General / Off-Topic expertise required

[escottystar]

Hi

I am not a developer so i must apologise for not knowing the lingo but i would like to ask an experts for some information on the following.

I would like to know if it is possible to capture and record the results from online games. For example when playing Nintendo /PS3 games online gained other players around the world could the result of the game be intercepted in some way (wireless) and recorded onto a website?

Is there any programmes which do this?
If not is it possible?
What would be needed to do it, codes etc?
Where do you get these and are they available?
Who / what kind of programmers would be able to do this?

Again, I'm not sure about the terminology so please bear with me any help, guidance, and advice would be greatly appreciated.

SC

 

[Michael Brookes]

I would say probably not, most online games will try and secure the data being transferred to prevent people spoofing and cheating. Your best bet is to contact the companies directly for the information you're trying to capture.

Michael

 

[escottystar]

Thanks for your input. Do you mean contacting the manufacturing companies like Sony or Microsoft or the game companies like Rockstar or EA sports.

I would only be looking to capture /record the win - lose (1st, 2nd, 3rd) onto a database in real time. Could this be used to cheat?

 

[Michael Brookes]

Being able to decipher the games transmissions could potentially allow you to cheat, however some games have their leaderboards and such available via their web sites, so the information may be available, but only the games companies themselves could tell you whether you can access it or not for your own site.

To capture the results of individual matches is potentially quite a large amount of data, are you trying to do it for just a few named players, or provide details for all players?

Michael

 

[Callum Rowley]

It can be done for PC-based games, and some companies allow the community to grab their own .xml data for things like leaderboards (World of Warcraft allow it I believe). However, companies will often keep this data to themselves to use, as a means to promote traffic to their websites.

I don't think it's available for console games, the tech is definitely there (EA do it quite a lot - Battlefield and Dragon Age being an example), but they've yet to make their data mining publically available.