Slashdot Mirror
Asus Request Feedback on "Cheat" Drivers
skunkeh writes "Asus have a poll up on their site asking the general public whether or not they would like to see "SeeThrough technology" available in drivers for Asus graphics cards. The technology in question is causing uproar in the online gaming community where the drivers can be used to cheat in games such as Quake III and Counter-Strike. Asus have posted some flimsy arguments in defence of the technology on their product page but they don't appear to be convincing the several thousand gamers who have already posted their comments." I still think this is cool stuff. People are just going to cheat online: drivers don't have all that much to do with it. And if they can't cheat, they'll DoS attack. Maybe I'm just disillusioned, but I have more fun playing with people I know and trust then strangers. Strangers cheat.
On the issue on cheating in online gaming, in my experience with a Q3 based FPS (STV:EF), I've gotten attacked with claims of cheating because of someone else's ineptitude. Maybe they had a laggy connection, and I seemed better than I was, better than I should have been, but they would not let up with their claim that I must be a cheater. Lame.
Depends. If you consider "Asus" to be an entity, then the singular form (has) is appropriate. If you consider "Asus" to be a group of people then the plural form (have) is appropriate. And please don't consider your local viewpoint to be universal, this sort of thing tends to vary by region. And the USA is a region, not the planet.
As another noted, this makes absolutely no sense.
I'm not into any kinds of games, but perhaps someone cares to explain to me why these sorts of hacks are possible in the first place: games like quake are clearly a client-server model. The server will of course know where every player is, and also the layout of the map. The client doesn't need to know these things. Of course, it's better to transmit some coordinates over a network rather than other information about what to render. Consider a scenario where client machines don't know anything about the position of other players until the server (who knows all positions and the map layout) sends the client such information in response to, say, an opponent popping out from behind a wall.
Anyway, it seems like this problem has been solved a very long time ago; one of the very first principles in security is that the client is not running the software you wrote.
The gamers are being stupid here. People will write cheats and cheat anyways. If the cheats are public and published, as in this case, gaming companies can try to develop technologies that are less cheatable. If they're only distributed in IRC channels to people who want to cheat, the same people will cheat, but we just won't know all the ways how or be able to do jack squat about it.
Security through obscurity is no security at all.
You keep them all? Where do you live, Utah?
... but it's comments like this which make the visit worth it:
...
"Maybe I'm just disillusioned, but I have more fun playing with people I know and trust then strangers. Strangers cheat. " - CmdrTaco, on multiplayer online gaming.
That one goes in the quotebin
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
... without needing to cheat. It scares me how good that girl is with a railgun sometimes.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
----
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Patches that turn opponent's skins completely red or white, occassional-use aimbots, wireframe patches, hardware arms races.
The real kick in playing this way is when you win anyway.
----
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
When someone rips a movie, it doesn't affect you watching that movie in any way.
When someone using these drivers beats you 20-2 in UT, especially if he's a lamer who couldn't have done that without cheating, that's a pretty big effect on you.
This already happens, but it isn't 'exact' this 'see-through' technology just lets you see things that would ordinariliy be blocked by the depth buffer. You can see around corners a little, but any more and there just wasn't anything drawn to start with.
...because all they're only tools for illegal purposes anyway, regardless of their beneficial uses. To be safe, ban VCRs, MD players, CD rippers, DVD burners, stethescopes, lockpicks, cellphones and toothpicks too.
Cheaters will always find a way to cheat. If it matters, don't play against someone you don't know/trust. Besides, your CLQ ranking isn't Life.
OpenGL proxies already allow this sort of thing anyway. It's removed now, but there was a "Matrix" Quake2 opengl32.dll proxy hack that did similar things here:
http://users.chello.be/sf15772/
Somewhere floating around there are screenshots. It intercepted OpenGL calls and replaced all the walls with Matrix-style green character waterfalls and called the real opengl32.dll internally.
y
'nough said.
Never the less, cheating in any form in a multiplayer game is not only rude and unfair, but you _will_ be found out, and when that happens, you are immediatly discredited. Just try to use a cheat patch or auto-aiming script for more than one round before someone yells "[your name here] is a BOT!!!". Then, hopefully someone in the room has administrative privlidges, and can ban the cheater. Or there could be a voting system in place to kick the cheater (like there is in CS). This is really the only way to stop cheating. It is impossible to prevent, but easy to stop with the right methods.
I think you're misunderstanding the motives of people who would use these hacks in online games. It's not about gaining prestige with better players by playing like them. Your last line, 'Cheaters:Online Games::Script Kiddies:Hackers', is closer to the truth. They're after just annoying and pissing people off. Nothing tweaks a cheater's knob more than seeing some really good player go down, and then scream bloody murder that someone's cheating or someong's a bot. It's funny, because the cheater's really destroying their ego. When a cheater gets banned, he just moves to another server and starts over, laughing when he magically beats the best and makes them cry. Given all the gaming servers out there, it would take a while to run through them all, and by the time you do, at least three or four new games are out ready to be tackled.
Script kiddies and cheaters are both annoying plagues. The best way to deal with them is not to have reputable companies give out tools with which they can easily cause problems, but to actively work to prevent them from causing problems in the first place. Voting and admin bans are simply measures to stop problems after they've annoyed people (akin to locking down a box after you've let a script kiddie do some damage).
--
Care about electronic freedom? Consider donating to the EFF!
The way to handle cheats is not to prevent cheating, but to make the cheaters accountable. For example, if every copy of half-life sent the players hardware ethernet card ID to the server, it would have a real list of who is who.
In addition to that, every player should be able to mark a please kick vote by every player that pisses them off. When the number of people who want a player kicked is greater than two thirds, the player is kicked and their ethernet card ID is banned. Problem solved, no server admin required.
The two problems with this are people who mod the client to send up a fake ethernet ID. That can be combated through encryption, but not solved. If you want to get really crabby, you could try some kind of trace route and ban everyone who goes through the persons next gateway IP number for 30 minutes. You'd disconnect more people than just the cheater, but there would be enough complaints that the cheaters ISP might do something meaningful, like unplug the guy. More likely, the little brat would just get bored.
The other problem is privacy. Lets face facts. Privacy does not exist in a public arena such as the internet. If you want privacy, log in only from public terminals or don't log in at all. Otherwise accept the fact that a unique ID is a requirement for a modern society. That is why you dont see people running around wearing masks all the time. Your face is your ultimate unique ID and in polite society you are not allowed to hide it. Since I can't see your face on-line, I have to make do with your unique ID number.
Drake42
Precisely, and this is ostensibly what the rendering option is for. It's a tremendously useful debugging tool for rendering engine writers and map makers to see if the bits of geometry they thought they were optimizing away are in fact getting chopped out.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
As a decisively mediocre FPS player, I have mixed feelings about such tools in the hands of the Ethically Challenged. I'd love to have such tools available, so long as we agree not to use them when playing "for keeps".
I spectate a lot, in the hopes of learning new moves that might help me rise beyond mediocre. But sometimes I spectate a server just as eye candy. For occasions like that, having a wireframe rendering mode would be cool, as I could immediately spot where the most action was and fly on over there.
But let's assume there's a cheating player on the server, with X-Ray vision, super speed (Quakeworld time hack), and autoaim. You could decide to change your personal goals. Rather than best your opponent on frag count, you could instead choose to constrain his frag count by becoming difficult to find. Run around, staying out of direct line of sight. Though he may be able to see through walls, he can't shoot you through walls (unless you're playing HalfLife with that weird energy gun). Stay out of his sights and see how long you can keep him from hitting the server's fraglimit. He may say, "Ha ha, I totally 0wn3d you, 20 frags to zero!", but you get to say, "Yeah, but it took you 45 minutes to do it, nimrod."
Take it from me: Getting thorked is No Fun. But if you decide on a new set of victory conditions for yourself, you can still have some fun.
Ultimately, as Carmack the Magnificent observed, there can be no perfect solution here. The only way you can be "sure" is if you're in an environment where every player's machine is verified as trustworthy by yourself or a trusted third party. Therefore, unless you're in such an environment, don't play for money.
(I'm reminded of a HalfLife TeamFortress Classic server, named Yiffy Rabid Foxies, where the admins will mess with you as you play (such as raining grenades down on you wherever you walk). Believe it or not, it's actually kinda fun in its own way.)
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
For the past few days, I've seen people consistently making blind, aimed kills in situations where you wouldn't expect someone to be. It's one thing to blindly open up on a crate or a door, it's something else to headshot someone running on the other side of a wall.
There was one guy Monday night who was getting AWP headshot after headshot through the walls on every level that we played, until the admin decided that he was cheating and booted him. Someone could've been ghosting for him, but he was doing it even before anyone died.
