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New ASUS Drivers Help Cheaters?
magicmat writes: "The guys over at Riva Station are reporting ASUS's nVdidia based video cards might have a new "special weapon" in gaming. Namely, drivers that allow you to see through walls, get brighter lighting or go to wire frame mode. Is it just me or does this sound like the smartest decision a card maker has ever done for their profits?" I always wanted to be able to reposition the camera... I mean, the driver should be able to do that, right? I guess it depends how much of the world the game is actually storing on the video card at any given point, but it seems like it should be possible. (Note that these drivers are not standard or officially released, while they are for the nVidia chipset, they are technically for ASUS cards. Sorry about the confusion.)
Replying to my own message here, something I forgot:
Email ASUS and complain here (marketing), and here (tech support).
(I had those email addresses in my story submission to Slashdot as well... oh well.)
Running online gaming tournaments is not a hobby for me, it's my job. Maybe you should think before flaming someone who knows.
Actually, you would be surprised how much Quake 3 actually draws that you cannot see. If you turn on r_showTriangles (only available if you start a map using the devmap command) then you will see that some objects, clear on the other side of the level, are drawn. This mainly applys to powerups and map entities. My bet is that a player, a around a corner will be drawn too. It is non trivial to cull everything away that cannot be seen, and most engines take advantage of huge fill-rates and triangle through-put to make up for that.
You call me a nerd.. look who's getting so worked up about one little piece of speculation about cheating in a game? You're the reason slashdot is almost not worth visiting any more. People like you.
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Actually haven't they gotten cheating under control in Quakeworld now? There was an initial flood of cheaters after the source was released but I was under the impression that there are now effective solutions to cheating. This seems like a real-world example of how cheating may be stopped..
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I believe "how long does it take crackers to remove an undesired feature (like CD-in-drive requirements and server-authenticated CRCs) from a program" is the scientific definition of "zero time".
Also, how do you differentiate between CRCs which differ because of patches and those that differ because of hacks?
Rather than speculating, I've actually tried to contact ASUS for verification. No response so far (after about 4 hours). We shall see.
You're correct about the Half-Life shots, I apologise.
The fact that it's only screenshots of Quake 3 engine games really proves little, if anything at all. Can you point me to the *exact* console cvars which enable partially transparent walls? Or even wireframe *only* rendering?
Wao -- Lara Croft painted platinum ...
You sure this isn't the Naked and Petrified Guy?
o/~ Join us now and share the software
Uh huh, until someone throws that console online via a null modem cable to a PC and uses the PC to run a proxy server...
Anything you can devise, they can break.
It's just that the good coders don't bother with consoles, closed cabinets == crap games.
I've done some 3d programming in my day, and this will just force programmers to use polygon obfuscation algorithims to not send this information to the video drivers at all. In the end, this will be a zero escalation.
Free Techno/Jazz/DNB/MI Music by guys obsessed with monkeys!
Brilliant! And how long would it take for someone to produce a hacked CRC program that returns the correct CRC whether you have a hacked game executable or not?
I remember that in one of the versions of Q3Test, you could toggle a wireframe mode, but it turned out that the players were pretty much hidden through the walls until they came a few feet from where they would be visible to you. I would assume that was because the server was being smart about not sending other players' positions over the network unless they were within your approximate line of sight.. this saves bandwidth (especially in highly-populated servers) and makes cheating more difficult.
I'm pretty sure that most modern 3D shooters do something similar, so I don't really see it to be much of a problem for those fast-paced games. In slower-paced games where stealth is more important (Rainbow 6, etc), I imagine this might be more of a problem.
problem being once again this is not a cheater dll. this is a video driver hack. you cant crc the video driver because there are hundreds of drivers constantly being released, all with different version numbers and different crc values.
-Steve Gibson
-Steve Gibson
Shacknews.com
Forget wireframe, I want to see that other dude's password through those damn "**********"s. :)
I have a pII 450 128 megs with a TNT1. I get 90 fps. Of course I turn off almost everything, use 16 bit mode. It's not quite as pretty, but it helps me win. Before tweaking, I got ~25 fps.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
As a reply to Temporal and CaptainSuperBoy...
There really is *no* way to trust a client. None. Anything that the client does can be watched, instruction by instruction, with a debugger. Any encryption it uses is performed in front of the determined hacker.
Any CRC of the binary, or the data files, is done by the EXE that the hacker has access to. They simply hardcode the values the server wants to get. Or if it's a changing algorithm, they keep the old files around to run the CRCs on, then use the hacked files to play.
It is provably impossible to write a program that can't be modified in this way. There are some anti-debugger tricks, but they'll probably increase general incompatibility and, they never stopped the pros anyways.
You either have to have a release schedule that beats the hackers, like updating the EXEs daily, so that they have to keep doing the work... or, you accept the fact that you can't tell if you're communicating with your certified client or a proxy.
It doesn't matter what platform it's on. As long as hardware is available, not encased in melted plastic, and development tools exist, hackers will be able to examine the game. It might be harder to disassemble Super Mario 64, or a Playstation 2 game, but it can be done, and if the stakes are high, *will* be done.
There is *nothing* that can be done to make this impossible. All that you can do is make the cheaters job harder by blocking the obvious things (like the Quake1 cheats - new player models, etc).
Anything the server does, short of sending the game out as high-res screen shots over the network at 60fps can be hacked. And even then, someone could write a proxy that would parse that pictures and auto-aim or something.
Cheaters and cheat protection will (as I think Carmack said) evolve until subtle cheaters are indistinguishable from the better players. Anything you can devise to stop cheaters, the cheaters can learn from and avoid.
Regarding certified drivers:
Repeat after me you example of poor slashdot moderation, YOU CANNOT TRUST THE CLIENT. Period.
I don't even want to get into your nice commentary on servers sending too much information to the client. Think of it this way, a lot of people who are a helluva lot smarter than you have been thinking about this a helluva lot longer than you.
I was thinking that it would have to alot of extra calculation to create a wire frame because its rendering every thing backwords. Of course if you could just turn off the textures and run in an allready created wire fram enviroment i would eexpect fram rates to shoot up, but I don't think Id created that option with the released code. Of course games are not my specialty.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
at least he didn't post it in the wrong story
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"It was people! People soiled our green!"
The performance hit with translucent walls will likely be rather severe -- z-buffering can't be performed on alpha surfaces. That means that the triangles would have to be depth-sorted and blit in order. (every frame!)
... even if the walls are textured, it's very hard to tell what's in front of what.
Wireframe mode on the other hand would be much faster. It's really hard to play with, though (do r_showtris 1 in quake3 while cheats are enabled)
Much less annoying in Quake 3 is "r_shownormals 1", which only makes a little tick mark on each vertex, showing its normal vector. Something like this would probably be more valuable to cheaters.
Yeah, hire a technician with a van full of TEMPEST stuff to sit outside your opponent's house, view his monitor, and confirm that he's cheating. . .
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
The camera cant be changed in a game, at least not by a driver, because it hasnt got anything to do with any info stored on the video card.
Usually, a 3D video board, half of the memory is used for textures and half for graphics. The actual game geometry is stored in RAM. So, unless a hack is written for a specific game, knowing exactly how it handles the world geometry and where (and how) it stores the camera data, you cant change the camera angle. It should be done before the frame is computed. The driver just renders the data given to it (so it can mess with transparency or wireframe it) but you already got the scene there. No changing camera angles.
It may be theoretically impossible to write a program that can't be indetectably modified, but from a practical perspective, you can make it damn near impossible, especially when it is dealing with interactive servers.
I don't want to belabor the details of some of the most dirty tricks that will give even NSA crackers a pause (deliberate race conditions in self modifying code, etc), but even non-programmers can understand it isn't that hard to bury half a dozen redundant checks in the game which at rare moments calculate and send disguised CRC verification stamps to the server. All it takes is for your uber-hacker to miss just one of these for the server to mark his unique game id as one held by a cheater. The server can even delay the penalty by many weeks, so as to obfusticate when the cheater was caught.
The real reason why cheating is so prevalent is that most companies don't bother to try. Hell, they don't even bother to use any real encryption on the game authentication id they give out.
San Francisco, CA - In response to nVidia's announcement of a 3D card that will allow a game player to see-thru walls, 3Dfx has revealed that they are only weeks away from releasing a 3D graphics card that can see-thru clothing.
The technology coined "strip-o-way" allows the owner of a 3Dfx "ClearSpeed3D" card to analyze any graphic layer by layer. Similar to the upcoming movie "Hollow Man," a splashy special-effects remake of the popular movie "The Invisible Man," 3Dfx's technology will allow the user to see through-images.
