Highscores?

[Zach_VB6]

I am building a game project for a school project. User gets points for completing certain tasks. I have it all coded - curious as how I should do high score table.

I was thinking an Access DB, but that seems like total overkill.

Does XML seem reasonable?

[Shaggy Hiker]

If the table is small and will not keep adding rows, then XML does seem reasonable. Of course, anybody can edit XML with Notepad, so that may be a consideration. Other than that, serializing/deserializing a datatable to XML will be easy.

[Zach_VB6]

If the table is small and will not keep adding rows, then XML does seem reasonable. Of course, anybody can edit XML with Notepad, so that may be a consideration. Other than that, serializing/deserializing a datatable to XML will be easy.

How hard is it to encrypt & decrypt it? A native way is preferred

[formlesstree4]

You could use TripleDES. There's a Provider in the Cryto namespace.

[Zach_VB6]

Ya it's not like I need a super secure encryption - it's for a school project.

I don't want to include someone else's code in my project - the simpler the better.

[minitech]

I wouldn't even use XML. You could have a format like this:

SCORE:NAME
SCORE:NAME
SCORE:NAME

And you wouldn't even have to escape anything because the score is always a number and won't ever contain a colon. Hopefully the name won't contain a newline.

A good and simple scrambling system might be to take the characters in the file and interlace them - take the first character of the first half, first character of second half, second character of first half, etc... it would be very easy to encrypt/decrypt with a program, and possibly easy to read manually, but not write... so it would be pretty safe if you're just looking for something that would stop people changing things about easily. (After all, they could always just look at your Triple DES key stored in the program!)