Though I don't think this is going to be as terrible as people assume. At least for CS, they'll probably have to make more walls and boxes impenatrable (the garage in cs_seige comes to mind) but there's really nothing keeping most people from ghosting as it is, and it gets pretty obvious very quickly when someone's doing something illegal. Though they need to lower the vote threshold to kick players, since CS voting doesn't work the way it stands.
Counterstrike allows players to vote people off of servers. However, this system doesn't really work, as it requires 50% of all players to vote against someone to boot them.
What happens is that most players (more than 50%) don't even know how to vote. You have to bring down the console, which isn't enabled by default. Then, out of the ones that can vote, only half of them will actually vote, because you're usually voting against someone cheating on the other team. The other team doesn't care because it means they're winning. Or you're voting against a jerk on your team, and the other team isn't even aware that there's a problem.
Yeah, if you want to insist that everyone in the world speak American. Some people are from places like England, where they do not talk it good like we do.
Who the hell moderated this "Informative"?
GeForce drivers are pretty much perfected.. no major improvements are going to show up in them.
Ha! Tell that to NVidia, so they'll stop fucking leaking about three sets of drivers a week...
Sorry about that - it's just that I get sick of _every_ geforce forum being nothing more than an extended testing lab, where nobody does anything other than compare one set of buggy beta drivers to another set of buggy beta drivers so the performance freaks can squeeze that extra 0.07% gain out of their cards...
ABSURDITY, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
I wasn't aware that Tourette's syndrome can affect typing as well as speech.
This is the comment that didn't make any sense at all that got me to suspectin' that someone's either been smokin' the whacky-tobaccy, or commented on the wrong thread.
That sound like a no-thought comment to me.
It's a legitimate option. I understand why you don't agree, but what the hell does that have to do with Tourette's Syndrome?
I guess I am confused.
This leads me to believe that you are in fact a raving pothead. Look, I don't want to take any more of your time because it's almost 4:20, dude, and I know how important that is to you people, so you'd better get out to your VW minibus and roast a bowl in your 6 ft. bong, dude.
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
Did you even think about this comment before posting or are you just trying to start a flamewar?
WTF are you talking 'bout, fool? Nothing in the message you commented on about starting a flame war!?!? He was just saying that they should make all games cheaterific so that the cheaters would have no advantage.
[flame] This is what happens when you allow karma to go up for meta-moderating. You get a bunch of knuckleheads posting with a +1 bonus who don't even know how to post correctly.[/flame]
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
In a game like Quake II, the ability to see through walls would hardly give you any advantage, because it comes down to your ability to move fast and aim accurately. I must disagree on this point, as a long time deathmatcher (I have won a few local tournaments, and been a top ranked player in Half Life Op For) I must say that cheats such as this *DO* make a difference. I have experimented once or twice with cheating, as I wish to know what my opponents are using, if they are cheaters. I do not however use cheating when I am in online play: With the exception that I once used a variation of the see-through technique in Half Life for about a week - Under a different play name. The cheat was a simple FOV hack, that let you move to third person view, this skewed you view and made some walls see through when you pressed a key. It did not work for all walls. I can say that this cheat was devastating. One could duck behind a corner or some other kind of game brush, and see if the person persuing you was continuing pursuit, or holding back, or what have you. There is a huge advantage in being able to step around a corner and have your cross hairs leveled at your opponed where they will do the most damage. It comes down to (like you said) reaction time. Being able to see through walls gives you an advantage in reaction time because you know exactly where your opponent is, and you are obscured to them. I would say that the only cheat worse than seeing through walls is an aimbot. The whole irony to this is that I have spent a grand total of 1 week cheating online. I am regularly kicked off of servers for "cheating". So, I am a pretty good player. (Read, until I picked up Whitewater Kayaking, I had no life outside of deathmatching... =) ) So to your comment here: Never the less, cheating in any form in a multiplayer game is not only rude and unfair, but you _will_ be found out, and when that happens, you are immediatly discredited. Just try to use a cheat patch or auto-aiming script for more than one round before someone yells "[your name here] is a BOT!!!". Then, hopefully someone in the room has administrative privlidges, and can ban the cheater. Or there could be a voting system in place to kick the cheater (like there is in CS). This is really the only way to stop cheating. It is impossible to prevent, but easy to stop with the right methods. I must disagree with this. I would reccomend Punkbuster for Counter Strike. However, I have been banned from a number of CS servers for cheating. Indeed, with the quake games we play here at work, a number of my co-workers were certain I was a cheater. I finally proved that I was not when I sat down at a "clean" PC (built by them), and they watched me deathmatch. There ARE good players out there. Not all of us cheat. Have I cheated? Yes, as I mentioned. For one week of online play. I stopped because not only was it lame, but I found it boring. Take that as you will.
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
So you ask, why don't id software and Valve just add cheat protection to their games? Well, that's the funny part. Because the games use an open standard to render their scenes, they are also succeptible to all sorts of totally unpreventable "hacks." Just like id software loves to hack open protocols and add some error correction to UDP, Asus likes to hack the open protocols and modify the way some OpenGL instructions work. It helps their business, just like it helps id's business.
Is it A Bad Thing? No, I don't believe so. If someone will go to all the trouble to buy a $150+ video card just to see through walls, I believe that they would no less likely spend the five minutes searching to download the superwallhack cheat for Half-Life. Anyone who won't face up to this fact is simply naive.
Regardless, id software and Valve are both in the same boat: by using an open standard to render their games, they are relying on security through obscurity.
You don't prevent cheating by hiding the tools. All you do is leave it to a few clique-like groups to exploit. This was a hard-learned lesson from the original quakeworld teamfortress mod. I know that's not a solution, but network 3d gaming as we know it has long had its fate etched in stone on this matter. Its days are numbered.
There is no such thing as "cheat proof" code. Punkbuster is not a solution, it's a plug in the dike. In a perfect world with sub-100 pings to every spot on earth everywhere at all times, you could get away with some of these 'protection' schemes. The whole idea of sending hidden information is a basic tenet of network play on a network that involves significant amounts of latency.
If someone doesn't write the new drivers themselves, then someone other than Asus will, although it's a bit too late anyway. There's nothing to stop someone from also snooping their own network traffic and using that to reconstruct "hidden" views on another machine. There are also quite effective and useful aimbots in existence as well, and combined with a gamma hack and some sort of extra information hack like the Asus drivers, and a player can easily become invincible.
Having aimbot detectors is not a solution. I know people who have godlike aim. (I'm definitely not one of them.) They do not need to cheat. These people exist, despite all the whining and crying that follows them wherever they go. I've seen them in real life playing on other peoples' machines that could not have been comprimised into cheat boxes. Aimbot detectors are like Punkbuster, a complete waste of time and will crank out false positives.
A real solution, that few people like to hear, is an active and responsive programming team that maintains the game code (even after the initial release), and an active and responsive server administration on the servers that are out there. Cheaters only get away with what they're doing when there's nobody around to stop them. Problem is, nobody likes to have to babysit a server. The worst places I've been are where nobody can get an admin to deal with cheaters and jerks, or where the admins simply don't care.
----- The dumber people think you are, the more surprised they will be when you kill them.
That's because I gave her back when I was done with her.
At least the drivers work better than the See-Through-Clothing X-Ray glasses I bought from a comic book when I was a kid.
--
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Of course there is no way to stop people from cheating in games. As long as we use general purpose computers, this is unavoidable. So what.
HalfLife wend half of the way there when they decided to use WonID. Server operators can ban cheating fools.
The next step required is a network of server operators banning fools. And this means a really really well implemented trust system.
Anyone have a really really well implemented trust system?
--
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
A better solution would be careful game design that thwarts cheaters. For details, please refer to the Slashdot posting titled "Combating Cheating In Online Games". It refers to an article on gamasutra.com titled "How to Hurt the Hackers: The Scoop on Internet Cheating and How You Can Combat It". Please disregard gamasutra's incorrect use of the word "hacker" here.
--
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
The genie is out of the bottle. The drivers are out there, and because this is client side, the same thing can be done by anyone knowledgeable, and it only takes one to spread the tech to lot's of cheaters. Now, that's all pretty obvious, so going on a big crusade to try and "undo" the genie is pretty fruitless.
Solution? On-line gaming needs a Web of Trust. A system based on PKC where gamers, should they choose to, get to 'vote' on other players as to their potential cheating status (and possibly other things too, depending on the game, but that's something for the design stage..)
Game servers could then be configured to allow only players who's been with the system for X days, and/or been signed by Y players, and/or have a 'neutral' cheating rating, and/or is signed by the server operator and/or someone currently playing.
Players will only get to rate/vote so-and-so often, and only on players they've played with. And so on, many cool things can be done with something like this, but it must be done right by people who know their stuff.