In an late-afternoon press conference, 3Dfx Chairman, President and CEO Thisis Ajoke announced that, "Our technology is meant not just for the games people anymore. We have expanded our product line into a much larger market." Mr. Ajoke refused to comment what he meant by that comment, but, a source close the development effort said: "Think about it! What would you do if you could strip away, layer-by-layer, the clothes off any image of Gillian Anderson you find on the.. err.. I mean, you could possibly find out who shot Kennedy."
3Dfx is expected to release their new product before the Christmas buying season, but industry analysts already expect 3Dfx's stock to "go through the frik'in roof."
Some computer owners might have to upgrade their systems as the new video graphics technology is expected to take up 4 PCI and 1 AGP port, and require a minimum of 5 external power supplies to drive enough juice into the cards.
3Dfx is seperately negotiating with Intel to increase the mega-wattage it pumps through the system bus to make "all those dangly wires and power-strips" unnecessary.
Pricing has not been announced for the new product, but in light of Microsoft's recent announcement of becoming an Application Service Provider, 3Dfx is considering folling the software innovator's lead with their own ".accell" model. 3Dfx's engineers were unavailable for comment, as they were beating the crap out of their Marketing department at the time we called them up.
- Some hungry gremlins contributed to this story.
"I only believe in a fair fight when I can't rig it in my favor."
-Grimjack
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
There are absolutely no parallels to hacking in cheating. No one cheats to see if they can do it. Sure, an actual hack is very cool, if you do it yourself and use it once or twice to see if it works. That's fine, and even then it's only you who's amused. As soon as you make yourself an obnoxious cheating moron you ruin the game for everyone. Except you're having fun. But of course that's the real reason isn't it?
"Hot lesbian witches! It's fucking genius!"
Hah, people criticize Ryan at MacOS Rumors for not checking his stories... nice work, Taco ;^)
Just venting (grumble). If only this was a realistic picture of the situation...
I don't really support this form of cheating and whatnot but.. It seems to me that playing in wireframe mode will be horrible confusing. I find it hard to play without any sense of depth or lighting. What the cheat really needs is some sort of in-game toggle so you can, say, switch it on and see that guy around the corner and then switch it back off and play normally. and once again.. being a gamer myself.. i don't support any of this...
I don't believe it will work without constraints on the ordering (though there may be techniques to speed it up as one poster suggested).
Consider this cross-section view of 4 polygons, each at 33% alpha (and an opaque background).
viewer
Loc1 Loc2
A --------
B --------
C --- ---- D
background
Suppose C and D touch to make a continuous wall. Loc1 and Loc2 are places where we calculate a pixel value (Loc1 sees ABC, loc2 sees ABD).
Drawing order matters:
One correct drawing order of CDBA gets us
loc1 = (.66 * (.66 * (.66 * background +
loc2 = (.66 * (.66 * (.66 * background +
Note that if colorC=colorD (they should, since these make up a continuous wall), then the two locations compute the same color (correct).
Now, an incorrect drawing order: CBAD
loc1 is still the same as above. But loc2 is:
loc2 = (.66 * (.66 * (.66 * background +
loc1 and loc2 are different! Note that loc2 gets a 33% contribution of ColorD, while loc1 only gets a 14.4% contribution.
Depth sorting is necessary because the order of blit on alpha matters.
The poster who said that GL_ONE GL_ONE doesn't need sorting is correct... but my experience mapping for Quake 3 (where you can specify the blending mode for brushes) leads me to believe that colors max out VERY quickly unless your textures are as dark as night. Maybe this could be made to work.
I've always had an advantage in Quake 3 because of a slight z-buffering problem with my video card (Real 3D Starfighter, 8MB AGP on a socket7 mobo, intel's initial graphics chipset). It allows me to see where people are through walls and floors without disrupting gameplay.
I've since switched to Unreal, where I don't have the problem (just a problem with OpenGL?). But people would always ask me why I still had that old thing in there :)
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Never trust anyone over 90000.
This has been happening since hardware acceleration was used in FPSes. Don't you people remember transparant water in Glquake? Software users had to hack their pak files to get transparency, and then it barely worked. Very easy with hardware acceleration though, and there were those that claimed that it was cheating because not all players had the option of seeing other players in the water.
To me, if the game itself allows it, it allows it. I'd hardly call that cheating.
1) For a competitive game to be interesting, there has to be a chance of winning (or at least not coming last ;-). To take the chess analogy further, what would the point be of me playing Karpov at chess (if I got the chance) other than for fun?
2) Contra to US soda commercials et al, winning isn't the most important part in many activities/sports. Some people actually take part because they actually like the activity. Oh yes, it would be nice to be the winner, but it's (say) a 1 in 1000 chance and life's too short.
3)In the case of D&D etc - I don't play myself, but I would guess the reward is in developing friendship and understanding with your fellow players, rather than the alienation of always wanting to win.
Finally, perhaps you can answer a question. Why is winning so important? - and you can't use the words win/lose etc in your answer... and if you use "better" etc, please explain what you mean by that (just so you think b4 replying :).
-- Trinity in high heels carrying a whip: The donimatrix - there is no spoonerism
No, I do. Read ASUS's web site. The English there is top-notch. I've read many motherboard manuals, and none are quite as bad as this.
I'm never going to post on Slashdot again, they talk about freedom of speech and all that, yet they only hear what they want to hear. Looks like I'm going to have to find a new news site. Oh well.
With OpenGL, (and a little programming knowledge) it is simple to make a stub library that can be used to augment or override and existing OpenGL calls. This is how the OpenGL debugging programs work.
As an example, I recently tried playing Half-Life on NT but the underwater fog effects gave my 3D card problems. In my case the frame rate dropped to less than 1 frame per second which made the game unplayable.
Using gltrace (http://trant.sgi.com/opengl/toolkits/gltrace/) it took me about 5 minutes to create a version of OpenGL.dll with fogging disabled. Problem solved.
I think this cannot fix the problem. If cheater wants to use some special driver (s)he will use it and there will be crack to remove that driver check.
Right way could be to send driver information string to server where it could be compared to blacklist of "cheater drivers". After identifying driver as blacklisted it's up to server what to do. It could mark mark points as cheated or disconnect after random period of time with text "cheater".
This wouldn't prevent cheaters to play and therefore there would be much less effort to crack executables or so. Making cheating public would cut the edge out off it and perhaps lesser people would do that.
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Spelling and grammar mistakes left as an exercise for the reader.
Diablo II deals with cheating by not trusting the client all - according to Blizzard, in realm games all that's sent to the server is your mouse and keyboard actions. They can get away with this only because the game environment is extraordinarily more constrained than that of, say, an FPS.
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Do I look like I speak for my employer?
Wireframe display on the Voodoo has been around for a while, and it lets you see what is really happening. I had a good look at Mario64 on UltraHLE on a PC/Voodoo, and my admiration for Nintendo increased when I saw how they did stuff, also I learned why some things that puzzled me had to happen as they did. (Our family owns an N64 btw, for me UltraHLE is just a curiosity.)
So one benefit of nVIDIA wireframe is that it might encourage a few more people to do 3D graphics. Another is that with hardware transform and lighting we can see whose drivers are culling more efficiently, the benefits of clever Z buffer algorithms and so on.
yes, but I also read that youd be able to toggle the transparent mode with a hotkey from in-game...
.. Lihe I don't have a hard enough time trying to find a 'clean' game. What is the performance trade off? what good is seeing throught walls if your frame rate is 2 ?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
"We have constructed pyramids in honor of our escaping."
sup Jim?
Lars -
Actually I believe Lightwave uses voxels extensively, they're very useful for animating objects like splashing water.
- Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.
Back when Sc2000 was first released I did release sc2kcash.exe onto a few bbs's
Now that felt like an achievement.
Speak for yourself. I've been doing this stuff since Doom and I can tell you that there's a massive community of gamers who wouldn't think of cheating.
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As an owner of a Riva TNT2 Ultra, let me be the first to say, OHYEAH! I spend a lot of money on that card, and I can't wait to wax some fragmeat.
Remove the spamfreak to speak.
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Nicotine free Amish .sig.
Chess, Go, Tic-tac-toe, and others of that ilk. Take out the twitch and thought is all you have left. Any game with sufficient velocity to attract the fps or role-playing *craft/diablo style players must send more information to the client than the user can see at one time. I think.
