I would like to hear from Splash Damage staff, or from other experts, considerations on how the open ET source codes may affect fair play.
Is Punk Buster capable to prevent cheating when modified/recompiled executables (multiplayer clients) are used?
Thanks.
a psot from an admin for the ET section of oen of the largest cheatin forums on the net said
“do i smell a bigmac clienthook for et comming?” so looks like something will be comin out soon
When playing on pure servers, your client code has to be identical as the client code on the server, else you won’t be allowed on.
Besides these checks, punkbuster has some tricks of it’s own ready to deal with modified gamecode as well.
For short, it ain’t an issue really.
Notice how the release of the RTCW source code unleashed a flood of cheats :poke:
(for those who didn’t play RTCW, there were very few cheats, before or after the source release. I am not aware of any which were based on gamecode.)
It does give cheaters a few more options, but I wouldn’t expect a huge change.
Isn’t there a way to get around the pure check? I’m thinking of Heron4ET, the spawntiming program. How does something like that work (Heron.exe appears to have it’s own process, but somehow talks to ET well enough to make it use the say_team command for you; is there an API in ET that isn’t commonly known?).
There are various IRC scripts that can squirt PM’s into team chat, in ET and other games. I don’t think that’s the same thing as wallhacks / aimbots. I can’t see how the game code being released is going to spawn loads of new cheats.
Ahh fuck off. Thats 3 times since the new forum ive written a massive post and it doesnt post as it just asks me to login like 3 times… then when I do get in, my post is wiped.
Basically explaining that Ive tried and tested 6 different cheats on our clan server (ETPro/ETMain 1.02/Latest PB Server+Client and Pure) and all of them worked, and also widely availible on Suprnova and .de Cheat sites.
Evidence that they exist and players are using them:
From Wireplay ET Camp Server 2 few month back. 2 players using ]QAT[ or summit alias’s both Tracking, Snapping, Locking, Attempting to Shoot players through walls that quite blatantly are like hundred of units appart 
and (PrePre) Prepriming.
Note, for anyone who thinks this is myself aliased by any chance. Im a spectator, it says that
Also, the above is on Oasis. Which, is the FIRST map of the Campaign… no matter how good a player is that aint possible 114 headshots to 64 kills? :] cmon.
Sorry Piggy, we all know cheats exist (so let’s not go down that road again) but where’s the “evidence” in your screenshot?
64 kills, 114 headshots (less than 2 per kill) and 472XP after 26 minutes of play. That’s good shooting, but entirely do-able by a good player on a noob server without cheating.
Like I say, we all know cheats exist, that isn’t in doubt. The question posed in this thread is whether the release of the source code will lead to more.
Man I really wish you would start reading my posts before you post a reply. I really cant be arsed writing another post… for that screenshot above? Theres 4 demos sitting on my HD and a log @ Wireplay. Trust me, I wouldnt have posted the above if I didnt know for a fact they were cheating… remember m8, it was me spectating the two of them, not you.
While im here tho, my post (the massive one) was just going into detail about how/why PB aint catching anyone or anything and how I can see ET being raped by cheaters in the months to come. And I can see it getting to similar state as CS…
Its funny tho tbh. If PB has ‘tricks’ to catch cheaters using modified gamecode… and theres already cheats out before the source was released (bare coded, not ported from Q3/RTCW as some say… I think 2 of the hooks were, the rest werent as far as I could tell) then how come it couldnt pick them up? As I said here I think, dunno if it was the one I posted which didnt make it or in another forum…
So RR2 is right. It isnt an issue.
But instead imo, its a mainstream problem and the worst is yet to come. With or without the game code/engine source.
Fair enough, I just didn’t see how that screenshot was evidence of anything. No offense intended, I assure you.
I’m just a bit touchy on this subject as we’ve had all these arguments before. Someone sees a player doing well (i.e. better than them) and immediately screams “cheat”. Happens all the time and certainly in the early days new players were coming into ET, having never played RTCW, and seeing these uber-headshot top Clan players displaying what to them must’ve appeared god-like skills, and assumed they must be cheating, which of course they weren’t.