The client cannot be trusted. No amount of raving about cheating clients will solve this problem. A Web Of Trust is needed.
Free Software project, anyone?
Belief is the currency of delusion.
I still think this is cool stuff. People are just going to cheat online: drivers don't have all that much to do with it. And if they can't cheat, they'll DoS attack. Maybe I'm just disillusioned, but I have more fun playing with people I know and trust then strangers. Strangers cheat.
You obviously have no idea what you are talking about. MMOG (Massivly Multiplayer Online Games) can NOT exist soley with people you know.
Maybe I'm just disillusioned, but I have more fun playing with people I know and trust then strangers. Strangers cheat.
You're not the only one. I'm a pretty nifty UT player, and I *often* get accused of cheating cuz I can run up the walls with the teleporter (and other stunts). You try to calm people down by saying you're not cheating, but the next thing you know, they're sending you tons of ICMP's down your pipe, increasing your latency. Screw it. I only play with friends now. If ASUS comes out with cheat drivers, all the better, maybe us good players will have a bit of competition!
Take care of her, love her, respect her, take time out for her, take care of yourself and your appearance for her.
She won't have a reason to cheat. Just be the same person she fell in love with. Too many guys (and girls) slack off in a relationship.
Speaking (well, writing) as someone with Tourette's, let me just say that the random use of obscene language is a very rare symptom of Tourette's syndrome. While by definition Tourette's involves some form of vocalization, in most people it usually things like grunts, coughing and/or throat-clearing. It is also closely correlated to incidence of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.
Most people don't even know I have it (though they do think I'm a little wierd). Any excessive swearing on my part is probably more closely related to my working with a couple of ex-Navy guys than to my Tourette's Syndrome.
-- It only takes 20 minutes for a liberal to become a conservative thanks to our new outpatient surgical procedure!
I need to preface this by saying I do have an ASUS V7700 GeForce 2 Pure, but I do not run this see-through crap (actually don't know, and don't care, how to turn it on).
This obviously has no place for online gaming. Yeah, people will make cheats, that's pretty hard to avoid.
What if ASUS were able to put in something that, upon detecting a net connection turns off this "feature"? I don't write drivers and stuff, but something like this should be possible? That would leave this feature available offline, and I certainly would have no problem with this being available in a single player game. The only problem is for people who have always-on connections... Perhaps add non-standard port usage detection and disable it then?
It seems as if ASUS is doing the "Hey, look at what we can do" crap without thinking about its effects. Granted, it doesn't have to be used for cheating, but I think if you're going to market a product to a group, and your product contains a "feature" that is harmful to said group, then you definitely have a problem. And you need to fix it.
--mh
Considering the number of brilliant programmers out there (me being at the pathetic end of programmers), I'm betting someone can figure out how to design a game that prevents see-through walls from working. It might take more CPU load, or increase latency, but I'm betting it can be done.
Until then, who cares. Don't take it personally. Not everyone can be a quake god, and some can't be one even if they cheat.
The PC industry (in the form of Microsoft) will be happy to deliver a system that prevents cheating by refusing to run unapproved drivers. The same system will prevent you from ripping any copyrighted audio or video with hacked drivers, too. So decide which is more important to you: control over your own hardware or online trust.
spirit of fair play? where have you been playing? I'd like to join you!
Compared to aimbots, client side hacks, spiked models, proxy cheating, rules bending (i.e. using game features in ways they were not supposed to be used to gain an unfair advantage), ping flooding other players etc. etc. these 'cheating' drivers are a drop in the sea...
-- the cake is a lie
I'm surprised no-one has posted this yet... there's an online petition that can be found at http://www.petitiononline/badasus/ (goatse.cx safe link). I would suggest signing the petition to let Asus know you disapprove of the matter, if you do. HTH,
----
Dave
MicrosoftME®? No, Microsoft YOU, buddy! - my boss
- Dave
I would think that the gaming community as a whole is against the availability of these drivers. Just like the Quake2 aiming bots and all the cheats that have been found in counterstrike in the past year(s), its existence makes the game less entertaining for those people who play the game honestly. Only cheaters want this technology to be available.
If Asus can find a way to make it game specific and alert the server that the person is using the driver, it might be accepted, but that seems like a silly thing to try and do from a driver.
chris
Actually, I think it should be had now that the site is Slashdotted.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
pretty much everyone here seems to be missing a seemingly obvious point:
:)
- not everyone plays their games online/multi-player.
- said people may, nevertheless, see this as a neat-o thing which could be potentially useful in other areas, or at the very least fun to play with.
I see this being potentially useful for programming novices who are interested in figuring out more about the rendering support for their games. I can see it especially useful (if it works there) for, say, MS Flight Sim scenery and aircraft designers who don't have the availability of many rendering/debugging options in the actual program. And I'm sure there are many potential applications _outside_ of gaming all together.
Of course, I can't really be sure 'cause I haven't really thought too much about how it works
--craig, never played quake but loves a good flightsim
It's a tremendously useful debugging tool for rendering engine writers
Almost all modern cards have an alpha value for each polygon. The idea that a 3d engine writer would need special hardware to debug a 3d engine is silly. They can draw all the verticies, a wireframe overlay or on more modern hardware render the polygon data that fails the z test into another buffer. It's a damn' 3d card... you don't need special hardware to get a different representation of your polys! Sorry.
-- http://thegirlorthecar.com funny dating game for guys
I think 95%+ of the people playing, for example, counter-strike nowadays have never even *seen* a real bot. I get accused of cheating on a pretty regular basis, and anyone who thinks I am a bot has never seen a netquake bot that could fire rockets out of its ass with perfect predictive accuracy.
Java: the COBOL of the new millenium.
I know that you cannot get rid of cheating.. there will allways be cheating.. but that doesn't mean that somehow making it more easy is fine. If everyone has a option to see though walls in the normal setup then more people are going to use it. The more people are cheating the more regular people hate it.. the more people that are GOOD get fingered as cheaters. I have shot people though walls and doors and had people accuse me of cheating. I wasn't. I just try for it when I see someone duck behind a obstacle and I get a good frag once in a while.
With online games everything possible should be done to make cheating hard. Its not about making cheating impossible, its about making it the exception when playing. If there are good reasons to have see though walls enabled at least have it so EVERYONE can see who has it enabled.. there are hacks and cheats of games that make it fun but that is ONLY when everyone knows what is going on.
The difference, of course, is that SeeThrough technology is only useful for cheating.
--
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Aurthur C. Clarke once said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Well, if you're enough better than your opponent, you are indistinugishable from a bot.
--
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Actually, this will do nothing more than eventually kill your network because of lack of bandwidth. Just think for a second...
- -
Such a driver will force people (read 'Id') to write games in a way that will reveal the client only what the client *should really* see at any given point in time. And when, say, you move a tiny bit, it has to send you more data (the stuff you couldn't see before) and invalidate all the data that you had, because you shouldn't be seeing it anymore. That would be immense amount of traffic! *ouch*!!!
-----------------------------------------------
Jobs? Which jobs?
PEOPLE who run corps need to be responsible for their actions!
And PEOPLE who run corps need to have their rights protected as well.
Thank you,
Chris
But sometimes they need a little help. :)
How we know is more important than what we know.
How exactly is that giving you the tools to steal? Sheesh, at least get your stupid analogy right.
How we know is more important than what we know.
You dont even have to do any tricks to be accused of "cheating". Just have good aim and a steady hand or fast reflexes, or half a brain not to stand out in the open (he's camping!!).
How we know is more important than what we know.
I would say that the players are ruining the spirit of fair play, not the drivers.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Guns don't kill people. Bullets kill people.
------
If you want a fair fight, join a clan or play against your friends. Or join a server which bans cheats. Or, just get better than everyone else. The skilled players will always rise to the top, regardless of whatever visual or input assistance other players have.
Too big to fail? Does that make me to small to succeed?
I'm an online gamer. I have been since 95, and will continue to play until my hands fall off (Or until I get married ). I have had to fight cheating as both an Administrator, and as a player. And it's simple frustrating when a well respected company goes as low as to boost sales by releasing cheats.
/a> will help defend atleast league play. Please stop by and offer your support.
I personally, will no longer buy an asus product. I've had 5 motherboards, and 2 video cards, and several other asus boards I have recommended to clients/friends. It's to late, the damage is done. Asus should have realized their major mistakes when they got huge negative feedback when the announced them. Including an open letter from the largest gaming league out their.
So, what can we do to fight this? You can NOT buy an Asus product. Not just the video boards. Buy an Asus product will also endorse their direction and compormising nature of their product. Please, help us on-line gamers protect our dignity, by not letting a corporation attempt to gain market share by cheating!