Sure, the ability to make walls transparent is great for the company's bottom line, but think of how much more successful it would be if it also allowed users to make certain characters' clothes transparent.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
Even if ASUS decides to not make these Drivers.. you know someone else will decide too, and because its done on the Video Card itself there is nothing that can be done with the software, outside of checking if these specially modified drivers are installed. Even if that happens, they modify the drivers.. and so on. But still, just because you can see through a wall doesn't make you Thresh, you can't see behind you, and odds are some other lamer can see you.
This does not bode well for the online gaming community, this is all fine and dandy if your playing single player. But if you go on, and rack up the kills because not everyone else can see through the walls. There has to be some way of preventing people from doing this.
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Insert Witty Sig Here
Because the games almost certainly wouldn't know about the current state of the driver, so there'd be no way to tell what "cheat options" the other players have set... unless I'm missing something?
Zahlman Q. Namlhaz, esq. {:> "Zahl Incorporated - the Last Word in Everything(TM)"
Are you bitchslapped? that shouldn't be at -1.
The reg'lar 5.32 drivers give me full screen anti aliasing, and also better GL drivers which are more stable.
Remember that article, "The Programmer's Stone," on slashdot a while back? It's the article about "Mappers" vs. "Packers." If you believe his point of view, it seems very related.
:-)) and says, "Why don't you just turn on the flying cheat." ... WHAT? GET THE F**K AWAY FROM ME! I can't fathom this personally. And in a SINGLE-PLAYER game. My point is that it wasn't even necessarily to beat others or"prank" others to bring out his desire to cheat.
"Mappers" would work to grok the rules and how they interrelate, drill themselves on skills, learn from each other, and feel satisfaction for "exercising their mind" by thinking about the rules, etc. This isn't even a REAL problem. It's just a game.
"Packers" would want the one answer that wins everytime. There is no interest in exercising or grokking. Better (expensive) equipment to win? Fine. A loophole in the rules (found by someone else even)? "Boy am I clever for using that!" A patch to close a loophole. "That isn't fair!" (-:
I was playing a single player game a couple of years ago trying to decide if I should jump down into the lava and look for a secret. Clues pointed that a secret down there was likely but it would cost half my health to even check and see. A kid at work comes up behind me (it was after hours
Now, I know there is plenty of controversy anytime an elitist view claims one type of person/personality (mapper) is superior at problem solving to another. But cheating in games bring up a good point to me: wouldn't it be nice to be a problem-challenged "packer" who could actually derive pleasure from winning through loopholes and superior (expensive) equipment? How nice it would be to avoid all the frustration with those that take advantage of the rules. (-: Why create problems that don't HAVE to exist? It's just a game. When there is no real problem, why create one? (Well, for fun, but that is the kind of fun that mapper personalities would enjoy.)
I occasionally cheat (on single-player modes) because, and I'm not ashamed anymore to admit it, I'm not good enough at most of the games out on the market.
I used to be able to keep up with the arcade stuff & early Doom-clones, but as each type of game has matured & there are people with lots of time to do nothing but practice, the companies have cranked up the base difficulty level to the point where it would take me months of constant playing to improve my skill level to the point where I could complete the game (I'm usually into RPGs & first-person-working-toward-a-goal-type games).
I'm busy working, I visit my family a lot, I like to get more than 2 hours sleep per night - I don't have the time or health to build up the skills necessary to complete the popular games (which are not necessarily useful to me in the rest of my life). So, in single-person modes, I cheat so that I can enjoy the game in about a week of a few hours/night.
On the other hand, I wouldn't cheat in any kind of multi-player mode, due to the ethical concerns. (Of course, that generally means that I just get my butt kicked, because I still have problems with the difficulty level...) I don't agree with your statement about cheating being a practical joke - I think people who cheat in multi-player mode just want to win in any manner possible.
OT - bye bye karma
.oO0Oo.
ok troll i'll bite for fun
gpl isn't about redistribution of wealth
it's about redistribution of thought
If you want to solve a problem there's a chance that a gpl project will either have fully or partially solved it.
In return you contribute your efforts back to the pool. The pool gets deeper and opportunity gets wider.
For those of us supported by non-productive day jobs (in terms of research and innovation to give back) we also get to program "becasue it's there". Through this we push the boundaries of our knowledge and learn from others the good and bad way of doing things.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Cheaters and cheat protection will (as I think Carmack said) evolve until subtle cheaters are indistinguishable from the better players
The obvious answer, in my opinion, is that eventually the current "join a server, meet your opponents online" way of gaming will be seen as a poor alternative to playing with a group of (trusted) friends, which I consider more enjoyable anyhow.
I also suppose it won't hurt serious tournaments much - just either use a one-off client with modifications that eliminate current cheats and give no time to hack it, or bring in the player to use a designated box
they have no choice but take account of that. once this is in the developers minds, it's only a small step to seeing that open source clients are not any more of a problem...
greetings, eMBee.
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Gnu is Not Unix / Linux Is Not UniX
Now we're telling games "Get rid of that wall!" or "Could you clear up the fog a bit?" Yikes. I'm waiting for the day we start cheating at games by saying, "Make the Colonel's brow less sweaty" or "Make Laura Croft more sexy."
If you're not wasted, the day is.
Your point about the number of players is an interesting one. People here keep talking about Quake all the time, but everyone I know plays HL (or a mod thereof).
Anyway - in Half-Life DM, anyone using a model you don't have is displayed with the "helmet" model (hazard suit with a helmet). What's to stop people deleting all their models and replacing helmet with an elongated version? That wouldn't be detectable, and it's much easier to do than messing with some driver. No performance difference either.
It occurs to me that people might be inclined to cheat to make up for some other deficiency (apart from just being bad at it). The thing that IMO makes the biggest difference is ping time. Being able to see through walls won't actually help a bad ping though - the person you see is probably not there (and more than likly has run up and killed you already). I often get routes to servers which give a good ping but intermittently freeze up for a couple of seconds, and it can be really annoying. My tip: play an engineer on TFC, as sentry guns don't suffer from lag!
-- Steve
Right, anything with twitch is a problem, because you can always write a program that will twitch faster than than you could normally react.
:)
Still, I'm thinking something that's turn based, with fairly short turns could work well.
A *craft style game where it takes time for your orders to be relayed to the units might work. I think.
Jerrith
I'm not familiar with any specific ones, but in discussing them, the trend seems to be this:
First someone will create an aimbot that grants perfect aim. In response, the server will be changed to call anyone who has perfect or "very good" aim a cheater. The cheaters will then modify their bot so their shots are just barely under the "you're a cheater" level. Good players will frequently be just slightly better than the "you're a cheater" level, and be unfairly called cheaters.
It'll take video game graphics processing off of the graphics card and put it back on the main CPU, where it should be. Back in my day all of the graphics was rendered in the CPU before sending the data to the graphics card. This usually resulted in a respectable frame rate of 1-3 frames per second, not that fancy schmancy 100 FPS that all you kids think you need for a good time.
Since these disrespectable silicon valley hardware companies want to allow cheating with there cards, more and more graphics rendering will have to take place on the main processor. That's a step backwards.
To respond to UnknownSoldier's comment and a few other comments too, I have been using CAD systems since before CAD systems were made and you are wrong about rendering speeds. There are 2 different wireframe styles of rendering. The first is called 'wireframe' and it displays all edges in the entire FOV with no shading. It is always faster then fully shaded rendering. The second type of wireframe rendering is called 'line-clipping' and it is always slower then fully shaded rendering. This is because it is mathematically complicated to determine where to start and end lines. Line clipping looks like wireframe, except that you can't see wires behind other objects.
All that hogwash about graphics cards only using triangles is utter nonsense. Triangles and polygons are used for benchmarking purposes, but there are NO graphics cards that only use shaded triangles for 3D rendering.
-vax computer, vi, lynx. 'nuf said
Simple, you don't give the client the information needed to cheat. Take a look at FreeCIV if you need an example. Or alternatively take a look at Applied Cryptography from Bruce Schneier. The only reason these sort of games feed the client too much information is that it just isn't feasible to process on the server side.
The answer to how to tell a cheater from a good player is that it is impossible. The player controls the client and search the bugtraq archives for discussions on trying to run code securely in an untrusted environment. *Hint* it can't be done.
Good look with your "game engine" kid, I hope your reimplementation of Tetris rox.
homophobe.
Who? Are you one of them? Are you secretly the author of one of my favorite games? If you're not, please shut up. If you were really "helluva" lot smarter than me you'd find better uses for your time than bitching about why my comment was moderated up.
