Anyways back to the topic.
It would appear that there is some concern that by saving a game in "midstream" may give information to a hacker to do serious damage to the game or give himself an unfair advantage.
I do know the turn is encrypted when it is saved as a .plr file.
For 20 years I was a Mac user and we had programs that could look at the structure of the program in memory and on a floppy or hard drive.
I know this because I did it. I was curious about the structure of the program and the way the data was saved. And the "savegame" files were not encrypted. If they were, it would would have made it immeasureably harder to decipher the data and probably would have stopped me in my tracks.
I would imagine those programs are still available for the Mac and for the PC as well. So the dedicated "enthusiast" should be able to locate and print out the program which is in memory.
He should also be able to locate and print out the "savegame" .plr file in whatever format he wishes. I was particularly fond of two, but hexadecimal was my favourite with ordered columns of hex data. But as mentioned the .plr file is encrypted so the dedicated "enthusiast" would have to have the skills of a cryptologist as well to make any sense of the data.
One way to break a code would be to make just a single change and compare the two results. That probably will not work now as the the algorithyms used have become much more sophisticated to make savegame files completely different from the earlier Version of the saved .plr file which was saved for comparison purposes.
What we need from MM is the ablity to save an incomplete move with the use of a completely different algorthym. Someone who takes weeks and even months to decipher the savegame algorithm for a incomplete move will not be able to use it to decipher the final .plr file.
Just a few cents worth.