We still have hope. Thinks like <a href="http://www.punkbuster.com">punkbuster<
Sgt
Isn't it interesting how some people are all in favour of Open Source in general, but when it comes to something actually relevant to themself, they prefer security via obscurity.
I suppose these people are also hoping Quake etc. stay closed-source, in case someone modifies the source to cheat? Or even remember the DOOM days where you could load a WAD giving clear blood instead of red blood.
Do they also wish Linux were closed source, so that other people can't cheat and get better performance out of their operating system?
Makes you wonder whether these people actually embrace open source, or just jump on the bandwagon in order to sound cool.
That won't help, people will just give their hacked driver the same profile as the real driver
(or also modify the polling function).
I presume the 'problem' with these drivers is that people can set it to make walls see-through?
To solve this problem, the server would need to perform visibility calculations for all players, then -not- send data on a player's location who is invisible, but only send side-effects (noises etc); requiring a fairly decent re-design of the game and using a lot more bandwidth and server CPU.
Bollocks, doing a blind 180 and firing is a skill. You might do it if you hear noises directly behind you indicating someone is there, or if you know that you are probably being followed. It's just a matter of moving the mouse -exactly- the right distance and direction and speed, and hitting the button.
Not really. The sole purpose of DeCSS is to allow illegal access to DVD data. However, ASUS are merely releasing open drivers. This can have a multitude of applications, such as helping in game development, or increasing rendering time, etc.
I don't know where you come from, but around here we use:
he/she/it has
they have
Thats just fine and dandy that ASUS has a poll up, but the damage has already been done. It would be more timely for ASUS to put the poll up *before* they release the driver. Now, even if ASUS releases a new driver with the cheats disabled, there will still be people using the old drivers. Way to go ASUS, you're #1 in my book.
SYSOP ('sih-sop) n.: the guy laughing at your typing.
Surely you must realise that any manufacturer who releases their video drivers as Open Source is enabling this kind of cheating to occur, and potentially many other kinds of cheating we haven't yet seen. ASUS isn't open sourcing the drivers, but they are doing the next best thing - giving users the ability to control their hardware at a lower level than before. A consequence of this is the ability to cheat. Would you all bash NVidia if, because they released the source to their GeForce drivers someone hacked the driver to enable transparent walls etc.? So, do you want closed-source, proprietary drivers, or drivers that are free to be modified in any way shape or form, which may, as a consequence, enable cheating.?
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
Not everyone doing this is cheating on purpose, but when it happens it's hard not to take advantage of it. My roommate had a problem with his machine when he had a TNT 2 in it using the nvidia detonator drivers. Sometimes he'd magically be able to see through walls, it wasn't something he was trying for though. Seemed to be either a bug in the drivers or something, I never had it happen on my machine though.
"Asus has..." as opposed to "Asus have..."
Want Root?
Those of you on windows machines, try this now. If you hold the Left and right mouse buttons while pressing Escape, the time freezes. If you type in "xyzzy Enter Shift-Enter", this turns on see-through mode. In see through mode, a tiny pixel in the upper left corner turns on or off depending on whether or not your mouse is over a cell with a mine in it. Using this, you can win hard in 0 seconds. Looks suspicious though. :)
-Ted
This might be it ...
http://www.planetquake.com/madlogic/matrix/
People who want to cheat will. In fact Asus allready released see through drivers which are in widespread use. I see people cheating online all the time. If we all had see through drivers it would be easier to prove someone was cheating, and the only real way these people are going to stop is if they get banned from some servers.
Any decent server is going to ban people who cheat, so why get rid of our means of detection?
This could only be a problem if the client is aware of (and thus can render) things that the user can't see. That's more the game developer's problem than that of the video card folks, IMHO -- the client receives more information than the player should, ideally, have. Theoretically even without the ASUS driver issue somebody could try to hack up a trainer...
Of course, to fix the underlying problem the server would have to be able to do visibility testing from every player to every player with every state change, perhaps powerups and anything else that's critical to hide. Mostly players -- your client isn't told at all where an enemy is if you can't see him. It'd probably be expensive in an FPS...
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
-----------------------
Nicotine free Amish .sig.
The problem is that the games can't be drawn on your screen by a remote server. Graphics cards are essentially Quake and Unreal accelerators, they know how the engine rendering pipeline works. Unreal uses span buffers and is pretty agressive about overdraw. Quake's VIS sometimes allows the kind of overdraw that these drivers from ASUS are hoping to exploit.
What kind of security are you talking about? There's no security with GPLed Quake, Quake 1 online playing has all but died due to hacked clients. In this case it's not a matter of gamers cheating, it's a matter of selling cheats to gamers that can't be patched or worked around, killing modern games. Security through obscurity is the only kind with games that let rules run on the client. And if you want these games there's no other reasonable choice.
Plus, assuming that playing with strangers has to be a bad experience, CmdrTaco, is pretty ignorant of how the game communities got started in the first place.
I used to be a cynic, then I got disillusioned with it.
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
So now people want to get rid of "SeeThrough technology" in graphics cards because it might be used to cheat by some individuals?
What next? Getting rid of peer-to-peer file sharing because some people might trade copyrighted data?
Yes, let's deny something that could be useful to many because of the actions of a few.
</sarcasm>
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
Turnabout is fair play. It would just as easy for game publishers to disable gameplay on ASUS cards. All it would take is one Id-sized developer. At least it would be more effective than this dumbass poll. What response could they possibly expect? Imagine if AOL had an internet poll asking if their users should get usenet access.
Hey i don't even need freaking see through drivers.
In haft life and as a result counter strike my card screws up at times and start making some objects flash rapidly. As a result if i move around abit i can get doors to flash just right for me to see through.
The result to say is a m4a1 at full auto..
I know it's "not right" but if you are in a game and already doing well do you want to quite haftlife and restart just so you don't cheat?
Here's the message I posted to their board. Since there are 9,000 messages there, and you can only read 5 at a time, it's unlikely to be read there...
Anyway, from a marketing perspective, they want to increase sales for their cards by giving us this unique feature.
From a gamers perspective, those who buy the cards will have a blast with them, and those who don't use Asus cards will constantly be pissed off at the number of cheaters in the game, and this will ultimately result in many online games becoming closed and password-protected, making it very hard for many honest players to find an open, fair game.
From the game developer's POV, this is ultimately detrimental to their market. They want as many people as possible to have a positive experience playing their games, the way the game was intended to be played. They will ultimately view Asus as a threat to their market, and many if not most developers will intentionally make their games incompatible with Asus cards, and will print on the box "DOES NOT WORK WITH ASUS CARDS". The end result is that Asus will lose marketshare, because the most popular games are incompatible with their cards.
Is that what they want?
> Strangers cheat.
Girlfriends cheat too!
I remember the first time somebody ever accused me of cheating (mostly because it was only a few months ago). Since I wasn't, it made me feel pretty good--a kind of perverse acknowledgement that I was playing well.
Anyone who thinks these are good has obviously never played an online game against anyone. One person running these drivers can cheat and ruin the entire game for the 20+ other people on the server.
How would you feel if you were playing a game fairly, but were being killed 10 seconds after being respawned not because of skill, but because some cheating punk can see through walls.
To put it in language that linux people can understand, this is the equivilant of a person getting root access illegally and kicking off other people connected so that they can get a bigger share of CPU time. Sure, it's great for the person with illegal root, but annoying and painful for anyone else
Write a wrapper around your OpenGL driver. It's really quite trivial to do. I did it myself once. However, you'll find that having transparent walls and automatic headshots really isn't fun at all. (and no, I didn't distribute my wrapper)
------
We already know the drivers exist. Holding them back now only means that someone else will implement it in the near future. Why put off the inevitable? The people who would use this to cheat are the same losers who cheat using other methods anyway.
-Legion
that was back on May 9th
now it's the poll to remove it.
shacknews had talked about this about a week ago
anyway it's a pretty big deal. For me, i get to hear about how i'm a "gay4ss l0z3r" using the "wirefr4m3 asus h4ck" when i 0wn everyone in CS
-Jon
this is my sig.
Personally, I couldn't care less in either case, but then again, with my m4d UT skillz, I'd probably be the lamer in your second scenario.
Free Manning, jail Obama.
That would blow a giant smoking hole in Asus' card sales, since the vast majority of people buying these cards are consumers looking for good game performance.
here: http://www.asus.com/products/seethrough_1.asp
There will always ways to cheat. But why make it easy?
~
~
~
~
:wq
If someone linked to the drivers in this article, which way would the comment get moderated? I guess technically it should get a +1 Informative but I bet it wouldn't do...
--
Do you have any better hostages?