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I went on a serious Unreal Tournament binge during the last year, and was doing pretty well (IMHO). Managed to stay in the top 99%-ile in both CTF and DM, for the 4 months or so that I was playing. I was accused of cheating several times, despite that fact that I wasn't (heck, I'm even too lazy to map most of the keys off the defaults...)
Additionally, because of my experience, I was able to watch players of similar or better skill levels, some of who were slightly suspicious. (wierd warping, etc).
But, ordinary players accused them of cheating equally...
Therefore, I surmise that, at least to most players, cheaters are indistinguishable from the good players (the ones who know all the sneaky little strategies...)
Now, let's say you can do that, and have the required latency....
Most games have darkness or fog in the distance, making it hard to see. Yet a program monitoring the datastream would see that player, and be able to alert you to his presence. How do you deal with foggy situations, where you have a poor view of the target? Having him pop into view when the server decides you can see him? Not a very nice looking solution... Displaying an indistinct figure? Might work if you have allies, but if everyone is an enemy?
Jerrith
Daniel
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IANTC (I Am Not The Carmack), but it seems to me that if these drivers do indeed implement this feature for all games including Q3A, that it could only be done if it was an OpenGL hack/trick/normal API call. If this is the case, then it's not the fault of the game author.
OTOH, the driver may be overlaying an internal wireframe representation of its polygons on top of the frame buffer (?), but if that's the case, it's still not the fault of the game author.
When they're that big, you can be sure they aren't real. I bet if you actually looked, there's nothing under there at all.
If you are modding me down because you disagree with me, use the "Flamebait" category, not the "Troll" one.
Easy, simple steps -- yes, even you could do it:-
1. Moderate DOWN all posts questioning or saying negative things about Open Source, no matter how reasonable or accurate they may be.
2. Moderate UP all pro Open Source posts, no matter how stupid or inaccurate.
3. Moderate UP all posts from people saying nice things about VA Linux/Andover/Malda.
4. Watch VA/Andover/Slashdot stock $$$$ rise
and have a really good laugh at all those suckers who let them get away with it.
It's very difficult for a game engine to determine which elements to trace, texture and light. The best engines automatically remove objects that won't be seen - those behind walls and not in the camera's viewpath.
In the case of switching to wireframes, you'd only really see what the game planned for you to see. Quake III Arena, for example, automatically removes objects a certain distance from the player - objects in maps it sure can't be seen.
You'd probably only see wireframes of characters immediately in front of you. Characters around corners (again, a good engine would omit them before they even reached the graphics driver) would never be seen.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
Most (99%+) multiplayer gamers (first person shooters especially) really and truly respect the integrity of the game. If the integrity is destroyed for me, the game has lost all of its fun. I don't understand cheating, but the fact is that it can utterly ruin a game (Again, both Diablo and QW. Diablo never recovered, but the QW community seems to be making progress). The solutions to the Diablo and QW problems were both technical.
It's clear that video card drivers are bound to come out (just look at the long list of nVidia beta drivers that have been leaked). We can't count on ASUS reconsidering releasing these. I think the solution this time rests on the game designers, in the form of some kind of driver signing / certification, a la Microsoft. Don't have a certified driver? Can't play the game.
I don't know a lot about 3D, at all (I hope Carmack replies to this story). You'll see that the worst cheat in this driver is the "see through walls" and "wireframe" modes. If it's not too much of a performance hit, games may have to stop sending information to the video card about polygons that are not visible. I think this would probably kill performance though, as determining which objects block the view of which other objects is a primary function of hardware 3D.
I hope we can learn from our previous battles with cheating. Though I don't think this will do much in the long run, I hope that game companies show that they are not pleased with the decision of ASUS.
--
Networked games shouldn't trust the client. The client shouldn't have any information that the user shouldn't be aware of. If you send some data to the client, you have to assume that that user is going to be aware of that data. This includes things like the location of enemies or objects that are out of sight, as well as any other attributes that the user shouldn't know about (like say, how much ammo your enemy has, or his health).
This would prevent cheating with these drivers. That, in combination with an RSA "blessed client" scheme, like that used with Netrek, you can drastically reduce the types of cheats that are possible.
This adds some complexity to software, of course. The server has to determine what information to give to the clients. That means it needs to do basic line-of-sight determination, for example. That can be tricky though. Just because the guy's toe is sticking around a doorway, it doesn't mean I can "see" him -- I might not notice him.
A simpler solution would be for the game developers to do more clipping on their own, rather than relying on the hardware. Of course, that could potentially slow things down significantly. It also doesn't deal with other kinds of cheats that involve modifying the client itself. (particularly a problem if the client's source is available, but even binary clients can be "tweaked") Not trusting the client is the most general solution.
That could work quite well, but couldn't it also make it slower, especially if you were behind a wall or something and move and it had to render a whole assload of textures quickly? I don't quite understand the innerworkerings of a video card, so call me ignorant if need be.
---
--
Insert Witty Sig Here
> Are games about fun or popularity of having the coolest shit (to the kids)?
There seem to be two (at least) basic classes of mentality among gamers of all types.
I used to play D&D with a group. For some of us, the fun was in the adventure, the puzzles, the humorous occurences, the challenge to overcome setbacks, etc. For others, the fun was in "winning". These people would go to the local game stores, dump out the whole box of dice, and roll each one over and over until they found, or thought they had found, a high-roller. Etc.
Similarly with wargames. For some of us the fun lay in understanding history, testing strategies, recovering from mistakes and/or bad luck, etc. For others, the fun lay in winning. If the rules had a bug that allowed patently unrealistic operations - well, no problem if it led to a win! Etc.
I, for one, can comprehend the desire to win, but if the "win" is merely nominal and results from cheating or exploiting a loophole, then I absolutely cannot fathom how any satisfaction is obtained from acquiring it.
OTOH, I recognize that my notion of fun is surely equally unfathomable to parties in the other camp.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
* Is there any confirmation of this outside of this guy's site? Does anyone here actually have said drivers?
* Go to ASUS's site, and read press releases by Mr. Tsang - he is much more articulate in them than he is in the press release on Riva Station (which, coincidentally, is NOWHERE on ASUS' site).
* The Wireframe screenshots were, also coincidentally, taken *both* in the Q3 engine, which happens to have a wireframe cvar you can use if cheats are enabled.
* This just screams 'page hit scam'.
Did I miss anything?
Being a part of the online gaming community I really like to see cheating discuraged as much as possible.
/whine off
Cheating takes away the fun for people that don't cheat (doesn't take a rocket surgeon to figure that one out).
I can't believe that all you slashdot readers take it so lightly that such a small group of people (the cheaters) have the ability to ruin a game for so very many.
Don't tell me that 19000 half-life players (that I counted 5 minutes ago) will take it for granted that their onling game will be ruined just because the technical community doesn't care about moral issues.
It's a minor issue but has anyone considered the consequences of delivering Open Source Graphics Drivers into the hands of cheaters?
Yes I know the facts. Cheating can't be stopped completely. I'm just wondering what judgement this forum comes up with. Because if we list cheating as one of the "online-facts-of-life" I for one will lose some of my hope for a pleasant online future.
---------------------------------
Now, the question really worth discussing here is, is it possible to create a multiplayer game where there's no advantage to be gained by examining memory, or intercepting the data stream? What would such a game be like, and would it still be able to attract a wide audience?
:-)
Multi-player free cell, here I come
Seriously, these games already exist. Think: Tennis, Golf, sports, many board games (CHESS) etc. To some extent, warcraft et clones are already open, as it were. It doesn't take a genie to determine that the enemy is building a nuke if 'something' has been under construction for a few minutes. Sure, you can't tell _exactly_ how much gold (or whatever currency is in use) he has, but that shouldn't make much of a difference anyway, all other things being equal.
There are 1.1... kinds of people.
Ok, so let's say we have a high processing power, high bandwidth, low latency enviornment, and a Quake-like game. If there's darkness or fog, or even walls which can make it difficult to see a target, you can create some sort of image analyzer which looks at each frame being sent by the server, and says things like "ah ha! There's part of a player sticking out from behind that wall, let me aim at him and fire, because my user probably wouldn't notice that small part." I don't think that this can be avoided...
Jerrith
Here are a few rules to live by, to keep the cheaters from bothering you:
1) It's a game. The point of playing a game is to have fun. If you're not having fun, stop playing.
2) You're not the greatest player in the world. Someone better will always come along. If your goal is to be the best, stop playing.
3) If you're playing a game against a better player(see 2), and it's frustrating you, stop playing against them, play against someone else. Games are supposed to be fun (see 1).
4) There will always be cheaters. Combine a love of games with a love of cracking systems, and you have a cheater. It's a mentality that will always be around in computer games. If you want an ideal world without cheaters, stop playing.
