Hi there!
I want to include a fully functional account system into my game. The player should be able to login into his account, and all achieved scores or "gamerpoints" should be sent to a online webpage.
I know that there is no way around PHP and stuff, but this would be a really great feature and I wonder if there is something like it. Note that I might plan to make commercial use of my project, so I hope that there are brave souls out there who can help with suggestions.
To sum up: the player is able to login ingame and on a website. His highscores are sent from the game to the MySQL database and show up on his profile page.
Can nobody help a brother out? :^_^':
Something like this is very possible, but it would take a lot of work and it wouldn't be very safe no matter how you looked at it. Since the game would have to interact with either A) A MySQL database or B) Make HTTP calls to some PHP pages, anybody could decrypt your game and get a hold of this data. Which then leaves you screwed because if your MySQL is right there in the open, people can get into it and do whatever the hell they want.
The only safe way to do this would to create your own C library which can be used in Ruby using Win32 calls. This library could either communicate with MySQL or do the much safer route and make HTTP calls to some PHP scripts on a web server. This is definitely doable but its still not safe as people can still decrypt your game and call these Win32 calls whenever they want. If you honestly want a system like this then I suggest going with a different engine thats more secure. Its a lot more trouble than its worth and its really not worth anyone's time.
Speaking of encryption modes, which is the "safest" for XP games at the moment?