Also, the chemicals your body releases during different stages of a relationship are different. During the first 6-ish weeks, you experience the so-called "falling in love" stage. This is also the period when you can't keep your hands off each other for longer than 30 seconds. After that, you move more into the "marital bliss" stage, where you're happy, but no longer as excited as you once were. Sometimes people cheat because they feel that initial rush again with someone else, and it makes the new interest look more appealing than the current partner.
Then there are people with problems, be they psychological problems or just the fact that they're assholes. These people will cheat for no reason at all, or for a reason that is totally incomprehensible to the outside world.
Really, your comment is just blaming the victim. Sometimes, yes, someone cheats because of neglect. It is by no means the usual case.
(Disclaimer: no, I have never been cheated on (to the best of my knowledge, obviously), I just hate it when people assume that someone who gets cheated on must have "done something wrong")
The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
Once again, CmdrTaco grossly overestimates the abilities of the majority of people out there. This is not because of some expectation of his that everyone will be "as smart as him." Rather, he just can't fathom that not everyone is capable of doing everything and anything. He does this all the time when he talks about Linux and how easy and intuititve it is when Linux is truly far from it. This is yet another example.
Here, CmdrTaco is saying that everyone will cheat if they can. "Strangers cheat" sums that one up. CmdrTaco is going further by saying that if these "strangers" can't cheat, then they'll DoS everyone else in the came. Forgone conclusion, right Taco? Taco is implying, also, that hardware drivers for graphics cards are no more capable of facilitating cheaters than current methods (such as screen-reading aimbots, bug exploitation, and packet-interception). That's just not right. Every current method of cheating is 100% preventable. My case-in-point is Counterstrike. Just about every cheat that has come out for CS to date has been attacked by the game's programmers. (Kinda' goes with the name of the game, y'know?) Drivers, on the other hand, can not generally be changed by joe-shmo cheater. Drivers are the most basic link in the chain.
"Maybe I'm just disillusioned..."
Yes, Taco, you are. Shut up, and let someone else on the staff write these stories for Slashdot. At least they have some notion of sensibility.
But, anyhow, video card manufacturers who cater to gamers have only to lose by making it easier to cheat honest people in games. See-through "technology" is only useful for cheating. Cheating is a horrible thing and it will always destroy the game in the end. Remember Diablo I?
-------------------------
Stupid people suck.
That would be damn nifty for bug-testing a zone in live play, if you're not the cheating type. Especially if it's one a person wrote is playing and winning big on. Need to see if they put in cheats that only they'd know about? Go for it!
- --
In defense of the cheating angle, you can't honestly say that cheating isn't a problem now, what with the rocket-jumpers on half-life clearing an entire level in one jump 3 seconds into the game and getting your flag.
-----------------------------------------------
I wonder how things are going in the online chess world. Visions of some kid in his bedroom with a cluster of overclocked PCs claiming to be a grandmaster...
so what you need is: /. Moderation FAQ
[ a method ] to sort the gems and the crap from the steady stream of [ gamers ] that flows through the pipe. And wherever possible, [ try ] to make the [ gamers ] of the site take on the responsibility.
- paraphrasing of
Moderation, meta-moderation, and karma for gaming communities?
I don't game too much online; what methods similar to /.'s moderation have been tested?
-f
-f
www.blackant.net
Where can I get this? (drool, drool ...)
--
Je t'aime Stéphanie
Yes, people will always write cheats, but how often does J03 Hax0r write a driver-level cheat?
It would have been better if ASUS had released some sort of aim-bot, because that kind of thing can be detected by the game. How's a game supposed detect if your drivers are cheating?
question: is control controlled by its need to control?
answer: yes
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
First, let me say that I consider using a wireframe- or transparent-mode video driver in any sort of multi-player game is absolutely cheating, and should absolutely be prevented. That said, it's worth pointing out that, while Asus has been promoting these drivers from the cheating front, there are legitimate uses for this sort of thing, mainly for developers.
For a person writing a 3D app, not having a wireframe mode could make debugging and performance testing extremely difficult. Take, for example, the case of testing vistable algorithms (probably the case where this is most important), which are the systems used by games to selectively hide objects outside of vision and speed up rendering. Trying to debug and evaluate such an algorithm without being able to see exactly what is being rendered would be near impossible. Another case where this is important to have is when designing models or worlds through any sort of abstraction. A large percentage of the work in modelling is minimizing the number of polygons, which is difficult to say the least if you can't see them. This is exactly the reason Valve added a wireframe mode to Half-Life (which, I might point out, works only in single-player in software mode, making it effectively useless, so a driver like this could be extremely useful).
My point is, while Asus is definitely promoting this for illigitimate use, there is good reason to have these sorts of things.
------------------
A picture is worth 500 DWORDS.
This is a security issue that the games should be addressing. The game shouldn't be sending information on avatars that are out of line of sight. The cheating just shouldn't work, regardless of hardware or drivers.
This is similar to UO, where Spot Hidden used to work on the client side. However, cheats arose to see all people, hidden or not, because the client knew about the hidden people. The solution was to move the spot hidden back to the server, and a similar solution should be adapted for 3d games in the long term. Information shouldn't be sent to the client if the player shouldn't know about it, because people *will* exploit it.
Fixing this bug involves doing server side LOS checks, which will slow things down, but servers are just getting bigger and faster anyway. It'll be within reach soon, if not already.
Maybe the state's highest function is to grind out insoluble problems. (Zelazny, Hall of Mirrors)
Anyone who wants to use these drivers can find them online already, so this won't stop the people who really want to cheat. The people who wouldn't cheat aren't going to use these if they are included, so the conclusion is...
It wont make a difference!
There are so many auto-aim, modelhack, wallhack, bots, etc... that this will make no difference. Just play the game, and ignore the cheaters.
Listen, if they are going to cheat, they will find a way. Freely available hacked vid drivers will only make it easier. What we *really* need is for the games to somehow poll the hardware driver list of every client that chooses to connect to a game server.
*sigh* But it doesnt really matter. Where there is a will, there is a way...........
Feed The Need[goatse.cx]
The only online games I play are TRIBES and T2, and I am not even that great at them, but I have been accused of cheating. (I have not, nor will I ever cheat in an online game). The fact that these cheats are available taints every good move/shot with the belief by some that the player is not really that good, and is only cheating.
Computers don't make mistakes. What they do, they do on purpose.
Metabyte tried this exact same thing back in the days of the Voodoo2. The community blew a collective nut, Metabyte pulled the drivers and they never left the underground. I imagine the same thing will happen again.
Goto http://www.rage3d.com and check out the drivers for your ATI card. If you have a Radeon, there will be no problems for you running the beta drivers. If you don't have a Radeon, you're probably SOL. If you do, shame on your for not keeping your drivers current.
monolith
Well, I'm more familiar with Q2 (i can't even count how many days i deprived myself of _any_ sleep because i wanted to play "one more map" of CTF or Lith Rail-Only), so I'll use that as an example.
If you're coming up on someone from behind them, and all of a sudden you see them spin around on their axis and fire dead-on (or some other humanly impossible feat), then there are two possibilities: 1) he's cheating 2) he's lucky. If it happens more than once or twice, it's the former.
However, most of the bots I've seen are so poorly designed that just watching them move is a sign. Especially when you notice railgun slugs coming from their back and grenades popping out of nowhere.
If you are just really good, and don't want to be accoused of cheating, find some equal competition. I guess it's a double edged sword no matter how you look at it.
--
--
#nohup cat
In a game like Quake II, the ability to see through walls would hardly give you any advantage, because it comes down to your ability to move fast and aim accurately. However, in a game like Counter-Strike, a patch such as the one mentioned above could win you the game.
Anyone who's ever played CS knows the intensity of crouching behind a box, hiding behind a corner or ducking in a vent, waiting to make your move. If your enemy could just look up and see someone waiting in the vents, why not jump in behind the enemy and blow his head off?
Never the less, cheating in any form in a multiplayer game is not only rude and unfair, but you _will_ be found out, and when that happens, you are immediatly discredited. Just try to use a cheat patch or auto-aiming script for more than one round before someone yells "[your name here] is a BOT!!!". Then, hopefully someone in the room has administrative privlidges, and can ban the cheater. Or there could be a voting system in place to kick the cheater (like there is in CS). This is really the only way to stop cheating. It is impossible to prevent, but easy to stop with the right methods.
Cheaters:Online Games::Script Kiddies:Hackers
--
--
#nohup cat
--
Friends don't let friends use multiple inheritance.
--
Friends don't let friends use multiple inheritance.
Actually, that's an incorrect analogy. He's not advocating that game developers purposely make it possible to cheat. He's saying that cheaters should be given the tools to abuse the game and make it miserable for everyone else, much like BUGTRAQ's philosophy that script kiddies should be given tools of destruction to embarass companies into fixing security holes.
