Slashdot Mirror
Asus Dropping See Through Drivers
Stijn Wuyts writes "Asus Taiwan marketing manager Kent Chien e-mailed today the company will delete the See-Through cheating code in their future drivers, as a result of the protests from the gaming community. But maybe this move comes too late, because the company already released the drivers for their GeForce 3 video card. As long as this driver works with current DirectX versions, it can be used to cheat. Removing the code in future versions will not stop current Asus buyers from cheating. Even the cheating detection by checking the Windows registry (as Asus proposes) can be disabled by a skilled programmer. I think Asus realised too late what were the consequences of their newest driver "features"..." Personally I think this is lame. If you want to see through walls, fine: It makes playing games lame, but thats your choice. But wow have a lot of people cried over this. As if crying is going to make any of this stop. Oh well, Asus will remove the driver, and anyone who wants it will just keep using it.
Dammit. I bought one of these cards because I thought it would let me see through clothing.
I read it first as "Acid dropping see through Drivers"...
Well, there is a flip side. It would be nice if cheating was impossible so people wouldn't routinely accuse good players of cheating.
It's annoying to be kicked from a server after 48 unanswered kills because people think you're a bot.
As a map/level designer, being able to see my maps in-game WITHOUT textures is a HUGE trouble-shooting tool, since it helps me find inconsistencies and errors in my models. What I dont get though is the people whining and complaining about the see-through drivers. Its already out there, and future versions of the drivers may not have the See-Through feature, but the current ones do, so cheaters (and map developers like myself who need this) simply wont upgrade (I just wont upgrade my dev machine, but I use BETA dets from nvidia for my gaming rig).
Just because you don't see a viable reason, it doesn't mean there isnt one.
This could just as easily be implemented in the level editor. There is no reason to put it in the drivers, where it is obviously intended to override places where a programmer chose that something should be opaque.
Oh, bullshit.
There *is* a legitimate purpose -- sheer coolness. I may want to use it while in single-player mode, or to show up my friend by trouncing him while he's using it (in effect using the thing as a reverse handicap).
Anyhow, it's a tool. Tools don't have to have a legitimate purpose, they just have to be. Any other attitude stifles innovation, and otherwise Just Plain Sucks. Innovation is more important than fairness in some game, or who has more little green pieces of paper, or lots of other things.
(Yes, I'm showing a bias here... I think that there's no reason not for nuclear weapons to exist, for instance, while I'd really prefer that they not be used. However, ya can't knock me on consistancy).
For that matter, in discussing the reasons you might favor the nVidia product, you imply that you *are* considering other factors -- and thus that this isn't really a boycott in its purest form, but rather Just Another Factor included in a buying decision.
Why?
Damnit, this thing is a Cool Hack. Yes, it can be used by bad people... but that's the fault of the bad people, not the cool hack. Video drivers don't cheat in multiplayer games, people cheat in multiplayer games.
I just don't understand the fuss.
I know exactly two things about Asus -- that I've heard of the GeForce 3 (but don't recall whether it was good or bad) and that they released this driver. The former would've been enough for me to at least look into them. The latter is enough that I will not bother.
You probably already know this, but the wording of your comment makes it sound like maybe you don't: Asus don't make the GeForce3. Nvidia does. Asus is just one company (of many) that make graphics cards based on the Nvidia GeForce3 chipset. So you can boycott Asus until they sink beneath the waves, and still buy a GeForce3-based card from someone else. What a deal!
I don't cheat. I haven't even played a game of Quake in months. However, this sort of holier than thou attitude among people (in this case, the PunkBuster developers) really pisses me off.
Sure, a skilled programmer could cheat. It's been possible to look through walls in games since there was access to hack up openGL drivers to add 50% opacity to all surfaces.
This is about cheating for the masses. When users have to click a checkbox to enable a cheat, there is bound to be more cheaters because it is more accessible. In that respect, Asus opened the door to something new and bad.
Er, neat idea, but considering the average Half-Life environments, I think it would not make sense.
I mean, Lara chose to do the archeologing stuff wearing relatively light clothes - no need for anything more complicated; Freeman wanted the protective suit, and I think he, as a scientist, had a good for that. "Common Sense Says We Shouldn't Go Naked To Test Chamber That Has Some Dangerous Stuff In It That Creates Interdimensional Gates And Stuff Like That"...
(Well, personally, I play HL deathmatch with the Kain-9 player model - a wolf guy who doesn't need clothes, he already has a good fur =)
Munchkins are going to find ways to ruin any game, even if they don't have see-through video drivers, or source to the game. The solution is not to play with them.
Cheating is best dealt with, socially in games.
You sorta need to KNOW the person's cheating. With see-through, unless the server is telling you (PunkBuster), you have NO WAY of knowing.
If a person cheats, you don't play with that person, and then they'll either cheat all by themselves or they start to not cheat.
And I repeat. BULL!
Again, this presupposes the notion that you're able to discover that the person is cheating? What about Internet games?
Shouldn't you be able to drop onto a random server for some gib-action without worrying that R001ZU is using a wall hack?
The only time cheating should be an issue is if there is money to be gained.
God you're naive. Cheating should be an issue if you're interested in fair and equitable gaming. What fun is a game if you have to join an arms-race for cheats just to achieve parity with the llamas?
Excuse me for prefering to match my GAMING SKILLS against the GAMING SKILLS of others, not their CHEATING SKILLS, CODING SKILLS, or their EXPENSIVE CARD BUYING SKILLS.
Games should be for fun and excitement, and it seems too many gamers take them FAR too seriously.
What's so fun about getting smeared by a guy with an aimbot who can see through walls who fires no-look rails out their ass?
I think it's abominable for the community to make a company restrict its drivers for this reason
It's abominable to restrict driver-hack/cheats? Sorry, I disagree. When I want to play someone, I want to play THEM, not their cheats/hacks.
The ONLY legitimate use for these driver hacks is CHEATING. Most games, if you need to look at the wireframes and scan maps, come with the options to do so, outside of a competitive environment.
