Since the earliest of online computer games there have been small groups that strive to ruin honest games for the selfish delight of being able to gain advantage over other honest players. I admin on a number of servers in a number of different games. Most of which are first person shooters. Myself and other admins I work with keep up on what kind of cheats there are availible to the public to constantly try and keep up with the new epidemic of cheating on our server. During one such search for the nefarious “H@Xz” I came across a site with a section for the new up and coming title Enemy Territory Quake Wars. Though this site yeilded no actual cheats for ETQW, it promised to have them soon after the game is released.
Companies Like EvenBalance (originators of the “punkbuster” software) try to keep some games protected. Unfortunately less than ten perecent of all real cheat programs or “hacks” are actually detected. Leaving those gamers without such “hacks” at the hands of dishonest cheaters. In reality People that cheat at online multiplayer games are by far the worst kind of gamer ever… far worse than those new to games “noobs”, or even those that would plant themselves in a hiding place to lurk and await unsuspecting players “campers” , and cheaters are far worse than the chat spamming foul mouthed players “flamers”, but the cold frightening reality of how truly “Lame” online cheaters are is how they are even lower than the players that find it a great fun time to kill those players on thier own team “TK’ers”.
What will be done to keep our beloved ETQW free of this viral outbreak of putrid cheat writing coders? How will splash damage be different from so many other software companies, most of which dont actually care about those that buy and play thier games (after they buy them)? Will ETQW be a ramapant"hack"- fest only months after its release like so many other titles?
"Dirty Rotten Scoundrels..." A Look At Cheats To C
Of course ET:QW will have it’s fair share of cheats, it is in human nature that a certain type of people will try to gain some kind of advantage…all any software company can do is make it as hard as they possibly can for people to do this, though people also want to be able to personalise their games which would appear to make the thing vulnerable to such people.
I don’t think it’s possible yet (though I am no expert) to completely make a game hackerproof, though it would be great if it was the case.
Unlike W:ET, which was never released inside a box, ET:QW will most probably provide you with exactly 1 cdkey per game box. So even if pb fails for some reason (where did you get these stats, by the way ?), you can still spectate someone, record a demo, etc. So even if you have to catch someone manually, he’ll stay banned.
Of course it is. The problem is, it would require much more bandwidth, or server calculations, or you’d have to be a badger like myself.
The reason you can hack at all is because you (client) is sent much more information than you need. More than you can see, for example coordinates of enemies behind walls, behind you, etc. As said above, servers do this, because they don’t have to run so many calculation this way. They send you the data, and your machine’s CPU/GPU determines what can you see. The first step to preventing cheats (wallhacks), would be making servers that calculate what each player can see, and send them only just enough data. (coordinates). ET:QW already did first step towards this: there’s “area of relevance” system which makes sure you aren’t bothered with info you don’t need, such as how many grenades is someone carrying 2km from your location.
I understand one reasons servers do this (send too much info) is because it makes it harder to notice lag until it hits you hard. In early Quake games lags looked quite ugly. There was jerkiness etc. Then games like UT started messing with that. A BIG lag (or even total loss of connection) looks different in UT1. All enemies freeze, but you can walk around several paces from your actual position, turn around, etc. You’d be soon enough teleported back to your original position, but still. A clear example clients are sent more info than they need.
I think it wil be next natural step of evolution of FPS games. As we get access to faster and faster CPUs, somewhere in the future servers WILL perform a lot of calculations to make sure each client is sent only data he needs. This means higher server hardware requirements, but not for clients.
So, would the ideal solution be to send clients only objects (wall vertexes, entities, player models) which they should actually see ? Not exactly. It would stop wallhacks, but probably not aimbots.
As I understand, aimbots work by messing with your graphical library. They use coords of enemy players and shoot at them.
There’s one more way to seriously harm cheating. You know what video streaming is, right ? Ideally, each client/player would be sent only a stream of video “from player’s eyes”. Client would send ‘vector’ data back to server, I mean ‘i rotate THIS much degrees, walk in THIS direction’ etc. It would make it impossible to write wallhacks (unless you hack the server itself, not the client), and I imagine it would be really hard to do aimbots, too. Basically aimbots would have to recongnize patters in raster images, and do it REALTIME. There are some programs that can do it (for example recongnize some of text you have to type in when you register an account,etc), but they’re limited (they don’t think the same way human brain does), and it would probably require a lot of CPU firepower to work.
Obvious big problem with video streaming is bandwith required. And the server would have to do all the work for clients. But there are benefits:
- assuming your machine can receive video streams, hardware requirements would be static for each game, because all the work is done by server.
- you’d have to download very little, if anything, to play another game/mod. Just connect to another server.
I can see bandwidth requirements for video streaming is a big problem… but is it really ? You’d have to think outside the box, and that’s where badgerity comes into play. You already can stream videos with low bandwidth requirements:
http://ascii.dyne.org/
… and you can achievie rock-solid (static) 25 FPS with a mere 56k modem.
http://n00n.free.fr/aatv/
http://webpages.mr.net/bobz/ttyquake/ss/
http://www.jfedor.org/aaquake2/
(note: these 2 are just client-sided hacks, so you’d still be able to wallhack/aimbot)
You’d have to play a bit with contrast to make it work properly, like this:
This poll is kinda weird… of course NO ONE wants to have cheaters on their servers.
Punkbuster does a good job imho, cause it keeps those “kiddy cheaters” from the servers. I mean those cheaters that are using “standard” hacks. You’ll never have a 100% chance to catch the pro-hackers, that are using customized/unreleased hacks. But those guys are rarely seen (at least I hope so) so PB does the trick for me. It’s the best we can get.
