Safer saves (Patreon)

Hi everyone, sorry for being less communicative this month. My plan was for me to leave the code optimized and ready to receive the content, but I saw the need for some changes and I'm rushing to get everything ready by the 30th. As I'm focusing on the code for these weeks I don't have anything exciting to show you. This is one of those more technical reports. I'm sorry, but not everything can be just fun.

In April this year, Microsoft published an article about the risks of using BinaryFormatter, which is very common in saving games. The problem is that a hacker could modify a binary file to execute a malicious program when it was loaded by the program. For games, the problem would be when using save files from untrustworthy sources.

Until the last version published of S4H, the system needed information in the registry to load the save file, this prevented an outside save from being executed. Still, it is important to reiterate the recommendation to avoid using third-party saves as well as downloading games from unofficial sources.

However, I understand that the nature of my game may lead many to want to cut corners on the sex scenes, and save sharing is a thing. So I decided to eliminate the risks by changing the formatting of the saves to JSON. This is basically a text file with organized information, leaving no space for executable snippets.

In addition to this security change, I optimized how the save system works, to avoid bugs. Due to these changes, old saves no longer work, but there will be many reasons to start the game over from the beginning.

I'm currently working on a significant change in how scenes are edited, which I hope to finish before the end of this week. There's a change in the cameras too, I'm abandoning the camera that always follows the mouse. Some players have complained about it causing dizziness and I'm opting for better solutions.

That's it for now. My next post will probably be as boring as this one, but as soon as the code is working perfectly I'll start working on the playable demos.

Thank you very much to all of you!