Supplying a driver that allows this IN-GAME, is ridiculous. And if you can't see that it's only purpose is cheating, I'm not going to argue it with you. You're already too deluded.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
What's all the whining about? It's a two hour hack to recover the "functionality" with the new drivers. Move your OpenGL library out of the way, create a fake one with all the necessary entry points, patch glEnable() to do glPolygonMode(GL_FRONT_AND_BACK, GL_LINE) and you are set. It will probably screw menus and lots of other stuff, but once you have it up and running it's just a matter of fine tuning. Why glEnable? Because it's probably the function that's called earliest in any OpenGL program. The careful reader will note there are some details left out, but that's an exercise for, uhm, him. This works with any program, free or non-free software and with any driver. There's some minor performance hit involved, but hey, you are not filling polygons anymore! This is actually faster! For extra credits, use alpha blending instead of disabling polygon filling altogether. And for some more extra credit, make it look good. Adjust as necessary to the Windows World. It's possible to do it, ergo someone already did it.
In a multiplayer game people using this RUIN the game for others. I run a UT/Tribes2 server that is NOW passworded because of a rash of cheaters. Was a good public server on a T3, but I don't have the time or the desire to babysit a bunch of 13 year old hackers. So I just Pword'd the servers and limit the players to people I know. Sorry for everyone else that was enjoying it.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
but do we have to make it easy for any script kiddie to do it. Writing a good hack takes skills, installing a cracked driver any idiot (err most idiots) can do. Half the fun of the online games is the openness, but if everyone is worried about cheaters it detracts from the game for all players.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
That and I want to know just what game's programmers are dumb enough to draw major amounts of detail that normally will never be visible? Me thinks a lot of the sheep are riled up over something that's more their imagination than reality.
How many sites urged people to Vote yes?
Bunch of freaking lemmings!
A shortcut to designing a matrix-like (read: Shadowrun/Cyberpunk matrix) FPRPG. Being able to see nodes and such would be a pain to program but would be a simple matter if I could turn transparency on/off via driver.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
I wonder how difficult it would be to add the feature to Mesa?
I'm sure that would result in a large increase in Linux usage. There are a lot of llamas out there.
I've made this point before, but would you play poker with a bunch of random people you don't know? Probably only if there was some sort of authority (like a casino) warrenting a fair game.
The fact that you can play games with anyone, anywhere, anytime is cool, that I won't deny. But, you'll have to suffer the riff-raff. Probably the only longterm solution is identity checks (credit cards, X.509 certs, etc) and a much more regulated and monitored environment.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
2) Someone else has already said this, but I'll underscore it. If I was restricted to playing half-life with people I knew, until about 2 months ago I'd never have played multi-player half-life, and even now I'd only have one opponent (who is significantly less experienced, though he's catching up fast :-).
Most of the people I know who play fps games have had trouble setting up half-life and abandoned it in favor of the games that work without a lot of hassle on their machines (quake, unreal, etc). I don't know why this is the case, as I never had real trouble, but I tried helping several of them set up half-life at a lan party and didn't have any more success than they did.
So because I can't find people with equipment that works easily with the game I prefer, I can either take my chances with cheaters or with only one other person? That hardly seems reasonable. The whole point of having internet games is so you *don't* have to be isolated into some small clique and you *can* find numerous and skilled opponents to play with/against.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
Bah, no one told me if I changed my sig, it would change in already posted comments. That's stupid.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
Poker is usually for money, even if it's only play money (quarters or whatever). Online fps games and the like are not even for money, they're just for fun and the challenge. Yes, there are other ways to cheat; most of them take some effort to achieve. Having ASUS remove the see through drivers continues to make it take some effort.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
I suppose it matters how whiney the tone is, but I think everyone who *likes* playing games for *fun* can agree that the munchkins who have to have the best score no matter what (typically exploiting every possible loophole in the rules) ruin any game they have anything to do with. This goes for "real life" games as well as those affected by "see through" drivers.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
What would be kinda nice is to have newer patches for games detect players with the see-through drivers. I run a Tribes2 server, and would love to be able to find out who likes to cheat. I'm not saying I'd boot them automatically or anything (the maps in T2 are big enough that I'm not sure a player would get any benefit out of seeing through stuff), but if I saw a player with an absurdly high score who was also using the drivers, I'd be very tempted to ban them. A guy using those drivers (especially after they've been phased out for a while) is probably the sort who would cheat in other ways as well. And it would be nice to look at the players on a server and see if they are using the drivers. I wouldn't like to play on a server where everyone but me could see through walls. Then again, I play for the fun of it, so...
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
John Carmack himself said that one of the things that made the DOOM community to strong was the hacking that other people did after they shipped it. But if someone wants to learn how 3D works, or just wants a new perspective on the game that's not ok?
Wow, ac's are dumb. Did you stop to think that maybe there's a difference between hacking an engine to learn/and/or make cool mods and hacking just so you can win?
If you want to reduce cheating, then don't play with cheaters -- how hard is that?
Basically impossible, does that answer your question? Where it is really hard is telling if a player is cheating or just very very good.
In the Great Scheme of Things (tm), cheats don't matter, but closed-source software, is a Bad Thing.
Um, no, when it comes to cheating in multiplayer games, having closed source is a GOOD THING. Not having the source makes it a great deal more difficult to add a "gimme 10,000 gold" to a game like Age of Empires or an aimbot for Half Life.
Denizens of slashdot, why, oh WHY are you worrying about what features are in closed source software?If the source were open, the source would be open.
Which does what, exactly, to cut down on cheating?
The issue is, always has been, and always will be FREEDOM.
No, the issue is about a company releasing lame drivers for their products that can interfer with other people's enjoyment of a game. And insisting that everybody does it your way (open source software) is no freedom at all.
So why do we care what Asus does to their drivers? As long as we can hack the code, we...
WHAT?!?
You mean their drivers aren't Free? They're not even Open Source?
Denizens of slashdot, why, oh WHY are you worrying about what features are in closed source software? Why do you complain to the vendor that their features suck? Do you also complain because your congressional representatives take too much bribe money, instead of rioting over their acceptance of ANY bribes? Do you petition the police to shoot unarmed black men only ten times? Do you ask the RIAA and the MPAA to charge you only $14.99 per CD instead of $15?
GET REAL!