B0rsuk…
Well it looks like you are the resident expert on everything… but the whole video stream thing was a little out there… I think what your talking about is “Server Authoritative” instead of “Client Authoritative”… for example… Counterstrike is a client authoritative game… I.E. the game is played on the client machine and the server only relays info back and forth, While Halo PC is a game that is server authoritative I.E. what is seen by the client is only a mirror image of what the server is playing ( any client interaction is decided by the server )… Both systems have been worked around by cheaters to be able to write cheat software.
A while back I bought a game with copy protection called “Fade”. the company that wrote it promised that if you copied the game it would work until one day it would “fade” away from your hard-drive until it was un-usable… this seems like a fitting end to cheaters… Valve Bans for life if your caught cheating on a secure server… but wouldnt it be better to have a file-scan/cheat protection software built in? So the game scans the game directory for cheats as you load … and actively waits for someone to use third party cheat software while in-game. Then if found the program fades, leaving a hidden registry entry not allowing the program to be re-installed until the owner formats the operating system, and simultaneously banning them globaly from play on PB servers.
video streaming is a non-starter for current and near future for a number of reasons:
- The server would have to render everyones views. This means that for, say a 32 player ET server, you’d need the equivalent of 32 geforce 4 level video cards for acceptable quality and performance. For ET:QW, you need that many of the very latest and greatest.
- Just being able to render it isn’t enough, you would also need to get the output of all 32 of those streams over the system bus into main memory for encoding.
- Streaming video can look OK on a decent broadband connection, but you lose a lot of detail. Fast movement and sharp detail are the strong points of compressed video. Video that is acceptable quality for a TV show really doesn’t cut for an FPS. If you doubt, try playing ET with video out on your TV and report back.
- High quality video encoding is very CPU intensive.
- All current FPS games predict on the client. If you have to wait for a round trip to the server to turn or start moving, it feels very wrong, even if your ping is only 50ms.
- Consumer broadband connections behave poorly under heavy load. If come close to maxing out your connection with a video stream, your upload is not going to give you interactive performance.
Finally, even if you manage that, people can still code aimbots with image recognition. By the time streaming video is a realistic option, your clients will have plenty of power to do that very well. In fact, you could do a fairly decent job of it on current system.
Moriarty:
By definition anything anticheat (or copy protection, the problems logically are equivalent) does on the client can be defeated.
The use of Punkbuster and MORE CRUCIALLY the ability to spectate another player through their eyes is all that is needed by server admins and players imo.
you will always get cheaters of some type - the best solution is one CD Key per user and getting the public to spot, name + shame them to the authority and have their account suspended or disabled.
this is a fine and dandy system provided:
- you can hop out of one server and into another one with the cd key being “left” in the old server and not allowing you to enter a new server till the old key expires
- the authority listens to complaints and enforces the rules
thinking about it - even a public voting system could act as the enforcing system - after 10-20 negative votes an account becomes suspended - 10 more and its disabled. Then if a user keeps cheating a one year CD key ban could be placed.
The only thing that makes me a little uneasy is the possibility of false positives. If all it takes is a few assholes to ban my cdkey, it’s just wrong. I’ve been kicked/muted for planting dynamites at objectives, for instance. Depends on the server.
In one match, I was even muted even if I DIN’T SAY ANYTHING at all, not even voice messages. Why ? Because some people like to annoy others, and other people don’t care how they vote; they just want that yellow message to disappear faster so they press F1. And it should be DAMN EASY to disable complaint system/voting altogether, and count only votes of people who still have it enabled.
About video streaming: I’m aware of limitations, but I guess it would be possible with ascii.
Anyway, I expect image recognitions programs to be much more error-prone than current system. You’d get cheaters sometimes shooting randomly because their software thinks it sees something, or can’t recognize a flying rocket properly. Or the enemy could be only partially visible, etc. And then there are many effects like fog, edge distortion (water etc), blur, post processing and so on, all of which make cheater’s life harder. Or more enjoyable, if you enjoy challenges, that is. It’s really not as ‘simple’ as having the aimbot shoot at clearly defined coordinates.
In any case, it would shut wallhacks down for good.
like in "real " life (not the life most live inside thier computer) it is customary to bring with you a lot of kindness, and for those that dont return such kindness, you bring a black bag filled with high caliber wit… now if everyone could stay on-topic in this thread… just maybe we can get some good feedback 
Punkbuster does a great job at busting the noob hackers/cheaters that have just downloaded some dodgy hack of a dodgy site. The real cheaters are people that make there own hacks and dont distribute them. Ofcourse the ratio of real cheaters to your average joe who downloads is always 1:1000 so really I’m not worried about cheats.
“A few assholes” can only ban you from their own server, they can’t ban your CD key. There are sites like pbbans.com that distribute ban lists that a lot of servers use, and although they also make mistakes they at least require more proof that these “assholes”. 
Punkbuster does a great job at busting the noob hackers/cheaters that have just downloaded some dodgy hack of a dodgy site. The real cheaters are people that make there own hacks and dont distribute them. Ofcourse the ratio of real cheaters to your average joe who downloads is always 1:1000 so really I’m not worried about cheats.
Actually now some guys tend to sell ther home made cheets so ther are actually alot more out ther than u think going undetected. Ther are also making a nice business from it
Shouldnt they start to work for evenbalance improving PB? Or should not evenbalance try to find and hire them (i.e. buy thier cheats) to improve the stregnth of thier anti-cheat tech?
Evenbalance are shining knights in shiny armor, they don’t accept former cheaters.
This is actually true… but still sad.
Shouldnt they start to work for evenbalance improving PB? Or should not evenbalance try to find and hire them (i.e. buy thier cheats) to improve the stregnth of thier anti-cheat tech?
Actually a league wher u can play for money did hire a hacker from cs he supposedly an almost unbeatable hack or something so they hired him to make something against the normal cheaters. Pretty good idea learn from your enemy