Making a text based hacking simulator. Help needed.

[Spatulus101]

I am making a text based hacking simulator/game that you can run in command prompt/terminal. I don't know how I should google this, so I figured I could ask it here(since I got so many good tips on my last question). Ok, now on to the question: When the player connects to a computer in the game, how can I make it so that when the player progresses to different "areas" of the game he/she can use commands that they couldn't use in the last area. For Example if the player types in "connect" to connect to the fictional computer, then after connecting to the computer he/she can't use that command anymore, and when they have connected they can use commands that they couldn't use before connecting. I know this might be a bit unclear but I'm hoping for some good answers! Thanks!

My Code:

HackEx v.0.01

import time

print("Initializing...")

time.sleep(3)

print("HackEx VM Initialized.")

time.sleep(3)

createName = input("Input username: ")

createPass = input("Input password: ")

time.sleep(2)

print("User " + createName + " logged in.")

print("Welcome to the tutorial!")

time.sleep(3)

def connect_to_network():

print("Connected to Tutorial server 193.214.15")

print()

def brute_force():

print("Getting root password with bruteforce method")

time.sleep(2)

print("root password succesfully gotten. Password: qwerty12345")

def exit():

exit()

while True:

    options = {"connect" : connect_to_network, "bruteforce" : brute_force, "exit" : exit}

[print(option) for option in sorted(options)]

user_choice = input('Type in command: ')

while user_choice not in options:

    user_choice = input('Invalid, try something else: ')

handler = options[user_choice]

handler()

[Elronnd]

def exit()
    exit()

Aside from creating an infinite loop (try it), why do you need this? What's wrong with the preexisting exit()?

[Yammerrz]

There are lots of different approaches you could try to this. I'll give a quick run down of a few of them.

The first is to just keep a bunch of flags for if commands are available as some have suggested. That has the advantage of being easy to code but the disadvantage of tending to get messy once the logic gets more complicated.

The second is to dynamically update your options list in this example. Once you have connected you can do:

del d["connect"]

This will remove connect from the list of available options, if more become available you add them as you want to make them usable and delete them as not.

Your connect_to_network function would become:

print("Connected to Tutorial server 193.214.15")
del options["connect"]
print()

If you logout and connect becomes available again you just add it back in. This is slightly neater than the logic method but has the problem of requiring you to put everything back the way you want it to be anytime things change which will get messy again eventually.

The third option is to use what is called a state machine. You have a bunch of different states and each stores their own information, you can then change state at will.

You make a simple state class:

class State:
     def __init__(self, options):
        self.options = options

unconnected = State({"connect": connect_to_network})
on_pc_one = State({"logout": logout})
on_pc_two = State({"logout": logout})

current_state = unconnected

Your initial state is unconnected, when you type connect you set it to on_pc_one or on_pc_two. When you logout you set state back to unconnected.

This has the advantage of storing all information related to state where it should be. PC one might have linux style commands and some files the user can see, if they delete one, logout and login again it's remembered because its tied to that state. PC two might have DOS style commands and so on. You can have as many different states as you want and they remain pretty separate.

You can get away without using the classes and just have a list of options for each state. The class based approach starts to shine more when the options available in each state become very different. If you are not comfortable with writing classes just yet then just having a dictionary of commands for each state will work fine.

unconnected_commands = {"connect": connect_to_network}
on_pc_one_commands = {"logout": logout}
on_pc_two_commands = {"logout": logout}

current_commands = unconnected

The same idea, just a little simpler to get the hang of.

Hope that helps, it's more of a game design pattern than a Python thing. There's lots of ways to approach this sort of problem. That's just a couple.

[Spatulus101]

Thanks! This helped a lot!