Like I say, we all know cheating exists, the only debateable point is to what extent. I’ve been playing ET since the test version, and although I tend to stick to servers in my favourites folder, which now are all (bar one) ETPro Stopwatch servers, I have NEVER seen a cheat, EVER. That proves nothing of course, but it does lead me to believe it ain’t anything like as big a problem as some seem to want to make it out to be.
i think we should leave the subject on hand atm because like kendle said we all know cheats exist I’ve even posted 2+ demo’s and a avi with cheats enabled that shows you he follows them with ball hacks but oh well thats what will happen when fags want to cheat =P… and your making unfair comments about pb piggy atm all the cheats of mpc.de are detected… and if you email pb with any new cheats you find they will be detected even sooner
Fusen, I do and I have sent cheats to Pb. Just because the ones on mpc.de are detected doesnt mean the ones on erm, like another 40 odd (Off which like half are .de hosted o.0) of the sites have undetected cheats. As I said before… PB can what, release updates to counter the current cheats thats on offer. Follow? So, think about it. PB can ONLY keep up to date with what is an OLD RELEASE of a cheat and by the time it has countered them thew NEW ones are already out so then, to counter those, PB needs to UPDATE again… getit? So yeh, PB can only stop what it is lucky enough to pickup (Id think about 50% (probs more tbh) of caught cheaters is because the players are using OLD hack versions) and what has been reported. So basically, PB is pointless when it comes to countering NEW cheats… which I can assure you is rattled out constantly updated with new features around at least 2 times a week for most hackers.
Kendle, lucky you then for not coming across any cheats… but I mean come on. You know for a fact there is no way possible for any human player to kill that many with both the Mp40 AND Pistol with a headshot every time (Tho a few he had was Bodyshot kills so I guess that ups the ammount of HS’s/Kill). I used to sit and play 24/7 on the FuN 4 Headshot server (RTCW) and even the strongest pr0clan players who wandered on were struggling for frags… and that was with the possiblity of just spamming a shit load of bullets into someone and hope for a hit. Fair enough tho, believe what you want, im not a preacher just a concerned player.
I don’t think you will ever get a programme which can detect every cheat.Its a never ending circle create a cheat,counter the cheat,recreate the cheat and so on.At least PB
is an answer to most cheats. We are not being nieve(?) as to think cheats dont exist ive only ever found one player cheating and i was bitterly disappointed as I cant understand a cheat.Lets stop the PB bashing as it is becoming more and common. 
pb screenshots and ip bans do a great job, and then we have older ones getting detected also.
we got a pretty big list already: http://www.bod-clan.org.uk/viewtopic.php?t=37
sure there might be a few cheats working, but how much good are they? real fun comes from competative play and we always take pb screenshots.
Been collecting PB screenies from our server since we switched it to ET and STILL haven’t seen a cheater!!
Well they’d have to be a REALLY good player… I consider myself above average and on n00b servers I’m usually 1:1 ratio for headshots:kills. That’s pretty close to a 2:1… that’s REALLY impressive… especially to be that consistant to get almost 2 headshots on EVERY kill… I don’t know, something like that to me sounds a bit sketchy. But that’s just me, and I’m probably wrong. :bored:
I agree Larry, It must be a total noob server with people standing around scrolling through their items to see what they got the whole time, or a bunch of 5 year olds. 2 headshots every kill for 26 minutes. I don’t think so.
I was thinking, I know it’s been said that modified gamecode can be picked up by punkbuster. How? What’s to stop someone coding in a wallhack or aimbot directly into the gamecode? PB would never find it cause PB only looks for programs running concurrently with ET, or programs interacting with ET. This new gamecode would have the cheat as part of the game. Admittedly, I know only the bare minimals of coding, and I don’t know if this is possible or worthwhile, but I don’t see what’s stopping people distributing the game with built-in wallhacks and aimbots. Someone care to set me straight?
You are making unfounded assumptions about how PB works. Do you have any basis for them ? To be specific, what makes you think you know what pb ‘only looks at’ ? From what I’ve seen, they are very tight lipped about what PB does, and does not do.
This new gamecode would have the cheat as part of the game. Admittedly, I know only the bare minimals of coding, and I don’t know if this is possible or worthwhile, but I don’t see what’s stopping people distributing the game with built-in wallhacks and aimbots. Someone care to set me straight?
Because both the game and PB make an effort to ensure that client and server are using the same code. Go ahead and try to make a file that is different but comes up with same MD5 sum. I won’t hold my breath…
Note that source is not included for the part of the game that enforces pure checking, nor is it avialable for the PB stuff.
If you are worried about server admins making cheat or trojan mods, that is a valid concern. OTOH, it would be trivial to do without the source code, so that isn’t something new.
Also note that the cheats mentioned by Piggy are almost certainly not based on changing the gamecode (simply because the gamecode has not been available for very). So their existence doesn’t tell us anything except that cheats are possible. Anyone with half a clue should have known that already.
