm working on getting a search engine in the header, and next I'll add the tags for alternate engines. If you want to look at the Muse file, just private message me, and I'll share it with you on Google Drive.

I'm too new to pm, but I'm very good at php. Not terrible at Ruby either.

[MadBob]

I'm a HTML/CSS/JS/PHP/MySQL developer. I can help you plan the backend, find bugs, or improve performance of your code.

[darkenergy100]

I was about to quit... and then I read the thread.
Greatly sorry for my absence.

I'm a HTML/CSS/JS/PHP/MySQL developer. I can help you plan the backend, find bugs, or improve performance of your code.

I'm too new to pm, but I'm very good at php. Not terrible at Ruby either.

If either one of you could help with database functionality, it would be massively appreciated. I have the interface together, but PHP and MySQL aren't really my thing.

I think I might be able to make something pretty cool for yeah… Message me as I gonna need a little more details on the size and the borders

If your offer is still open, I'm shooting for a maximum size of FHD, or 1920x1080 pixels. I will be able to make it scale appropriately.

I'll try to stay alive this time

[darkenergy100]

Has it really been four years?

After having some spillover into my life afk, I decided to remove myself from the forums. I never knew it would last this long. I'm back, and ready to start on this again. I have a partner funding this, and am working on a site built with wordpress. With some blessings from flash developers, I'd like to put a solid five or six games out to start, along with donation buttons, just to test. I can guarantee that this will be published, and I have a self-prescribed deadline of the 28th.

If you'd like your game to be hosted for free and advertised for free along with a donate button straight to you, please dm me!

The site may be previewed here: http://www.gammaxxx.com

Please note that everything including the logo is currently a placeholder.

[Dead2112man]

wow, your right, four years is a heck of a comeback

[isaachawks]

welcome back, the idea seems solid to me.