5) Playing against someone beating you by cheating is similar to playing against someone better than you. If you're not having fun, stop playing. (See 2)
6) Multiplayer games are all about trust, whether it's Monopoly or Poker or Quake. If you don't trust the people you're playing against, stop playing. If you want to make sure everyone is playing by the same rules, only play against trusted friends.
7) Alternatively, forget the real game, play the cheating metagame. Try to outcheat the other cheaters. Again, all the other rules apply. You're not the greatest cheater in the world, either. (see 2) If you're not having fun cheating, stop playing.
8) If you're not having any fun playing to win, play to lose. Try to die more than the other guy, try to get the lowest score, be creative. Do your best to be the worst. Now the cheaters are helping you. If you're not having fun playing to lose, stop playing.
9) If you're playing computer games for higher stakes than "Loser buys the pizza," play in a controlled environment, where everyone has identical systems configured and installed by a trustworthy party. If you can't afford to buy the pizza, don't play.
10) At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter. Being the greatest player in the universe (which is impossible; see 2) won't do you any good whatsoever in the real world. It won't pay the rent, it won't get you a girlfriend, it won't put food on your table, except maybe a free pizza. (see 9)
Relax, it's just a game. (see 1) Repeat as needed.
What is wrong with everything happening on same
server, i.e. all rendering and game logic
resides on the (trusted) server, and all you
need is a display and network connection with
high enough bandwidth. If we are talking about
real time video streams over IP, then why not
do games that way? Bandwidth is an issue but I
think CPU time will not be so long as you can have
a GPU per user, i.e. some massively parallel
graphics card config for your server.
Having not played UT for more than maybe 3 minutes, I'll have to take your word for that, but I know at least in Counter-Strike, which basis itself on realism, it's usually quite easy to tell when someone's cheating. Especially a see through walls cheat, cause as you're flying around as a ghost (spectator) after dying, it's not hard to notice someone shooting up from the basement and picking people off on the roof with 2 supposedly solid floors between them.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
> I'm still waiting for an answer.
Again, you illustrate my claim. I gave my answer in my original post, and you are as incapable of understanding it as I am of understanding your system of enjoying a game.
> "The greatest happiness is to vanquish your enemies, to chase them before you, to rob them of their wealth, to see those dear to them bathed in tears, to clasp to your bosom their wives and daughters." -Genghis Khan
OK, so GKh was of your camp. BFD. Did you hope to convert those of us in the other camp by citing him as an authority?
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
If I remember correctly, the Voodoo1 did not have hardware accelerated line drawing - it emulated this by using a squashed/deformed triangle for each line, hence the performance hit.
What is wrong with you guys? NVidia didnt do this, ASUS did. they are thinking of changing their drivers. the nvidia ref. drivers dont have it. in fact, asus is thinking about not implementing it! Check before you submit.
> A kid at work comes up behind me (it was after hours :-))...
...and says, "Why don't you just turn on the flying cheat." ... WHAT? GET THE F**K AWAY FROM ME! I can't fathom this personally. And in a SINGLE-PLAYER game.
Yeah, sure.
>
Hahaha! I won! Nyeh, nyeh, nyeh!
Truly, incomprehensible.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
The cards tend to store all the textures on a level, if they can. Most cards render objects that are convered by other objects anyway, because they aren't smart enough to filter it out. An exception would be ATI's new Radeon, which uses HyperZ (an enhanced Z-buffer) to prevent itself from wasting time rendering objects that can't be seen...
Although this game is nowhere close to realistic, it is still a decent attempt at adding realism to the gaming environment. So why not take it the next step? Add in surveillance equipment view to the radar using infrared, x-ray, parabolic listening devices, laser sighting, etc. Yes this would make it more difficult to determine whether someone was cheating but it would also decrease the advatage gap in cheating AND maintain great graphics. Playing cstrike last nite sucked, nowhere to hide... kept playin though.
How can you be certain, nothing is certain?
"Although I agree that Counterstrike is played by more people and that you can shoot through walls, the best gamers play Quake 3 (as evidenced by the CPL), and because of that, everyone's looking for a little advantage."
What you say about the `best' gamers is not unlike saying "the best athletes play football (as evidenced by the SuperBowl)". When you get that foot out of your mouth, try to think about what you say before you start talking again.
Bad Mojo
Bad Mojo
"If you can't win by reason, go for volume." -- Calvin
And I don't see how crypto would help with go, chess, or tic-tac-toe, as there is nothing "hidden" from either player in those games.
This has been done before > On Fri, May 26, 2000 at 10:05:30AM -0400, Mental wrote: > > On Fri, May 26, 2000 at 09:13:05AM -0500, Dan Olson wrote: > > > This is exactly the reason transparency should not be allowed in QW. Until > > > someone duplicates it in software mode, it is a cheat. > > > > I remember the FOV `cheat` stance that Zoid had way back when. Yes. > > Transparency in the GL renderer can give an advantage. So can a T1. > > While we`re at it, I`m going to put in a patch to make *all* the walls > transparent for GL users. I`m sure you won`t mind, since it`s obviously not > a cheat. Someone did that already. They wrote a DLL wrapper between Quake and opengl32.dll that rewrote all the glColor..() functions to pass half the requested alpha. See through walls and anything else. Since it was an OS level change (hacking OpenGL calls), Quake couldn`t really detect it. /// Zoid.
Time does not wait.
Are you bitchslapped? that shouldn't be at -1.
Between the nick (bitchslapboy) and the fact there are no moderations to the post, yes, bitchslapboy is bitchslapped.
tangent - art and creation are a higher purpose
postmoderncore - art and creation are a higher purpose
It all depends on how willing you are to sacrifice CPU time. In a short crypto class we took, we examined how to play a secure game of poker (completely randomized deck, no one knows what order the deck was in until after the hand). Its among the coolest stuff in modern crypto. Bruce Schneirs book Applied Cryptography goes into this, I believe. Also, go, chess, tictactoe, battleship, and more can be done. I think you could do a FPS through crypto by "hiding" where one player is throughout the game unless the other can see them. However, it takes VERY high bandwidth, VERY low latency and LOTS of CPU time (I think the rendering would have to ALL be software...). At the end of the game, you could check that it was all played fair by examining paths if you chose to. Not doable on current systems. We need about 2-3 more orders of magnitude to play TODAY's games, let alone whats out by then...
True, the hardware could do all of this for you, but it wouldn't help much if the software was smart enough to speed things up by not putting things in the environment that wouldn't be visible anyway. Think about it: some games base what's visible on a "per-room" basis, rather than attempting to display the entire environment at once (unless the doors are open, then it's the next room over too, but usually not 2 rooms over). The hardware would only display the software calls that were made (eg if the software was based on OpenGL then the program would probably not draw the ENTIRE environment, but just the parts it felt necessary, which may or may not be the person sneaking up on you around the corner). Usually, for speed, software does not command the hardware to attempt to draw the whole world.
-Leo
This is indeed nothing new, and stuff is available right now. Just not very wide spread. Here's Zoid bit on it also which you may find interesting:
-Steve Gibson
-Steve Gibson
shugashack.com
This would allow a new cheat without a LOT of work going to fix it. I think I'll call this cheat "teleport." I can teleport from anywhere you can't see to any other such location; So long as your computer doesn't know where I am, you can't do anything. It would of course require a bit of hacking on my side. Time for a mod pack!
This sort of thing happens without the tools in at least one game that I've seen.
:)
I've got a Geforce and noticed weird effects while playing Tribes with detonator 5.22; objects would become partially transparent at large distances and seemed to "segment", each segment updating on its own as I move, sides aliasing and all.
While being able to see through walls at a distance sometimes is a small advantage, the effect is overall distracting. I'd gladly give up seeing through walls if I could have proper rendering.
Maybe it's just me, but playing in wireframe so I can get a few more points simply isn't worth giving up my delicious graphics.
---
Where can the word be found, where can the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence.
"Where shall the word be found, where will the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence." -T.S. Eliot
incredibly difficult. this hack is done at the driver level and not at the game code level. they can crc the client all they want and it will still return the same value as anyone else.
-Steve Gibson
-Steve Gibson
shugashack.com
I can see it now: Quake map designer sues nVidia for violation of the DMCA. "They circumvented my protection I placed on the other players by putting walls in the map." Gawd damn, go call Jack Valenti.
Yes, the framerate _may_ actually be _slower_ in wireframe with some video cards.