Perhaps what you were trying to say was that since people are going to steal things as well, we should sell them C4 and Thermite at the highest prices that they are willing to pay. Which I wholeheartedly support, as long I'm the only one doing the selling and they don't go out to rob my bank.
--
Friends don't let friends use multiple inheritance.
This is Morpheus, download page of Asus inc.
Choose the blue driver, or the red driver Neo.
Choose the blue driver, and you'll install it in the morning.
Everything will go back to normal, and you can get on with your life, all this just a bad dream.
Choose the red driver, and we'll show you the truth.... or quake without walls anyway.
Lets face it, we need something to help destroy those Smiths with their autoaimers, and teleporters.
Andy
sigfault - Terminating
I wonder if a future game could somehow verify whether or not a player was using a "legal" or "game legal" or "original" or "approved" driver ... like with a checksum that it compares to a database or something?
-Christian
our written thoughts are gifts to our future selves
Shit, not just the net. A few buddies from work and I went to a nudie bar last week, and one of the dancers was wearing an All Your Base mini-t. Looked damn good too :)
On average, hetero men and women have about the same amount of sex in a lifetime, because every time a man has sex, a woman does too. Generally, at the time of each act, the men are older, but men do start to have sex at close to the same age and men remain "desirable" till a much older age than women. So, men must be spreading the same amount of sex over a longer active period.
In times of high fertility and high mortality (most of human history), there will be more young women for every older man so such female promiscuity would not be required. But today in western countries this is not the case, and as we see, the taboos and strictures against sluttiness have all dropped away.If you are a young woman, do your part and live it up, it's not going to last. And if you are a young man, realize that, yes, she's doing some others at the same time, but realize it with equanimity because you'll get your turn with her younger "sisters" later.
Patch the affected games (TFC, CS, Q3, whatever) and update the server to only accept newer game versions.
Job done. Er, maybe.
Sheesh... here I am, stating the obvious again. :)
What online play? 30ms? Bah. .3ms, ooh yeah!
:)
Nope, I give strangers a chance. If they screw me over, they get left behind next time. If they are cool, they get added to the list.
-------------------------------------------------
I agree, but listen to this. At one time, everyone was a stranger. Give some people a chance, they might surprise you. And if they don't, then don't play with them again. You were a stranger once. Remember how much it sucked when people wouldn't play with you?
-------------------------------------------------
The night the 4.0 version of CSHP came out I happened upon an an aimbot tweaked that same night to defeat CSHP 4. For purposes of self-edification I tried it out that evening. It was sad and funny at once. Sad because no on the CSHP4 servers was willing to accept the obvious, that an aimbot was in use; not one person accused me of anything. Funny because my connection was so sad only one out of 5 shots hit even with the aimbot. Come to think of it, maybe that's why no one was accusing me of cheating ;)
Cheaters suck for gaming reasons, but I have to hand
it to em for technical reasons. They've kept ahead of
all the cheat protections, and now the cheat
protections are more annoying than the cheaters. Or
nearly so.
And remember if you suspect a cheater, just duck. The
aimbots I'm familiar with can't track crouching
targets. Case in point, a low-grav Face server I
played that same night (before I researched the
aimbot). One guy is shooting my head off without
pause, even when we're on opposite sides of the map,
floating at high altitude. So on my next flag run I
crouch in the air and for the last 30 yards to the
base. The guy is standing right in front of me and
can't hit me once.
I'll have to stop into my bot source tonight and see
what new strains of C-coded terrorism they've
developed, see if they've done anything about that
limitation.
Rg
PS Who is mad he couldn't cash in on the Mir Special
at Taco Bell or the Crouching Tiger Free Fried Rice at
the local Chinese place. How is my body going to make
enough blood for me to go to the plasma center with so
I can get cash for groceries if I can't get some free
food?
PPS
Pint of plasma: $30
Plasma TV: $10,000
Figuring out a punchline that connects the first item
with the second: Priceless
--------
get jiggy w/ ayn rand!
This is just like copy protection or anything else, someone, somewhere, is going to figure it out on their own anyway. And then it'll just be a lot harder for the rest of us to do it too.
Also, beyond the cheating aspect, there are some pretty cool possibilities for these drivers. Sure, people will cheat, but we really can't stop them. And that's a really lame excuse for hiding something as cool as this.
How about we have games only render objects that will most likely be shown in the scene? Besides making these "cheat drivers" impossible, it would probably increase the frame rates by having the processesor do some of the work(would really speed up NVidia based cards).
If you only want to play with people you know, you play on a LAN.
Huh? Now I know I'm not the only one that does this... I run a private HL/CS server and play friends and coworkers all the time. But never on a LAN, my friend. We frag each other from the comfort of our respective homes, over DSL and cable.
The best competition (measured in terms of screaming and crying and laughing!) is ALWAYS with friends. Cheat video drivers isn't an issue with friends (we'd find out who is running a card that has cheat drivers available, soon enough). So the cheat drivers won't spoil the BEST gaming at least.
Yes, it makes gaming with strangers less satisfying though. Cause you just never know what the other guy is playing with. Unless there was a gaming standard to broadcast (untampered) HW specs to other players.
The only defence of these drivers is that they allow me to delete the nude Tomb Raider patch.
Arthropoid, the Right Clam for the Job
With open source drivers (by which I mean the source freely available, independant of license), wouldn't this debate then become academic? Since anyone could have access to the source to produce drivers, this feature will make it into somebody's code base somewhere. This would essentially reduce to another Quake-style cheating thing since clients could be using altered binaries without the server's knowledge. Possibly an argument against releasing driver source? Who knows...
The fact that ASUS are touting these as drivers for cheating (rather than just saying that the see-through feature is a 'special effect' or somesuch) leaves a bad taste. Although gaming clearly isn't the most critical application of computing, it doesn't absolve companies of responsibility towards their customers.
Henry
i don't do sigs. oops.
I cheated back in the days of GLQuake with a voodoo card...Its a lovely thing if you have it, and you have a BIG disadvantage if you don't. They will be getting a lot of frustrated players (the ones that don't buy ASUS cards). My vote...this is a no-no
You know, the good thing about having an excruciatingly slow modem connection is that the picture loaded so slowely that I recognized it as the goatse.cx bastard and closed the window before it got down to his impressively wide asshole.
Numbers 31:17,18 Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man,but save for yourselves every virg
Only in my case, it's because the ATI drivers suck so bad they won't render the textures, not because I installed a hacked video driver. Does that let me off the hook? :)
The problems are not with the drivers, they are with cheaters and a general lack of honesty, honor, and responsibility. It's not illegal to own a gun. It shouldn't be illegal to own DeCSS code. It shouldn't be illegal to own drivers that let you see though walls. It is illegal to shoot people with your gun (in most circumstances). It should be illegal to use the DeCSS code (in most circumstances). It should be [bad word here] to use video drivers to see through walls.
And DeCSS can be used to play DVD's on Linux machines that do not have decoders available. This is legitimate use afaik.
It can be done easily, people out there are doing it... if we cant find a way to truly fix it we might as well spread it around and learn to live with it.
You just write a wrapper DLL for OpenGL and catch the API calls and modify them... very easy, you could do it in VB.
They are a company, they only need one reason...
Slashdot is alway so overrun with laissez fair capitalistic liberalists, did they all change their hats in this thread or what?
Heh. Now that you mention it, I could've given a better analogy. That's what happens when you've had a rough day, and you see a story on slashdot basically saying "Why bother to try to stop people from cheating?". I'm just proud I managed to pound out a coherent thought :)
:P
I'd love to hear your choice of analogy.
---
*grin*
:)
Exactly. I'd mod you up if I could dude.
---
Ok, let me see if I get CmdrTaco's logic. People are going to cheat, so we should give them the tools to do so.
People are going to steal things as well. Does that mean we should leave bank vaults open?
---
Just as well it happened really or there would be little true anonymiity and PPP would be harder to implement (unless modems had MACs).
Zero Sum (don't amount to much). [root@localhost]
We should have learned by now that you can't fight technology, it's better just to roll with the punches. This reminds me of the uproar in the online chess rooms when computer chess programs became powerful enough that cyber opponents were suspected of delegating their moves to a machine. The bottom line is people will cheat and cheaters will get found out. If people want to cheat let them, just move to a different game with trusted players.
My younger brother got tired of UO, because the method many players employed was to gang up on newbies and take their stuff. When this happens day in and day out, the game ultimately (no pun intended) fails new players. Time to move on when it's not fun anymore.
-- .sig are belong to us!
All your
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I can't very well admit that the reason why they keep getting headshots on me has anything to do with SKILL, can I?