The issue is, always has been, and always will be FREEDOM.
In the Great Scheme of Things (tm), cheats don't matter, but closed-source software, is a Bad Thing. Instead of wasting rhetoric to change a companies policy WRT the functions of their code, why not change their policy regarding the OPENNESS of their code?
/me stomps away in disgust
Cheating in single player games is a possibility. Debugging programs is another (although that could easily be done with changing rendering settings). There are other possibilities too. Unfortunately this is a moot point because it's obvious that this feature is not going to be tolerated in today's world of online gaming with so many people using it to cheat.
It takes a skilled programmer to write it once, then anyone can run a batch file.
Or do you think script kiddies are highly skilled too?
Game level development
What happened to x-ray vision? If people are going to look through walls in games if worse comes to worst they can always order those cool glasses out of the back of their favorite comic book! Then poof - m3 b 0wnZ y0u w1t aWp thru w@LLz 'n c0uNt3r-$tr1k3 G!
I would point out here, that it would be quite possible for a reasonably skilled programmer to put transparency into any open source driver. I think that about the only thing stopping it from happening is that most programmers with the skill wouldn't want to put up with the kind of public censure that Asus has suffered through over these drivers.
Making it easy for the script-kiddie types to cheat is, well, silly.
--
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
Selling a bunch of their cards to all the punks out there who want to cheat.
BTW, check out www.punkbuster.com for a site dedicated to eliminating cheaters on compiant servers.
Thermal imaging, microwave imaging, I believe there was even a recent story on slashdot about ultra wide band imaging. Counterstrike is a hella cool mod mind you.
How we know is more important than what we know.
or play games that actually require things from the player that a computer cant (yet) do, like, say, intelligence.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Even in real life soldiers and counterterrorists have equipment that can see through walls and do you think the predator didn't have an aimbot? Make it part of the game. If everyone is doing it, is it still cheating?
How we know is more important than what we know.
You'd take a pretty big performance hit, doing something in software that can be done by the accelerator board.
------
Camping is only really evil on single-player maps, where there are few resources and only a few spawnpoints.
------
Trusted clients are technically impossible.
------
If a person cheats you don't play with that person and then they either cheat all by themselves or they start to not cheat.
This statement demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of online gaming.
Whole communities can arise around one gaming server. It's kind of like your local basketball court at the park. You get to know the people that play there, and the experience is enhanced.
If someone came along to your court and started cheating, sure you could always drive to another park. On the Internet that's even easier than in real life.
But the effect may be the same. The people you know aren't gonna be there. Suddenly you're playing with nothing but strangers. Which goes against your next statement:
"Games should be for fun and excitement..."
YOU do not get to decide what constitutes fun and enjoyment, my friend. To me, fun and enjoyment is competition on equal grounds.
-- Mojo Tooth : exploring our world as only an idiot can.
Thanks for the vote. Vote several times with diff mail addresses. Don't think they check them...never did mine.
Anyway... The most popular cheat tool is punkbuster. http://www.punkbuster.com/
I know it lets server operators decide if they want to make the client mandatory or an option. It supports several games, and I know it was updated for these new drivers.
There are several anti-cheat tools now that have been updated to disable these drivers or warn other players if someone uses them. If you play on a server that requires these tools you won't have to worry.
You mean the "Render Subject Nude" feature of the upcoming Matrox Cards?
*wink*
Sorry, Mr. Cmdr in Chief, but it is NOT lame. In fact it's extremely cool that a big, mean old company actually listened to its users and changed the future of its product because of the input. Everyone here whines about closed source companies not providing outlets for their users to voice concerns about issues with regards to their software and then suddenly we get the opposite and there's MORE whining. What's going on?
The fact of the matter, is that it's not about whether the game player decides whether to be able to see through walls or not. No! It's about whether the game designer wants you to see through walls. If they wanted you to do that, they would have designed it that way.
They created their games for everyone to play against each other on a fairly even playing field (barring obvious performance differences between different hardware). But what they didn't want, is for people to completely go around the basic assumptions of the game world, the major one being that you can't see through walls if the walls are solid. Having hardware drivers circumvent the creative visions of the game designers is a stab in the back and should rightly be shunned.
--
+1 Insightful, -1 Troll. What can I say, I'm an Insightful Troll.
What if the drivers could allow you to see through Laura Craft's clothes in Tomb Rader?? Man I bet thaey could sell those drivers.
"If ignorance is bliss, why aren't there more happy people in the world?"
I think that having it exist in a form where it takes a bit of skill to enable it is fine. It takes just as much skill to download a cheat program, assuming the person already wants to cheat. And there will always be people who want to cheat.
This driver could have had some cool uses besides cheating, though.
--
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
> It is upto the developers to stop the cheating.
Not a flame, but obviously you're not a game/graphics programmer, else you would know this is "pratically" IMPOSSIBLE. (You will see why I say pratically below.)
> Having transparent walls does you no good if the game doesn't draw things that you can not see.
In the *ideal* client/server game, yes, the server would tell the client what it can and can't see. This style of client is commonly called a "dumb terminal." It takes input, sends it to the server, and renders what the server says.
Let's see how this would work:
Client is standing still, looking straight ahead. Server sends updates to what the client can see. e.g. players move around.
Now the client does a quick 180 turn. Server needs to send the client all the new objects the client can now see. Unfortunately you TOTALLY forgot about network latency. Objects "pop" into view, and you kill bandwidth since you are constantly telling the server where you are looking, along with the server constantly sending what you can see.
This one reason it is pratically why it is impossible to write a cheat-proof client/sever game. The network connection just doesn't make it feasible.
If you need more examples, I'm sure John Carmack could point out a few more examples, since he's been implementing First Person Shooter's for a while.
> This is one reason to prefer BSP trees for HLHSR (Hidden Line & Hidden Surface Removal) instead of Z buffers.
Nonsense. BSP's only really work for static objects. You still need a z-buffer for dynamic objects. BSP's aren't free.
Are you going to generate a BSP for each "frame" of animation, when the frame is generated dynamically?? (i.e. blended animation)
> Why can't someone just go into a map editor and replace all the surface textures to ones that have alpha-channels?