Back when I first got my Voodoo 1 there was some demos showing off the speed. The card was actually SLOWER in wire frame mode! It didn't make any sense.
BUT if a card doesn't have points and lines as primitives, but only triangles, then the geometry/lighting processing may be taking more time then the time saved from not texturing.
All though, I would think that with modern cpu's and graphics cards with geometry engine there shouldn't be any frame rate hit.
~
"Triangles are the 3d pixels of today's graphics"
- Anonymous
IMHO, cheaters sometimes cheat because they cannot play otherwise. Even an empty victory is better than no victory for some. For single player gaming, I suppose cheating is acceptable for those miserable souls; they ruin it only for themselves.
However, multiplayer games are different. Cheats *do* cause others not to enjoy the game in this instance, and the only explanation I can think of is the same as above: Defeating others even with underhanded methods is better than not defeating them at all.
They simply can't play. Have you *ever* seen a cheater skilled in combat not involving cheats?
Cheating like that (overbrightening, removal of textures) will always be possible and actually it is much easier on Linux than on Windows because of the availability of source code. One thing that can be done though is to not draw a player that is hidden behind a wall. Sounds a bit easier than it is most of the time but I guess the future generation of engines will take visual cheating into account and use more accurate clipping for actors (hopefully).
--
Daniel Vogel
Programmer
Loki Entertainment Software
What it comes down to is that people need to take some fucking responsibility in their lives and not depend on the gov't and corporations to look out for them.
Karma be damned
Actually, one of the reasons cheating is such a big thing is that because the best players are as good as bot-enhanced players, if not better, so top players start getting accused of cheating. Hell, not even top players - I know good players who have to endure accusations of cheating because the numbnuts they play can't believe people can be good without cheating.
The other reason is that people who cheat are often sufficinetly socially deficiant that they don't care that they're spoiling it for other people are are held in contempt - they want to win, and if winning means preventing others from enjoying themselves, they aren't particularly concerned.
If that were so, this driver would not be possible (well, not useful anyway). You couldn't see opponents.
--John Keiser
It is up to game designer to design levels
that make aim bots and the like impractical.
One way would be to overpopulate foggy areas
so that shooting at an AI selected target
would be an iffy proposition, as it would
expose you to other beasts. Or design levels
with "ghosts", which would make aim bots waste
ammo on harmless images. I think that
in this respect game design will always be
designer's AI vs. cheaters' AI. If the well-
funded industry cannot keep outdoing cheaters
then that's too bad.
Thats not the point. with the proper crypto, you can have the server hand off encrypted info, which is then checked when the game is over. This way, the clients can keep the server (or each other) honest, without having info they shouldn't when they shouldn't. You can see how this is needed in poker. I drew a flush...no really, I swear I did on my deck right here! Nonono, I REALLY DID. GODDAMN IT BELIEVE ME. It would take a bit more work for a FPS, but basically for cards I encrypt each card, send you the deck, you pick your cards, encrypt those, I decrypt them (so now they only have YOUR encryption on them) you decrypt them and have your hand. When its all done we exchange keys and independently decrypt everything to verify it was all honest.
Never played CStrike, but I did play TFC, and I recall thinking that a lot of activity there was suspicious. Course, I did track down some of it (like people throwing grenades that blew up immediatly instead of after 4 sec delay; turns out that you should hold the key for 3 secs, then let go...duh). Course, a lot of people had so many scripts and stuff, it sorta irritated the purist gamer in me.
Downloading a script that allows you to prime a grenade, run around, lob it at will, or have it automatically lob it if you hold onto it too long just seems so lame...but it seemed like most players were using them. Rocket jumping and conc-grenade jumping scripts can quickly unbalance a fun-level, and turn it into a frustrating "hunt-for-the-best-script" mentality.
Not really cheating, but I believe that excessive scripting can be a problem in openly modifiable engines like Quake...
Yeah, cause any stupid shit can plug a console in, it takes some ammount of brains to master typing. It's also a cheaper system.
But you have to be pretty fucking blind to think a console game can beat a PC game in depth or interactivity.
A lack of onboard storage (large flash ram or HD) cripples Consoles for anything but stateless games like Mortal Kombat or some pathetic RPG like Zelda where 'saving' the game loses everything about you expect for some basic numbers...
Unlike playing Deus Ex or System Shock 2 where you can revisit an old area and see the corpses, right where you left them and with the bullet holes in the right places, etc. If you can compare a console game to these in terms of depth, you're smoking crack...
Currently online gaming just doesn't intrest me, Diablo is playable on a 26.4k dialup. That is provided you spend the 9 months learning to sift through the cheaters, PKKs, and moochers. I used battle.net for some 6 months and I only played 3 good games while getting PKed 12 times. Somehow a good game has been left out in the cold while people download cracks (they don't even do them themselves). I'm beginning to wonder if the dreamcast's online functionality could be a very good thing.
If you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance -- Derek Bok, president of Harvard
Its ASUS, not nVidia is making the drivers. Kuro5in got this right, why couldn't slashdot? Can't we to a little fact checking?
We don't know how bad things are in north korea, but here are some pictures of hungry children. -- CNN
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Heeh, 'course, Chess, Go, Tic-tac-toe etc are all far too algorithmically simplisticly built, so the average computer 'cheat' will wipe out human competition even more throughly than in an fps game :).
In other words: Is that a rocket coming at m--**BLAM**.
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
My point is that design of secure protocols is hard work. Too many people just say "Well, we can encrypt such-and-such: that makes it secure." It's not that easy. Reading through Schneier's and other authors' books presents lots of interesting protocols. But note how many of those protocols were initially thought to be secure, and were later found to have holes.
Cracking the game wasn't really that big a deal tho. The amount of monny you had was stored in a fixed location in the savegame IIRC. I remember I found it with a simple search in a hex-editor and wrote a Pascal prog in 2 minutes. Ahh the god old days...
Of course they can also CRC the .dll, all known "cheater proxy dll's", etc, until it turns into a dick swinging match. The fact is - it's a relatively simple task to add the "new" CRC signature list to an updated client/server - as opposed to cheaters coming up with new mods.
//Apoc.
A little menial (coding) dedication to maintaining your online market can really bend the cheat community over a barrel - after all, their entire basis of leverage is that the "official community" doesn't have the capacity to stick it to them.
-------------
Pardon my grammar - I'm rather sauced... I is a Wednesday after all.
-ct
aka
You state that it's nVidia's drivers that allow it, its the ASUS drivers for (I think) the v7xxx line of GeForce cards, so it isn't nVidia who is doing the cheating, it's ASUS!
why is this short sighted?
i find this rather great, because it kills the arguments that was used to keep games closed source.
if a game gets open sourced, the same advantages would exist, and we are back to the discussion of security by obscurity.
networked games simply must not assume that the client is safe, period.
and this just proves that even binary clients are not safe at all.
greetings, eMBee.
--
Gnu is Not Unix / Linux Is Not UniX
You're joking, right?
The server does all the physics calculations, including deciding where you're allowed to be.
Just think of it as a new type of gameplay. Whoever can hack source best wins.=)
Ok but really, someone needs to come up with some type of CRCing program for games. Something that can get a CRC or something of an executable and send it to the server so that the server knows the client is running with an unchanged executable. I see this as the big hurdle in OS game development.
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
It is true that you have to turn Z-buffering off in order to see transparent objects, the triangles do NOT have to be depth-sorted and blit in order, due to a transparency technique called "nearest key search".
It is not as accurate as depth-sorted triangles but is faster and is not order-dependent. Don't ask me how it works tho, I just read it off somewhere...
weird.. I was the first one to post this information and it gets marked redundant. Gotta love moderation.
The story doesnt like to it at all in the story... Does anyone know where I can get this nifty program? Seems pretty cool.
-Brandon
Well, I've just been reading a great big book on OpenGL (OpenGL Superbible... forgive me for not remembering the authors' name... it's at home, I'm at work) and it strongly suggests (for performance reasons) not sending ANY geometry to OpenGL which will not get rendered.
The clippng which the book does by example would work just fine with this type of hack though, because it uses the frustum (basically, the d3-area of the camera view) to determine whether or not to render an object. IMHO if game manufacturers would take this one step further by implementing some kind of depth test, eliminating geometry behind walls, etc., then this type of card could have no effect whatsoever.
Peace
std::disclaimer<std::legalese> sig=new std::disclaimer; sig->dump(); delete sig;
IMO, it is legitimate players that keep interest in a game going. These are people that are interested in continously testing and honing their skills, hence they keep playing to learn and improve as well as have fun.