--------
Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
In addition, I disagree that playing with friends is better in toto than playing with strangers. Sure, I like playing with my friends, but it can be pretty hard to line up even a few of them to play for a few hours. I *love* being able to log onto the Zone at any given time and be able to play for a few hours with people who are more or less strangers, and indeed the vast majority of my gaming hours are spent playing with strangers.. But anyone who has run into a game where someone is lying in wait with a cheat or a rigged scenario knows that is just no fun and a plain waste of time. Yes, people will continue to make cheats even without ASUS' help. But why should I, as a gamer, buy a primarily-for-gaming video card from a company that is providing drivers that serve only to diminish my own enjoyment of the games themselves ?
Clearly the here problem resides in the implimentation of the client/server design of these applications (games). For instance if you had a website with some information you didnt want people to see unless they entered a password, simply making the text and background colors the same wouldnt be a very secure way of hiding it. Similarly if you dont want information to be misused in a game you simply dont send cordinant information of enemy players that arent detected as being viewable or very close to viewable to the client (obviously you would need to find balance between security and performance as not having information early enough could break prediction code...) I dont know a whole lot of the details of the protocols in question here but at work we are charged with hacking protocols on a daily basis to emulate propriatary programs and devices. If there isnt already detailed information available about these protocols it wouldnt be that hard to learn their secrets. Once you did that you could write sophisticated programs that would peek in on these packets before they got to their final destination and displayed this cheat information in a user friend format. (Infact I have heard of cheat proxy servers that do stuff similar to this.) Bottom line is the graphics drivers cant draw what isnt there in the first place. Dont send this info to the client. And definately dont render it to the screen and hope it will get covered up by a few polygons! If making this secure would inhibit performance of the games simply being able to turn this protection on and off (hopefully on the server side) would let users decide for them selves what was more important: speed or fair compitition.
Grrrrr... don't bother me, I'm thinking.
is that game developers CAN'T fix this cheat...
if they'll add a code that doesn't let people play with the ASUS drivers Then what about those who downloaded it from ASUS' website with no intention to cheat?
Unless someone organizes a boycott, they will almost definitely make more money by including the cheat option. Not everyone has to use it, and if it's a good card more people will buy. If this happens, why in God's name should they care what a few thousand people with GeForce's think?
--------------------------------------
No sig for you.
I remember battling an online cheater back in the days of Quake 1. I remember hitting him several times with the rocket launcher with no power ups or health in site for him to get. The guy would not frag...ever. At that point it became discouraging and I left online game play to use bots instead. I think this is why many developers are now putting more emphasis back into the single player experience. Of course CS would counter that argument but there are lots of players like myself that would play CS if it had decent bots. When UT came out with its excellent bots it was a breath of fresh air! No LPBs and no cheating just raw fun!!!
Sniping
- When someone of superior skill (such as yourself) stays in one area and kills other players, usually from afar. Sniping can only be done by the good players. See also "skilled player", "experienced".
CampingNeedless to say, I've managed to become sick of playing with more then a few people.
And I mod that last part (strangers cheat) a -1 Flamebait, just a little generalization there!
=-=-=-=-=
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Oh bother.
=-=-=-=-=
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Oh bother.
=-=-=-=-=
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Oh bother.
=-=-=-=-=
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Oh bother.
Maybe I'm just disillusioned, but I have more fun playing with people I know and trust then strangers. Strangers cheat.
My Spanish friend said the other day: "I don't talk to people I don't know." I guess it's a more european perspective, but it's true - You can trust people you know.
Ok, so sure you may expect the graphics drivers/card to do some clipping and stuff - but actually show where other characters are?
Doesn't this imply an incredibly wasteful game engine that is bothering to calculate what objects look like when they are not even supposed to be seen by the gamer?
If the driver never gets the information about hidden objects, then no amount of funky drivers is going to allow cheating.
R.
Asus shouldn't be forced to take this feature out of their drivers, it's their right to include it. If they believe they can gain an edge over their competetors by including this feature, then they should be able to do it. All of the posters who disagree with Asus's decision should think about this....doesn't Asus have a right to include what ever features they want. Aren't they just exercising their free speech? Another thing, what if this were Linux? Most drivers are open source, so couldn't anyone modify the code to make the drivers have this "feature"? Isn't this the point of open source?
Punkbuster, the program that checks client side files and now cvars will flag almost all versions of these Asus files because they are technically cheats. Either the Asus users are going to need to use other drivers or just play older drivers because Asus had to include the cheat with or without someone requesting it.
After all the hard work did making my own cheat drivers, now they want to release the tech. so anybody can do it?
There just aint no justice!
There have been better cheats available for ages. Most being client-side but some even work server-side. They work by faking your own config files to the server. I prefer playing Quake 3 without but sometimes likes using them when fighting non-uk residents due to the fact that a 400-500 ping cannot easily win against a -70 ping. Other cool things to do are code binds that execute things like rocket jump with one key. I can do it normally but why bother! Get your asses over to www.perfectkill.com and get paid to frag!
"To help novice players to have a faster learning curve in playing 3D games"
Thats a stupid argument. It should be the game developer who decides how difficult a certain game is, and certainly not the driver manufacturer. There's an "easy" setting with most games which is adequate even for absolute newbies. Also, by using see-through newbies won't learn the game faster. They'll learn to play a whole different game. They won't train their quick reflexes needed to fight someone who has surprisingly turned around a corner. They won't train their "feeling" for secret areas, because they can see hidden items from far away. In the long run, it will not help their gaming experience or skill, the opposite actually.
"To let skilled players to have a chance to test their skills with a new challenge"
If a player is skilled and wants a challenge, he most certainly won't turn to see-through, which effectively prohibits any challenge. Challenge comes from the situation in the game which need skills to overcome - If you can hit an enemy dead-on the moment he turns around the corner, you no longer playthe game the way the game designers intended; and therefore miss the challenges they set up.
"To help users become familiar with 3D graphics rendering"
"To save the time of developers for developing and fixing 3D graphics"
While those point may be valid, they're negligable; Game designers who code 3D stuff surely also have the ability to also code in a wireframe or transparency mode for developement, which can be excluded from the final release or blocked for multiplaying. There are games that still have these devel modes in single player mode, and the "users" who want to "become familiar with 3D graphics rendering" can use those.
The difference between the two ways of implementing is that if you implement it at game level, you can make it so its not allowed in online playing, therefore not altering the game for other players. If you however implement this at driver level, you give all other players an unfair disadvantage and destroy the game.
The most obvious reason why a client's computer would need to know if someone was walking on the other side of a wall is to correctly model the 3D sound produced by his footsteps. I'm not sure what FPS games have the players produce sound when they move, but I do know that there are some very impressive effects that can be done with 3D sound. I know I wouldn't want to give my enemies an unfair advantage of being completely quiet!
I am of the opinion expressed by others that you should be able to trust the people you play with. Know the people you are playing with. It's more fun to shoot someone if they have a personality, otherwise they may as well just be a computer controlled character.
I'm a hardcore gamer and have been hearing about this for some time. Normally, I'd ignore this kind of stuff, but this is something different: the Asus drivers allow people to see through walls in the games blahblah, but they're drivers... you can't fix a frickin driver cheat! the game devs have no control over this cheat because the cheat itself is on the card, not in the game. Disillusioned you are, CmdrTaco, and this particular driver has everything to do with it. Asus is being a dick for pissing us off like this, because we all hate cheaters and this only makes it easier for the losers who can't play very well who resort to cheating... a driver-cheat is anything but cool...
No one can put you down without your full cooperation.
A friend of mine brought over Diablo one day, and we decided to try out the online multiplayer option.
No more than five minutes of being in the game, some guy approaches us in town and says, "I'm going to kill you" (heh, the art of subtlety). Of course, since I had my trainer running in the background, I was more than happy to humor him.
As we made our way to the chapel, we made small talk. "So, you're going to kill me, huh?".."Yup".."Sure about that?"..."Yup"
Sooo, we get to the dungeon and walk out into a clear area. Next thing you know, he's being nailed with 14 consecutive lightning novas. Well, that's one more smartass taken care of.
He had a friend with him who sufferred the same fate. But at least he tried to run.
They both logged off, no doubt because they got pissed and started kicking their computers or some shit like that.
But, I tell ya. I'll remember that day forever. My friend and I were laughing our asses off.
Since that day, I've never looked back. Cheating is damn fun and I'll never play the game any other way, lol.
Heh, the nerve of some people.
If they're going to be hardasses, they had better be able to back it up.
--
--
This sig intentionally left blank
Seriously how hard is it to write code that doesn't give extra data to the client? And maybe this has been brought up before, but software already exists to cheat. I say let everyone cheat and then suddenly the playing field is balanced. If only a few people cheat then nothing is fair.
God spoke to me
All games will need to come with built-in aimbots, etc. as well...