Hacked maps have been around since Quake 1.
The client does a crc checksum on the map and sends it to the server. If the client has a different checksum, the server sends the map. Of course this doesnt' stop the client from lying to the server about the checksum.
Why is there an assumption this is a driver problem? The issue is the trust model between client and server. The game engine needn't send position information to clients when not necessary? Oh sure, it's _easier_ to let the client do the work, but the game (server) engines already do much of the same work (you can't walk through walls). Why not include this funtionality and make it server-side optional? Let the big boxes do more of the work to quash the would-be cheaters.
Personally I think this is lame. If you want to see through walls, fine: It makes playing games lame, but thats your choice. But wow have a lot of people cried over this. As if crying is going to make any of this stop. Oh well, Asus will remove the driver, and anyone who wants it will just keep using it.
As the article points out, crying did make it stop. Now, crying can't reverse the damage already done by previously released drivers, but if nobody had complained, then Asus wouldn't have changed anything. Ok, so the cat's out of the bag to a degree. This doesn't mean that the drivers will be readily available for casual cheaters in the future, and as existing drivers become obsolete, the problem will be nearly completely solved. See what a bunch of cry babies can do?
Yes! That guy!
Well Their are other 3d games out their that do not promote bloodlust. Like Jedi Knight ,and you can turn off all the gore in most of the bad ones.
But alas too much on the client side has drawbacks allowing cheating to take place, their needs to be a balance.
The people who don't see the harm in what Asus was doing just aren't very invested in online FPS gaming. Thankfully, the people who actually BUY Geforce cards, primarily the gaming community, have a different set of priorities. It speaks well of Asus that the community has a voice with the company regarding issues like this.
What would happen if Asus kept releasing these drivers? Game authors would be required to check and make sure the card owners were using the Nvidia reference drivers, rather than the Asus drivers. First they would check driver versions through the registry or something, eventually they would probably be required to do something like scan through the driver binary. Bleh. All very damaging to Asus' relationship with game developers as well.
It is likely that Asus developed an understanding of all this based on feedback from the community. This "whining" was a good thing for everyone concerned.
Now before I get modded down, I be to remind whoever might read this that what I am saying is FACT. - bogaboga
While it is cool that a company is listening to consumers for once, I don't think it is a huge deal. I find that multiplayer games are most fun when you are playing with people you know locally. Not only is there less lag, but cheating occurs at a lower rate, from my experience. (Of course, this is the cause of many weaknesses with massive multiplayer RPGs in my book, since you can't play them locally).
If someone on the net wants to feel "leet" by cheating, let them. Gamers who play for skill might actually benefit from taking on players who have given themselves huge, unfair advantages through cheating.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
The fault here lies in the game that trusts anything about the client's abilities or limitations.
Peer to peer games assume that everyone involved can be trusted to manage authoritative state of the game. Bad assumption.
Client/server games can be more secure, but only if the server is the only machine with the authoritative state of the game.
If these games assume that the user can't see through walls, then the games are made wrong. Don't even tell the user WHERE the enemies are, unless they're somewhere that the user would have a chance of seeing.
What else do these games assume, that they shouldn't? They assume lighting is muddy-to-black, but the user can tweak with gamma and brightness. They assume textures are certain colors, but the user can replace those. They assume bodies are certain sizes, but I've heard of "twenty-foot-spikey" body mods which end up sticking through the nearest walls for a cheap give-away. They assume that you can only walk a certain speed, that your weapon fires at a certain rate, that you can only walk where walls aren't, or that your gravity is the same as everyone else's. Funny assumptions, given that all the tools to control those are on the client's machine.
Game design should be learning from cryptography design: don't publish what you don't want cracked, harden your data proportional to the value of the data, and by all means, study the man-in-the-middle problems. Until then, EVERYTHING is potentially unfair.
[
This my be true for single-player games, but for networked, multi-player it makes the game "lame" for everyone. That doesn't provide a great incentive for people to spend $45 on the next version of Quake or Unreal....
ÕÕ
ÕÕ
Usually, here on Slashdot, we bash companies that get hax0r3d and should have known better. "That's what they get for having lame security" and "They must be hiring some real dope heads."
So, here we are, with a company that releases some drivers that let you do something you couldn't do before. Instead of bashing on the game company that made a program with an obvious game-related security flaw, we decide to bash those who made the drivers.
My my, that does seem wierd, doesn't it? We should be banging the heads of the game developers and telling them to get it right next time so there are fewer cheaters. We all know that removing the drivers to prevent cheating still leaves the gapping hole in the game.
Boo to Asus and all those "Waaa! My fun is ruined!" whiners.
Hurray to anyone that lets those game companies know that they did a lousy job and should do better next time.
It's not like this was anything new at all when Asus introduced it in their drivers... (well I guess it was new that official drivers supplied this kind of feature.)
--
Ner lbh sebz gur HFN? Gura lbh'ir whfg ivbyngrq gur QZPN!
It's oft-repeated in stories like this one (especially lately, relating to the Asus drivers) that, "It doesn't matter what you do, people are still going to cheat."
This is true. A certain non-zero number N of people will cheat. Everyone accepts this as true.
What is NOT true is the idea that because SOME people will cheat, we shouldn't try to make it HARD for people to cheat. Sometimes, there's a tradeoff involved: sure, you can make it hard to cheat, but then the game becomes frustrating to play for people who aren't cheating. You have to find the balance point where cheaters are (mostly) prevented from doing so, and regular players are't restricted unnecessarily.
In multiplayer games like this, most of the anti-cheating measures that can be taken will *not* affect honest players. Things like encrypting the data stream (and changing the encryption method regularly), limiting what kind of input can come from the player, obscuring technical details, etc., *WILL* help reduce cheating.
"But, dirtside," you say to me, aghast that I've just promoted the idea of Security Through Obscurity (STO), "any technical measure you propose can be gotten around!" This is true. They *CAN* be gotten around... but by making them difficult to get around, we reduce the amount of cheating that *ACTUALLY* occurs. And this can end up saving the day: if only 1% of all Tribes 2 players cheat, then in the average Tribes game you're unlikely to encounter even 1 person who is cheating. Honest players will therefore see cheating as something that is not a problem in Tribes, and the game will flourish because people aren't frustrated by trying to compete with cheaters.