Cheaters only serve to kill interest in a game by angering and frustrating those who want to play for real. If too many people cheat, eventually there will be no one left playing except cheaters and lamers, and everyone who is left will get bored.
Now about the bullies: it is true that some players will be discouraged by players that beat the snot out of them. But there are other players that respect their abilities and skill and use them as inspiration and motivation to improve themselves. This is something that a cheater will never be able to do.
-----
Obviousness is always the enemy of correctness. -- Bertrand Russell
Like we really need this bit of technology. As if people don't already come up with enough ways to cheat, we certainly don't need to be making it even easier for them. Sure sure, "it's just a game". But a) people pay good money for many of these games, and cheating can really ruin it for them, and b) how you play reflects how you live. I know most people still don't believe this simple precept, but if you're willing to cheat in a game, or even encouraged to do so with tools like these, chances are your real world behavior is going to learn a bad lesson from your gaming experience.
The drivers were released by ASUS and not nVidia but were based on one of the Detonator series made by nVidia.
I think there is two breed of cheater.
Intelligent Cheater : These cheaters are good at the game they play. They want to be the on the top (like athlete). Their IQ is above average. They will cheat in a way that is not obvious. They're going to cheat only when it's very hard to beat the opponent but they will do it only if beating the opponent don't look supspicious (unlike the cheater who the guy in this thread who said he was beaten by a simple sword hit of a level one opponent). They cheat because they want to be on top and gain recognition (this is the same reason some athlete cheat).
Dumb Cheater: These cheater are not good at the game they play. They want to move forward in the game with little effort. Other will just want to kick ass with little effort. They will cheat in obvious way and be recognize immediatly as cheaters.
They is another category which is the cheat creator. These guys are hacker who want to gain knowledge of the game. They are intelligent cheater but it's unlikely that they will cheat to gain the recognition of being top notch. Once they created their cheat, they will use it for some time, then get bored and create a cheat for another game.
I will add that their could be some kind of cross-over between these categories. Also the description of these categories should probably be broadened.
Unfortunatley for 3Dfx, they're going to have to rush their development cycle! It's already been done.
Wah!
Any ideas?
The problem is that client movement is predicted rather than synchronous from the server. You don't want to come around a corner, see nothing, because the server doesn't think you are there yet and hasn't sent you the information about something that will, after a round trip delay, pop into existence ... Yes, you can do better than what the Quake engine games do (region to region visibility lists), but because players can change direction unexpectedly, the server doesn't really know where you'll be / what you'll be able to see by the time its updates reach you. You can tighten the filtering of what the server sends to clients, but they will just lie about their latency to get a broader uncertainty range. Or you can be strict, and only people with truly low latency will be able to see an entity as soon as they come around the corner. It's even more complicated when clients predict not only their own movement, but that of other entities.
(anal article correction: The driver is made by Asus, not nvidia, although it may work on any nvidia card.)
Apparently, performance is significantly slower, so that's at least one disadvantage of using this to cheat. I for one don't understand cheaters anyway - whats the point of playing a game if your just going to cheat? It stops getting fun really quick. I never play anyone I don't know anyway, partly because I'm not very good, but also because most of the fun of playing is social, i.e. get a bunch of guys together, drinks some beers, blow each other into mip-mapped chunks with a rail gun.
---- I made the Kessel Run in under 11 parsecs.
Sure, you can't shoot through walls, but you can stand behind a corner and know exactly when your enemy is going to show up, and fire off a rocket to hit him the second he comes into view. Think of searching for the flag carrier in CTF... pretty easy when you can see through the freakin' walls, huh?
I run Quake 3 tournaments for Teamplay.Net, and cheating is no small issue. We've had to take pretty strong measures recently to prevent cheating, and this kind of thing is just a pain to prevent... it would require all players to take screenshots and submit them for review for every match. Not cool. It really renders any kind of fair online competition totally valueless.
I hope ASUS comes to their senses before this thing gets released. Kauffee
I think the less detectable cheaters out there, like in Quake3Arena, are cheating to get into tournaments where they have a shot at a cash or similar prize.
If this is the case, I wonder if using cheats to get in would be fraud.
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These are not Nvidia drivers, these are ASUS drivers built off of the NVIDIA ones. In other words, they aren't "Official"..
:)
:)
Then again, neither are the 5.32 series Detonators from Reactor Critical, but I use those
Happy fragging with fast drivers
I'm not sure how this will work? I mean, I'd assume that for speed's sake, the card would store essential 360 degrees of "line-of-sight" and possibly a little bit beyond. You wouldn't think that it would have enough more stored to make it worthwhile to cheat, would you?
On a different note, if this does work, how long do you think it will be before it's "patched" and how would they (game manufacturers) do it?
-Jer
Other 3D rendering thingies, those that communicate more directly to the hardware or come in more flavors, will be much trickier to deal with. As for open source drivers...
Well, on linux, God Mode will finally include omniscience.
My mom is not a Karma whore!
No shit. I can not believe that ./ would stoop to this level.
Linux O Muerte!
There's only one perfect solution that makes seeing invisible people impossible (far as I can see): don't send information about their location to the client.
You'd have to make the game server not send information to a client that a client shouldn't be able to see. Send a "disappear" message when it goes out of view and no more messages after that until it reappears.
Otherwise, you could cheat by having a hacked client anyway. Supermap or something.
Only problem is the crazy amount of processing this would require on the server. It wouldn't be quite as bad as the processing the client must do, but still, you'd have to calculate a view for every player, which would get pretty bad.
Just a silly suggestion from a non-game-writer.
--John Keiser
Bring back 3-Demon! That game gave me more hours of enjoyment than anything else at the time.
The only way is by reducing the network traffic and having the server send the minimum amount of info to the client.
The ultimate question in the server's mind should be "what does the client have to know in order to draw the scene it needs to draw and provide all functions the gamer can use?"
In this case, you have the server figure out whether the client could possibly see the opponent in question and if not, don't send him the location. If the opponent disappears from view, send a "disappear" message and no more location messages until he reappears.
So it can be done. Unfortunately, it requires mondo server power.
--John Keiser
They could even enforce it by putting it in the license agreement for the DDK making life on hackers a whole lot more difficult. With signed drivers that would only leave wrappers, which can be much more easily detected.
The only way to stop this on Linux would be if a trustworthy body was created which would distribute signed binary drivers guarantueed to contain no cheats. This is halfway feasible.
Of course it would only make it more difficult not impossible.
I submitted this story about 8 hours ago with the *correct* facts, but it didn't get posted.
Anyway, ASUS are releasing a modification of Detonator 2 drivers (based on 5.32 I think) which will add features allowing you to switch to wireframe mode, partially-transparent-everything mode, and also add extra lighting to a scene.
This has nothing to do with nVidia bar the fact their drivers are being used as the base, and Slashdot are making them look bad by not checking facts before posted a story.
Obviously neither the person who posted the article to Slashdot, or CmdrTaco actually read the URL supplied in the article.
*sigh*
This is a pretty short sighted move by ASUS. Another company, Wicked3D, tried this a while ago and met with a lot of anger in the gaming community. I really hope this happens again, and ASUS decide not to release the drivers. Otherwise the online gaming world will either be based on trusting your opponent (not likely), or everybody cheating as much as possible, and so will begin a horrible downward spiral into out-cheating each other, rather than gaming.
Obviously, the client needs to have the same validation at its own end, but would this be unworkable?
---
Book(n): Utensil used to pass time while waiting for the TV repairman
If they have the time to do this, then they should support more operating systems, and more specific games!
Really, if you think about it, isn't cheating in this way just defeating some security through obscurity the developer created? After all, the information about what's hidden behind the walls is there, these drivers don't create it... It's just that it's been in too obscure a format to read before now.
So those who seek to powergame and "be the best" will have another tool which helps them to do so more easily. Those of us who play for our own enjoyment (isn't that the point of games?) will ignore them, and continue to enjoy the games. Will the two groups meet? Unhappily? Of course. They do so now even without this.
Now, the question really worth discussing here is, is it possible to create a multiplayer game where there's no advantage to be gained by examining memory, or intercepting the data stream? What would such a game be like, and would it still be able to attract a wide audience?
AR Schleicher (Jerrith)
ars@iag.net
to me-- from someone who has worked at a Babbages for a while-- how many kids even play games anymore? Most kids I talk to just buy games (like Diablo 2, etc) and get the best video card on the market at the second-- and play until one of their friends gets something better. The same stance is taken by the grade-school kids with Pokemon cards.
Now I know that adults play games too-- but the whole idea of being able to "see through walls" seems pretty juvenile to me. Are games about fun or popularity of having the coolest shit (to the kids)?
