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.)

Comments

Re:We need a technical solution

[WNight]

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.

Performance considerations

[Tom7]

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!)

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) ... even if the walls are textured, it's very hard to tell what's in front of what.

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.

Newsflash: 3Dfx releases see-thru-clothing 3D card

[nwonknu]

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.

Cheating

[Datafage]

This kind of cheating is really nothing new, back in the days of Quake 1 there were client-side mods that gave the user a huge advantage, like aiming, hearing the health of his enemies, or having long rods coming out of the enemy's model to track him through walls. Yes, it sucks, and Asus should not be doing this, but please don't pretend it's unprecedented. And don't even get me started about Diablo1.

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It's actually ASUS not nVidia.

[mjg]

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.

Re:Games arent about the game

[Black Parrot]

> Uh, hello? If you don't play to win, what's the point of playing?

Thank you for illustrating my claim that members of the two camps cannot understand the others' motivations.

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