On the other hand, if 20% of Tribes 2 players cheat, then that means in a 10-on-10 CTF pickup game you join, there are, on average, 4 people cheating. In fact, with 20%, you'd be hard-pressed to find any moderately-populated game that didn't have so much cheating that the fun is essentially ruined. Now honest players will quickly get the impression that the Tribes 2 online community is rife with cheaters, and as such it's no fun playing Tribes 2 online, and the community suffers.
"But people WILL cheat!" Yes, but having gaming and hardware companies making it *trivially easy* to cheat will be the kind of factor that increases that cheat percentage from 1 to 20%.
Now, STO isn't a method you'd want to use when securing data that you would *never* want anyone to see -- but we're not talking about the same kind of security we talk about when we want our emails or telnet sessions encrypted. Obfuscating the inner workings of a game so as to make it more difficult for cheaters to cheat (while not inconveniencing honest players) is not the same as relying on STO for protecting the data integrity of my web server and database.
Some people have mentioned that, at least in the particular case of the Asus drivers, developers and other honest folks actually WOULD have some use for the see-through ability of the drivers. So would it be possible to retain those features without making them available for every d00d, hax0r and punk-ass cheater to use? No, I can't think of any. That doesn't mean there AREN'T any; I'd bet there are graphics programmers here who could think of something feasible.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
stupid? Drop the Asus spamm and marketing scamm!
The current Slashdot moderation system is made by gay communists!
You can't enforce honesty on a network.
This lesson was only first learned what? 30 years ago? Do people really expect that little band-aids here and there will be able to fix inherently broken crap?
On my computer, you can't rely on naything. You can't ever be sure that the code you want to be running is, or that code you don't want to be running isn't.
If you don't want people cheating, then don't send the client extra information (like the positions of other players) that can be used to cheat.
Its the network protocol thats broken, the game thats broken, not the video hardware or drivers here.
Is i tharder to write "more secure" protcols? Hell yea it is. Can it take more server end resources and more bandwidth? hell yea it can.
However, if you want to compromise security for speed, ease or server side resources, then don't bitch abou tthe consequenses.
Even after you fix all that, you still can't stop "line of sight" cheating. You still can't stop a bot from being written to play for a person. Some things are just not fixable problems.
Any program designed to stop cheaters is flawed. Flawed because they can "break" it. Once its broken, the new cheats will proliferate. Its whack-a-mole!
Having perfectly reasonable features removed from hardware by the manafacturer to "protect" inhgerently broken software from cheaters is absolutly silly.
If people want to cheat, then they will cheat. So what? Its just a game, get over it. Setup private servers and play there. Otherwise, put up with it.
I hate to be abrasive about this but, its fucking silly. This is a moronic issue. The idiots have won! That pisses me off. A completely useless victory! Yeah!
--Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
From reading the majority of comments here we all sound like damn whining bitches.
Oh wait, this is slashdot. carry on.
"I don't need a compass to tell me which way the wind shines." - Mr. Furious, Mystery Men
All of you are too busy reading /. to understand the full implications of this to the online gaming community. And it IS a community. Sure, it's not quite as healthy as your "make friends with all the kids on your block" or "get to know more people at work" kind of thing, but to many people it's their passion, their life. Online gaming has trancended it's quake DM free for all beginnings to a very complex community in a wide variety of games that is tightly knit. Something like these drivers has the potential to fully undo the entire community. Just look what the aimbot did to Unreal Tournament.
You can pick your nodes, and you can pick your friends, but you can't pick your friend's nodes
Not quite accurate. Games with software mode, like quake 1 and unreal tournament seems to do just fine. However, the check would have to reside on the server, which would have to calculate this for every player all the time. I bet you could optimize alot of it though, especially imperfectly and without models.
The net effect would probably be a bit more load on the server and slightly less bandwith usage.
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
Damn, lost my final conclusion somewhere between notepad and IE:
But the problem is of course that this isn't really feasible in an online multiplayer FPS. It's not the load or bandwidth that is the problem, but the _latency_. Imagine turning around 180 degrees, and having to wait for downloading object- and player data instead of being updated with everything as-you-go. It would be unplayable for all FPS'.
The only viable alternative left as far as I can see is then trusted clients, user-id's and moderation.
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
So yet again the minority loses to the whining majority. It's pretty sad how people can say "information wants to be free", then do the opposite, again and again. I guess it only applies if it doesn't affect oneself in a negative way. Well, that's excactly what your so-called enemies say and do too. Negativity is subjective.
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
"...there are mounds of competitors products who are just as good..." You're wrong there. Nevermind the fact that they wrote drivers for cheaters, there is NO company that puts out better hardware --more specifically: motherboards-- than ASUS.
Aimbots such as nopbot127 for Quake 3 don't take advantage of what's actually DRAWN on the screen. They effectively see through walls anyway. That + the railgun and they could probably play w/o the monitor on and still beat people using these "cheat" drivers. /. users hate Windows or think Microsoft is out to get them!
____________________
Remember, not all
Prevent linux based DDOS's!
http://linux.denialofservice.org/
The poster wrote:
"Personally I think this is lame. If you want to see through walls, fine: It makes playing games lame, but thats your choice"
Three little words:
online multiplayer games
The information about how to implement this in your own drivers/game is still out there, they just made sure that the risk of it affecting the majority in a bad way wasn't quite as big.
/Mikael Jacobson
"But surely we won't be still stuck with Linux in 25 years!?"
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
The community didn't MAKE the company restrict it's drivers. The company decided to restrict it's drivers because it made business sense -- in other words, they were worried enough about people boycotting them that it might affect their bottom line. Subtle but important difference. Bravo to the community for making it's preferences heard! You're right -- games should be for fun. Most of us don't find it fun when our opponents cheat. Companies who encourage cheating to fatten their accounts... well, that just defeats the whole spirit of competitive gaming.
I agree with CmdrTaco's comments on the original article. People are going to cheat anyway. I tend to play online games against people I know. I used to spend up to eight hours a day (hey, I work for a university!) playing Rise of Rome online. It seemed that for every "good" game, you'd have to put up with about four "bad" games (people whining about options, then dropping, immature kids, etc). It just wasn't worth it. I'd rather play against people I know and I don't have to worry about them cheating.