OK, just want to clear a few things up.
1) This driver is from Asus and not nVidia. As far as I can tell they are the only ones doing it (so far).
2) The drivers are still "pre production" which means unless you know some one on the inside, good luck finidng em.
3) There is a separate utility which does the same thing but gives you bad performance. This is different from the Asus drivers, for which the speed with this on hasn't been revealed.
I think Quake tries to do this in part by keeping all the physics on the server. However, there's just not enough bandwidth or latency (I think) to keep everything server side. So some things get stuffed clientside, and available for hacks.
Another example -- starcraft transmits the positions of all units to your machine, regardless of whether you can see them or not. Maybe it was less efficient to query over the network each time a unit moved (and thus saw more stuff). In fact this makes sense for SC -- you can have tons of units, but people only move a certain amount at a time. Transmitting only the order changes might take much less bandwidth.
I think game developers do think about how to make cheat proof architectures. I just think that the realities of network infrastructure (and deadlines) put an upper limit on how much can be kept on the server without slowing the action down.
The future of gaming: within two years every first person 3d game, will be set on a football field. For the unimaginative among us: there are no walls on a football field. Remember Duke Nukem 3D?
Of course, that's just the hardware. The driver itself may be given 3d data to work with, and conceivably you could try moving the camera within that data. That data is most likely incomplete, however, so moving the camera would probably break the image horribly.
Of course, this in itself might be fun. FWIW.
--Kai ( slashsuckATvegaDOTfurDOTcom )
I'm going to post the same message I posted on Blue's News to save time, I'm getting tired and I haven't had my java fix tonight...
LOL, just read the Press Release and you can see that it's clearly a fake:
"secrete weapon" - Sorry, I already have a secrete weapon, and it's good enough for me.
"3D SeeThrough TM" - Uhh...that's a bad name. I don't think ASUS would think of that. They'd probably think of something like L4023V092...
Why does the author include adventure games?
"Because the only result is to loose" - I get a loose girl if I lose to a person running these purported drivers? Oh man, I REALLY don't want to go up against someone with these "bad world evil onlinegame drivers".
It's really too bad Slashdot reported on this too. I'm sure the only reason that this guy did this is to get hits on his half-rate website.
One thing that's pretty funny is that he says there is software that will do this already out there. That's like saying, "Oh, how did that bloody murder weapon get there? Sheesh! People always do that to me, you know, framing me for murders and everything..."
w00h00.. with this i could still get my ass kicked by Player!! and Unnamed!! yay!!
;).. i'm totally for this driver being the answer for many poor gamers.. or to solve the "impossible" level scenario..
;) ;)
;) and a tidbit sCary let us know from Zoid (who's the bomb for those of you who never heard of him.. go loookup threewave.. and thanx again Zoid!! ;)
;)
;)
seriously though.. there are a few things to be noted about this..
i'd like to believe that the intention of this driver was to compensate for poor game design and level design.. so that those players who absolutely suck at whichever games.. could see them as "doable".. ie: finding the nearly impossible to see item.. or knowing which way the big nasty monster is facing..
I'm 100% behind that.. after all.. games are supposed to be fun.. since not everyone is Thresh.. sCary (hey bro.. like the way you whooped [DIS] on their qw server back in the day
having said that.. we all know that many people will try to use this to an advantage in a public situation.. ie: internet based gameplay.. many will stop using after it gets old.. the same way those people stopped using the llamabot for qw..
some.. will continue to use every advantage to their hearts content.. i don't understand them nor to i pretend to.. so i won't bother attempting to explain their motives..
now.. what this means to the rest of us.. everyone with 1/2 a brain.. can adapt.. and learn to get better at their respective game.. i play "team" based games (TFC mostly).. so instead of whining about mr guy with the transpaernt wall hack.. i plan to distract him while my "team" hopefully will make him a fine red mist.. or smear.. or powder in some circumstances..
on those odd occasions i do play dm.. i'll do what always works best.. run around like a chicken with my head cut off and shoot anything that moves twice.. and anything that's not moving at least once.. usually this results in a lot of "frag stealing" but hey.. that's dm for you..
now.. for those of you who still think it's a big deal.. would you do me a favor.. and get me an athlon 1GHz.. 512Mb pc-133 RAM.. Adaptec 29160N.. 32GB Ultra-160 HD.. etc etc.. and an oc-48 that pipes directly into my head..
while you're at it.. get everyone else one too.. that way the playing field is even and everyone can stop bitching.. heh..
many people do what they can to boost performance.. from new hardware.. to custom configurations.. to internet boost software.. faster connections.. etc..
no one bitches about that.. now i realize that there is a big difference that can be summed up in one little Q n A session..
Q: why is this such a big deal??
A: because it goes against the game designers intention
fine.. now we all know.. (that was mostly for those of you who were still unclear of the situation)..
so what is going to happen?? i have no idea.. already it's a big deal.. and it hasn't even been released yet.. well that's no news.. we're panicky..
but i have some solutions for those of you who will want one if the time comes:
1. LAN game.. it's more fun anyway!!
2. write to your game developer and ask them to start driver checking (this means anyone using non release drivers are probably screwed.. including those using wicked3d drivers)..
3. write nvidia (and 3dfx if wicked3d decides to follow asus).. and ask them to apply pressure to companies who do this..
4. boycot those companies who release software such as this.. (the whole company not just the division responsible)..
suggestions to those who want more drivers like this and cheats.. hacks etc..
1. write to ASUS urging the release of this driver..
2. write to the MFR of your hardware and ask for similar features..
3. grab a C book and write drivers of your own
4. write to game companies requesting "cheat" and "non-cheat" server options for this.. (it will prolly make the "cheaters" seem less irresponsible to the gaming community who generally frowns upon cheaters.. although i dunno why.. as it's more fun to kick their asses than the normal players
ok.. and just to clear up some facts some of you who didn't read the posts on www.rivastation.com or their fourms (some good stuff there too
1. the driver has been released to selected individuals.. (which means that it will prolly show up soon even if it is never officially eleased)
2. seeing through walls and wireframe mode.. can cause framerate gains and drops.. depending on the game/circumstance..
3. it's been done before.. look for steve gibson's post for details.. and remember sCary is a pimp
4. it's doable on a savage4 chipset just by using a savage3 minigl driver (in some games.. i got it working in halflife.. it was intersting.. as my framerate went up 20fps on a k6-2 350)
5. those of you who play against the cheaters.. and don't give up.. will become better players..
6. there is a video of the driver in action on.. www.rivastation.com
7. it should work for any opengl game.. sometimes causing undesirable effects (think driving games *SPLAT!!*
ok.. i hope i didn't bore you all to death.. i attempted to put as much useful fact in there as i did opinion.. although usually i have more opinion to give
-luvless??
The quake 3 engine should calculate line-of-sight from you to each entity each frame (it already does this for shotgun shots, etc), and only render the objects if some part of it is Actually Visible. (ie, not obscured by walls).
I'm sure it's already doing this to some extent (like players in different vis zones aren't rendered), but with a little fine tuning this part of the cheat could be resolved.
Then up the network protocol revision like they did for the security hole, and viola!
I did however get it to finally work with XF4.0.1 and their last set of drivers. OpenSource aside, it does work and kicked ass against my Voodoo3.
It's like they're going back to the 80s and the old wireframe maze programs that used to be available ;-).
Or is that what Quake is? A maze program with texture mapped walls and nasties that get in your way!
I mean, come on guys, you mean you want me to get this so I can go back 15 years?!?
What are aimbots? I can guess what they do, but how? Do you basically steer a bot around as it empties its guns at whatever you see? or is it something that makes your crosshairs snap to targets? do they use the game's bot-controller to set (variable) accuracy, or can you tell if someone has one because they're dead-accurate every shot?
it appears that rivastation has updated their site with more info..
www.rivastation.com
english version @ www.rivastation.com/index_e.htm
seems that asus will not release this driver.. (although there are probably enough individuals that it will be in the fairly public domain some time soon)
but asus wants to release an somewhat stripped down version.. for educational purposes.. so that users can see how a 3d engine works..
that's the summary.. check their site for full details
-luvless??
Although the site uses Quake3 screenshots to showcase these new features, Quake3 is not where the worst problems would be seen. In Quake3, there is an advantage to seeing where another player is, but you can't do anything to them until you go to their location.
A mod for Half-Life, Counter-Strike, which by far is played online by more people than Quake3, features rifles where wall penetration is a factor -- i.e. if you can see someone through a wall, you can probably shoot that player.
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