What If?

[Slynky]

Not so much worried about altering turns or weapons or moves. The hardest kind of cheating to detect would be decrypting the log file and/or the game file or learning other player's passwords. How could that be detected with complete assurance?

[Roanon]

Originally posted by geoschmo:
there are ways to get around it if the person is skilled enough and dedicated to teh task. There are always ways, and the cheaters always have the advantage in this arms race.

Not really. It depends on the design. The problem here is a client that actually executes most of the commands and sends the RESULTS to the host. 100% unbreakable is a design that only sends the commands to the host and does NO final data changes on client side. Host then does the usual checking if the command is possible, like the client does on the players side. Host has all data and does all data changes. If you hack data on client side, be happy but game data is not affected as you only can access a copy of the actual data, not the data itself. If you hack the client, you may be able to enter commands that are invalid, but they are not really executed but ignored by the host. Hackers problem if he can enter commands and his game goes boom because most of them are ignored. A matter of basic design philosopy. Only way to cheat here: host hacking, and that can be prevented easily.

The one guarantee I can give you is that it will ALWAYS be possible to verify if someone is cheating.

Not always. "Cheating light", only looking at the complete game data, CANNOT be proven. You just see a player who seems to have an incredible amount of luck when making decisions. The only way to prevent that is to send only the needed data to a player, data that the player is allowed to access completely. Can make programming a lot more difficult though as you need different data (.gam) files for different players. Sending unnecessary data is a common mistake and easy source for most hacks in many multiplayer games, especially Online games.

[ September 18, 2003, 14:26: Message edited by: Roanon ]

[Slynky]

"Not always. "Cheating light", only looking at the complete game data, CANNOT be proven. You just see a player who seems to have an incredible amount of luck when making decisions. The only way to prevent that is to send only the needed data to a player, data that the player is allowed to access completely. Can make programming a lot more difficult though as you need different data (.gam) files for different players. Sending unnecessary data is a common mistake and easy source for most hacks in many multiplayer games, especially Online games."

Sounds like what I was saying, Roanon.

[Fyron]

Not really. It depends on the design. The problem here is a client that actually executes most of the commands and sends the RESULTS to the host. 100% unbreakable is a design that only sends the commands to the host and does NO final data changes on client side.

And this is what SE4 does. The plr file contains ONLY orders issued, nothing else. All data files are read from the host's set when processing the turns. All game code is read from the host when processing. The player can only issue orders, not do any processing of anything. Unless he gets ahold of the game master password, in which case he can process turns on his own and see what will happen down the line, but the can not make changes to the "real" game the host sends out. The game detects even changes to descriptions of componetns and such and declares the data files invalid.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

well, that lays my concerns to rest.