As far a tournaments and leagues, cheating (in any form) is a major issue. Having Asus remove a driver feature doesn't solve it. I think the real effort should be to devise ways to ensure people are not cheating while playing online. While the drivers may had made it easy for script kiddies, the serious cheater already has tools.
Actually, what they've done is create a shortage of hardware with this feature. L4me cheaters will start shelling out lots of $$$ for the chance to be a l33t gamer. And then Asus looks like the good guy for removing the driver after asking for user feedback, thereby gaining lots of free advertising. MS couldn't have planned it better.
Looking for a computer support specialist for your small business? Check out
"Well, crying isn't gonna bring him back, unless your tears smell like dog food. So you can either sit there crying and eating can after can of dog food until your tears smell enough like dog food to make your dog come back -- or you can go out there and find your dog."
"You're right! I'll do it."
"Rats. I almost had him eating dog food!"
If people cannot use special video drivers, what about using memory modifiers and proxies to help you win a multiplayer game? I haven't seen any large outcry about a proxy for Quake that helps you aim. General purpose memory modifiers also work well for cheating, but those can be compensated for by checking on the other end. I have yet to see a game that has this checking, however.
would-you-like-cheese-with-your-whine
Very nice, Rob. It's rare that we see sharp, biting commentary from you; please consider this to be my vote for more like it!
--
If someone came to my park and started cheating my group would kick his ass and he would leave the park. That is why game servers (and most other social type servers including chat and such) have kick and ban functionality.
Its still a social issue. The world can't be protected from every bad thing that can happen so learn to deal with it.
Causeing what could be useful features to be removed froms software just because some stupid people do stupid and unfun things with them is wrong. I find it somewhat hypocritical when the sentiment here is that a corporation that removes functionality from a product in a cry from corporations to get protection from it is bad, yet when there is something that you feel damages you, you cheer for the feature to be removed.
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
Games should be for fun and excitement and it seems too many gamers take them FAR to seriously. I think its abominable for the community to make a company restrict drivers for this reason. Blah.
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
"Personally I think this is lame. If you want to see through walls, fine: It makes playing games lame, but thats your choice. But wow have a lot of people cried over this. As if crying is going to make any of this stop. Oh well, Asus will remove the driver, and anyone who wants it will just keep using it." Excuse me Mr. Taco, but do you even play games? You think it's lame for the gaming community to stand together as one and say, "No, we will not accept commercial cheating" as lame? Guess what, taco, people, myself included like to play these games! And it's a real pain in the ass when you spend time developing your strategies and honing your senses to hear/feel your opponent coming, and hide around a corner to get him. But then some 12 yuear old kid with asus drivers nilhilates all that and just shoots you, because he knows you are there. Then there is the issue of walls that you can shoot through... where is the skill in that? Where is the fun in that? And yet, in your ignorance, you call the uproar against this lame. Why don't you research your facts first? Society in general takes cheating in games very seriously, one example is drug testing at the olympics. Granted online games are not the olympics, but it is the same idea on a smaller scale. And yes it makes playing games lame, but it's not ONE persons choice to make EVERYONE's game lame. Just ONE person cheating in a online game ruins it for everyone. Bottom line, if you aren't knowledgable enough to comment on something then just don't. It will really aggravate those who DO have an informed opinion.
Well said. I attempted to make some sort of coherant reply along the same lines but came out looking like I was just another angry reader... Which I suppose I was. But good job, I think your words reflect the feelings of the gaming community at large.
I think cheating is lame, but people will always try to do it. The good thing about making it a little harder with the drivers is that it will eliminate the ease with which everyone can try. It's the AOL/Napster factor. Many MP3's were around and actively traded before Napster came out, but Napster made it so easy that even my grandfather could pirate entire albums. If it is easy for anyone to cheat, then game servers will have such a high noise to signal ratio that it will be no fun for the noncheaters to play anymore.
What's lame is working with the game developers via email to track down the cause of underground cheats only to have a major hardware distributor legitimize cheating in online gaming.
What's lame is playing a game in my free time, which I have little of, to gain some skill only to have that negated by some 14 year old l33t d00d who can move faster/jump higher/see me before I can see them.
What's lame is Asus trying to sell a product, not because of it's technical merits, but because it lets you do something that was never intended by the game's developers.
I didn't put time and money into something only to have Asus ruin it for me. I, and scores of other server admins, have worked with the developers at Valve software to thwart the speed cheats, the server-crashing scripts, the invisibility hacks, the unbanning tools, and who knows what else for Counter Strike/Team Fortress Classic/Half-Life. I want my server to be fun and enjoyable for everyone who plays there. Why is that lame, Rob?
--
The ASUS GF drivers contain a breakpoint in the OpenGL driver. It's impossible to debug an opengl program using the ASUS GF drivers, since the debugger stops in the OGL driver :). Hopefully the 'cheat'code was THAT particular piece of code so the breakpoint is gone too.
--
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
[sarcasm follows]
I think people are going to die anyway. So if someone creates new ways of killing them, who cares. If you stop them, someone else will do it right?
[ends]
Yeah right. I think that sort of thinking is bogus.
Just because you think someone is going to do something bad eventually, doesn't mean that you should:
1) Be the one to do it first.
2) Be yet another one to do it
3) Make it easy for them.
4) Say it's ok.
5) Waste time arguing that it's not that bad.
Same goes for so many other things - people justifying writing script kiddie exploits and making them publicly available.
Just because it can be done doesn't mean it should, and if it shouldn't be done, why should you speed things up?
I wonder whether I'm wasting my time. But anyway, this is one of my little paddles against the waterfall of entropy.
Cheerio,
Link.
---=-=-=-=-=-=---
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
"Why was it even developed?"
Becuase it could be.
Look at it this way... You're a programmer writing code for a particular
piece of hardware. One day you notice something about the interface or
nature of the hardware that might let you create an exploit that no-one
else had forseen the system being capable of. Do you:
A. Ignore this discovery, and go back to writing the code you were supposed
to be working on.