You may laugh at online gaming but it is an incredibly rewarding hobby. I've been involved with online games for over two years now, having run a 500 player league in my spare time before landing a job at Wireplay. The average gamer in the league I was running would spend 2 or 3 hours a night online doing online gaming related things - playing on servers, talking with their clan mates on IRC or discussing league matters on the forums. Many people are even more commited - one UK clan that started out on Wireplay has now started playing in American leagues which requires them to get a team of 8 or 9 people together for amatch at 3am in the morning.
Online gaming is not just a casual passtime any more. It is a full blown hobby, comparable to real life sports such as golf, football or whatever. Leagues are hottly contested, friendships are forged and a whole internet sub culture has built up around gaming. All You Base is an obvious example of the kind of thing I'm talking about - an in joke fostered by the online gaming community which went on to (breifly) take the net by storm.
Cheating is a huge problem in online games. It destroys trust and means that truly talented gamers are often branded "cheats". It disrupts leagues, ruins people's enjoyment and can kill off entire communities. The new asus drivers are actively encouraging this kind of behaviour. They actually say as much on their site:
Secret Weapon sure sounds like a cheat to me.I'll admit that the wireframe mode could be interesting, but it seems to me that Asus' primary reason for releasing these drivers is not as an educational tool (the claim on their website saying "It also allows users to learn more about 3D graphics rendering" seems pretty flimsy to me) but as a tool for cheating.
I've ranted enough...
Skunkeh
Man, I tried the ASUS see-through drivers on NPRQuake, and it didn't help my deathmatch skills at all! I tried the "wireframe" mode in the sketch rendering mode, and it didn't help me 0wnz anybody! What a scam.
It looks like this just disables z-testing. If you do occlusion culling or something else to reduce the visible set, then the hidden objects won't even get sent down the rendering pipeline, and still won't show up with this driver.
I wouldn't be able to believe that ASUS is using the fact that you can cheat with their GPUs as marketing material if crap like this weren't so common. ASUS's job isn't making the games we play fun it's selling their cards. That means until gamers get together and collectively do something to punish companies that pull shit like this they're just gonna keep on doing it. There is a petition to ASUS up: ------------ http://www.petitiononline.com/badasus/petition.htm l
------------
That is a start but there will be people who aren't good enough at games to play well without cheating and don't have the moral integrity to keep themselves from buying these products. Here is a better solution
------------
http://www.punkbuster.com/news.html
------------
Punkbuster is a program that keeps cheaters from cheating, if it got popular maybe we could get rid of cheating almost completely. Anyway, I hate it when companies figure out ways to make money that screw the communities that they sell to. Blah.
"A witty saying proves nothing." - Voltaire
My freshman year in college (1996) was pretty much first year of prevalent online gaming. We played Quake, we saw cheaters and got mad at them, and we cheated too.
Quake was available on the SGIs then. On the SGIs, it was trivial to turn the polygon rendering into wireframe mode (probably equivalent to what this driver is claiming to do). My guess is someone might also be able to hack up a DLL for GL that renders polygons as wireframes and have any game load up the hacked DLL instead. Not only has ASUS's "cheat" been around for years, but I also contend that someone can write one for the PC that will work with any graphics card.
Now onto cheating. Some of the ways we cheated (would be considered cheating under most people's definitions):
1) changing the invisible-person model to visible
2) changing the person model to emit a really huge glow (so can be seen from behind walls)
3) editing holes into walls
4) using cheat modes that no one else knew about
5) hacking the quake executable so that the server could not send commands to the client (e.g. renaming color to dolor so in capture-the-flag, you could be colored blue but be on the red team)
6) using bots (I hacked up the StoogeBot to remove the SBot name and to disable the "No Bots" kick off -- it was actually a nontrivial hack)
Believe it or not, when we competed in clan matches, we did not use any of the above. We reserved the above as an added toy for when we were in the mood for something different (and it was very much a game of who could figure out how to cheat the most).
There were also other things we did that could be considered cheating because they likewise gave us unfair advantages (but I am guessing that most of you will not consider them cheating):
1) Talking to each other over the phone on headsets
2) Having a tool sit next to the quake player to time quad, RL, and shout out "5 sec till quad," etc.
3) Remembering spawning-point orders
4) Using our 3l33t mice to shoot rockets down for splash damage instead of being a dumb keyboarder and going for the direct hit
5) When running into a room, shooting rockets blindly into known camping spots.
When we played other clans, we did not cheat, and we did not get accused of cheating. When we played against random people online, we would constantly be accused of cheating. "You always have quad! Stop camping quad!" "Actually I showed up at quad 5 sec ago to kill the camper waiting there.""Bullshit! You must be cheating!"
I got so sick and tired of being called a cheater while playing legitimately that I did an experiment:
I played using the bot and the name "Yo Mama." Almost immediately I got called a cheater. Another time, I played using the bot but the name "Thresh" (the best Quake player then). Funny, I never got called a cheater.
The moral of the story is that people get annoyed when they play against a suspected cheater (because only someone with better skillz should be able to beat them -- wouldn't want to shatter that ego) and when a good player playing legitimately is suspected of cheating (because that player wants everyone to know that his skillz are better than theirs -- wouldn't want to shatter that ego). No matter what game designers try to do, people will always find a way to cheat. It will not always be easy to pick out cheaters from non-cheaters. So take all your playing with a grain of salt and don't let it get to your ego. Gaming should be a fun stress reliever, not a stress giver.
Personally, the only thing I find rather amazing is the fact that 80% of the community has voted "No". I suppose either the CounterStrike community, which fancies itself for its inane usage of the words "fuck", "you", and "cheater", doesn't care about the poll or doesn't know how to vote.
;)
Or maybe they just don't read Slashdot. Damn cheaters.
When I first installed UT I had a major issue most of the walls weren't there at all for trying to learn the game it was just awful since you could only tell if there was a wall there if it exploded something you shot at it or you ran into it which made you look like a moron till you learned the map then it was just whoopassing with a 6th sense against them although I don't know what the see through patch would acctually show but some screens would be nice
We had a little discussion on alt.comp.peripherals.videocards.nvidia with a guy doing CAD. Turns out this feature is quite useful to him, as it lets him quickly see *all* of his design. Apparently the software alone can manage something similar, but it's a lot more hassle than Now you see everything, Now you dont.
using the see-through to cheat at minesweeper! I played so long to get those high scores and those bastards can see the mines right off!
Cheating has given rise to programs like Punkbuster, an anti-cheat client that checks for known cheats and reports violations to the game server. Quite a few online servers REQUIRE Punkbuster to play. The latest PB client checks for the ASUS cheat drivers too - very cool.
Yes of course PB can be cracked as well, but like I said, it's an arms race. You keep on fighting.
I think the drivers are cool and people will just cheat on-line weather the drivers are there or not but still the whole concept of the drivers allowing you to cheat and cheating itself makes the game stupid. Where is the challange in a game of Quake if you cheat? Whats the point of playing games at all? My opinion, and people will torch or laud it as they will.
My little Universe is cool for the people who can fit inside it (being 250 6'4" there aren't that many who can)
"I still think this is cool stuff. People are just going to cheat online: drivers don't have all that much to do with it. And if they can't cheat, they'll DoS attack. Maybe I'm just disillusioned, but I have more fun playing with people I know and trust then strangers. Strangers cheat."
yeah, so let's screw everybody else who actually plays online. after all, you are the only person that matters. your opinion supersedes everybody elses. rotfl, gg dork.
that I bought with my Sea Monkeys, then I'd have to say it was a hoax. Those specs aren't worth a damn. And those sea monkeys are more like brine shrimp than highly intelligent underwater kingdom-dwellers....
"I do not regret the things I have done, but those that I did not do."
Anyone heard of Punkbuster? It's a prog that monitors whatever you do when yer playing online games-cheat buster. cs.pimped.org counterstrike server will kick you if you don't have it. it's a nice touch =)
Nike. Just jew it.
People cheat, code doesn't. People break into systems that aren't theirs, code doesn't. People use bad judgement, code doesn't.
Granted, ASUS has some really dumb marketing folk who aimed at the "gaming" market with this feature (where cheating is seen as one of the primary benefits). But that doesn't mean the feature shouldn't exist. I can see some useful applications development as well as higher end 3d modeling applications (wireframe could enable engineers to model complex joint fits internally).
Think of all the tools and technologies that wouldn't exist if we let their "misuse" keep them from existing. Think of all the technologies (esp in the area of security) that can just as easily be misused but are incredibly good things to have around (albeit - in some cases, to fight the misuse *smirk*).
It's sad people think cheating is right...but let's bash on the cheaters and the users with no integrity. Keep the technology out of it and let the vendors create the tools...there are more appropriate ways to deal with those who misuse the technology.