B. Explore this discovery, in the interest that figuring out how that
exploit works might lead to other valuable discoveries about the
potential of the hardware/software you are working with.
The mistake the programmer made was not in writing the code, it was in
letting someone from the marketing department know it existed.
But wow have a lot of people cried over this. As if crying is going to make any of this stop.
But, it did just make it stop.
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
So on this same logic, should they discontinue drug testing in the Olympics? Let athletes make the decision not to take steroids because it is wrong? This software harms the gameplay for other players.
For a while Asus had a poll about their TNT asking if the "see through walls feature" should be added to their drivers. Of course the poll was overwhelmingly if favor of excluding the see through walls feature, and was not included with the TNT's then. It's a shame that after that they decide to slip it into the Gforce drivers (which presumably will work for the TNT's as well).
I run several game servers for NETDOOR ranging from quake 1 to tribes 2. Cheating has always been a problem especially on our heavily populated servers like quake 2, but until now it has always just been software which was the cheat, now cheaters can go in a whole new direction and use hardware to do this. It's really sad when you think of all the work that newer games have put into preventing cheating will now be null and void because of a video card. I will never buy an asus product again. I realize it's just a game, but I think the fact that they are knowingly contributing to ruining games for everyone for the sake of "marketing" is justification enough to look into other manufacturers. Looks like I'll be using ABIT motherboards from now on...
--
--
fat lenny's gonna lick your brain today.
removing the drivers doesnt stop cheating...the dedicated cheaters can still do it. However, Most cheaters seem to stop cheating if it becomes a chore to get the new cheat/driver/etc. Most of the people that keep cheating at that point seem to have some sort of vendetta against the game/community they are cheating in.
Yes, the serious cheater has his tools, but most cheaters just seem to be script kiddies anyway, not anyone with a real idea of what is happening behind the scenes to let them cheat.
I think Asus just thought they could corner the market on 'lamers' if they introduced drivers which negated the need to hunt down he latest cheat, and now they are paying the PR price for it.
Time for some tasty Shiner Bock!
you are right in that you do have to expect a certain amount of wankerism in online play. As you mentioned, there is no real authority, and no easy way to police it. That's understood. And im not asking for any kind of verification thru credit ard system o anything like that. Thats just silly imho. I just don't really think hardware manufacturers should be building the cheats in. Even an honest gamer might be tempted once he finds out what the drivers for his new card can do, even if he never considered cheating before.
And the fact still remains, if you want to play with more than a handful of people, your going to have to play with strangers. Like I said, the whole idea of internet gaming is playing with people from all over the world.
Time for some tasty Shiner Bock!
I dont think playing Rise of Rome and having people whining or dropping games is exactly a fair comparison to people being able to see thru walls in q1-q3. Ok, maybe you and taco only play games like this with people you know. What about the other 95% of the community that doesn't play with just friends? What about tournaments, and leagues? Most of these are played remotely from all over the country, or even all over the world.
I just think the whole philosophy of 'I only play online games with people I know' is detrimental to the whole idea of the internet gaming community. Playing with friends at a lan party is one thing, but most people dont do this, as the net provides much easier access to gaming oppurtunities.
Anyway, the whole point of this ramble was that just because some people only play with friends they know, that doesn't mean the majority of the internet gaming community does, and these drivers are detrimental to the internet gaming community as a whole, neat technology or not.
Time for some tasty Shiner Bock!
someone must have seen my comment coming through a wall and modded me before i could react
Time for some tasty Shiner Bock!
These drivers were designed to be cheats. ASUS promoted them as the thing that'd give you the edge over other gamers.
If this weren't the case, then perhaps I'd be more sympathetic toward them. As it is, I don't think I'd dare post my thoughts on here for fear of being modded a troll.
Why can't someone just go into a map editor and replace all the surface textures to ones that have alpha-channels? I'm sure a Geforce3 could handle all that alpha-blending.
When you use these drivers, you don't just ruin YOUR gaming experience, you ruin the experience of the OTHER 30 people you are playing with.
They had a survey during this past week that told them the see throug drivers were not a good idea.
When I checked the poll this wednesday, some 12.000 people had voted about the issue, with 89% thinking the see-through drivers were a bad idea...
No one remembers that Wicked3D did this three years ago either.
A penny for your thoughts.
A witty
Meanwhile, the Asus see-through driver is BAD.
Go figure.
What is the purpose of cheating? Their is no money involved.....This is like me saying that I have found a way to get fat without eating? I would like to here a good argument from a cheater as to what they get out of it???
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
The drivers should have remained the same. Developers and API writers should take these things into account during the production of their software. Its just bad form to hide features and disable potentially cool stuff because it *could* be used inappropriately. Many people have made good analogies, so I wont bother to come up with one.
I just want to say that I disagree with this. I play Q3 and HL, I use a Leadtek GeForce2 so these were not availible for me to use. I am also a developer of games. I would have preferred that Asus had not removed the features.
:)
Just my opinion...
Actually, I'm currently in the market for a 3D card (my current one's a Canopus Pure3D -- it's so old that the company apparently let the pure3d.com domain registration lapse) and will not by an Asus one exactly because of this situation.
I know exactly two things about Asus -- that I've heard of the GeForce 3 (but don't recall whether it was good or bad) and that they released this driver. The former would've been enough for me to at least look into them. The latter is enough that I will not bother.
Yes, but I'm not attempting to stifle them. Rather, I'm simply refusing to personally fund them. My money, my choice where it goes.
As someone else in the thread pointed out, nVidia also makes a GeForce 3 and they're sponsoring the E3 coverage on another website I frequent. Barring some amazing technical or price advantage of the Asus product, I just don't see any reason for them to get my business.
Does anyone else see this parallel?
I stopped using Asus drivers for my GeForce long time ago because they were too buggy and the latest updates was almost a year old. So I installed NVidia's drivers which are a lot faster with large textures and more stable.
So now I can't use the fancy features I paid for, like the TV out. So I have decided not to buy Asus again. It's a waste of money when you can't use all the onboard features anyway.
--------
Is why a driver can allow you to cheat. Really, that's the fundamental problem here.
Remember BBS games? Could you ever cheat in those? NO! Not unless there was a known hack on the server. Otherwise, send all the info you want to the BBS. There was absolutely no possible way to cheat by hacking. You could hack your terminal client, but big whoop-de-do.
This is the current problem with multiplayer games: too much information is known by the client. WAY too much. And most of these games: Half-life, Quake, etc are *server* based games. So what's the excuse? It's not like you have the insecurities of peer-to-peer. There is a trusted server. So why - oh - why do these client machines know so much? In particular, why does the video card know so much? Are the programmers that lazy that they are trusting the video card to figure everything out? Man, back in my day we had to render each pixel. The video card knew only what we wanted it to know.
Granted, there are other ways to cheat in games (like auto-aim, etc), but this? See through textures? This is plain laughable. This is not a driver vender problem. This is a game developer problem. Fix your damn games.
It seems a good many people are desperately trying to apply their favorite arguements from other issues onto a situation to which they flatly do not apply. This is not a security issue. There is no system compromise, nor privacy invasion. So bleating "security through obscurity" arguments are simply non-sequitor attempts to bring a "with-it" argument into a debate where it does not apply. Neither does the argument that online games are somehow flawed, becuase a driver *can* bypass the rendering code of the game. By arguing such, you simply demonstrate that you do not understand how such mechanisms work.
Unless we want to limit gameservers to processing engines vastly in excess of the typical linux box, or nt server, it simply isn't practical to attempt to render a scene according to a viewpoint at the server - because the clients, all 16, 32, or 64 of them are constantly moving, and not always in predictable ways. That scene data has to be computed at the client, because it's simply not practical to do it elsewhere.
But what really floors me, is that some of you would defend a company who have deliberately embraced unethical behavior and made it a selling point of their product.
Understanding this situation, requires first a basic understanding of the real issues.
First, competitive online gaming is currently being pursued by a lot of people. They join leagues like the OGL and compete in games against other players and teams. There are hundreds of thousands of people doing this now. By they have a huge achilles heel. Online games are vulnerable to cheating, and unlike offline sports, it is hugely difficult to verify that a person is playing an honest game.
So we must live under the honor system. we have no choice but to *trust* that our opponents are playing an honest game. And indeed, the vast majority do. But those who do not, are hard to catch. But until now, the cheats available have been crude, and usually detectable at some level, or preventable by server operators. Most are fairly crude hacks, and don't work all that well anyway. But now, here comes Asus - and designs a driver whose express purpose is to help people cheat. And so, the cheaters now have a nice, professionally developed, virtually undetectable means by which to cheat, and there is basically no way in which to stop them, or ensure you are getting a fair game now.
Now some of you have said "but these drivers might be useful for other purposes, like development, etc.". Maybe they are. But that's not what Asus coded them for, or is selling them as. They are marketing these drivers expressely to help people do something morally wrong. Cheating other people. Asus is a Corporation without ethical standards, for whom the promotion of unethical, shitty behavior is fine if it makes them money. They absolutely represent the worst of what Corporatism can produce. Yet - slashdotters are defending these dirtbags. Irony.
There is no rational argument, which will make this right. And objecting to their despicable business practices, and this product which appeals to the very worst human failings, is hardly whining. Rather, it is simply well justified righteous indignation. And gamers are completely justified in carrying the good fight to them.
Does cheating happen? yes. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't fight it at every opportunity. Cancer happens too - yet no one says "it's going to happen anyway, so just let the victims die".
Some of you folks need to think this issue through a little more fully.
Brian Davis
President
Online Gaming League
Seriously. Hands up. How many of you were planning on boycotting the GeForce 3 based on how this issue played out? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?
Why is this such a fuss? Did they have some big customer survey that said this was an important issue for them?
--------
Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
How could the company not have foreseen this as a PR disaster? No one is likely to boycot the product because of this but come on, it clearly took some programmer some time and concerted effort to develop this 'feature'. Why was it even developed? It's rediculous. People who want to cheat will cheat. part of the fun for them is finding new and creative ways to do it. Let them have their kind of fun. Let the rest of us play our games in peace, and save dome R&D dollars by not wasting programmers' time with things like this.
--
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
"// this is the most hacked, evil, bastardized thing I've ever seen. kjb"
I am a graphics programmer with 20+ years of experience. And, I have written a commercial 1st person 3d game. Since I last saw it referenced on a list of the worst RPGs ever written I will admit that I'm not the best game programmer in the world.
> > > Having transparent walls does you no good if the game doesn't draw > > things that you can not see. > > In the *ideal* client/server game, yes, the server would tell the > client what it can and can't see. This style of client is commonly > called a "dumb terminal." It takes input, sends it to the server, and > renders what the server says. > > Let's see how this would work: > > Client is standing still, looking straight ahead. Server sends updates > to what the client can see. e.g. players move around. > > Now the client does a quick 180 turn. Server needs to send the client > all the new objects the client can now see. Unfortunately you TOTALLY > forgot about network latency. Objects "pop" into view, and you kill > bandwidth since you are constantly telling the server where you are > looking, along with the server constantly sending what you can see. > > This one reason it is pratically why it is impossible to write a > cheat-proof client/sever game. The network connection just doesn't > make it feasible. > > If you need more examples, I'm sure John Carmack could point out a few > more examples, since he's been implementing First Person Shooter's for > a while.
Interesting style of argument. First you create a strawman and argue against it and then you appeal to an authority without a quotation.
You start with the insane supposition that the server would have to do all visibility checking when in fact the client can make the decision to draw or not draw something locally. The fact that the client knows that something exists does NOT imply that it MUST draw it. Truth is that earlier versions of Quake used a scan line buffer for HLHSR that doesn't suffer from these problems.
> > > This is one reason to prefer BSP trees for HLHSR (Hidden Line & > > Hidden Surface Removal) instead of Z buffers. Nonsense. BSP's only > > really work for static objects. You still need a z-buffer for dynamic > > objects. BSP's aren't free. > > Are you going to generate a BSP for each "frame" of animation, when > the frame is generated dynamically?? (i.e. blended animation)
Merging mobile objects into the small subregion of space that the existing BSP tree marks as visible is not all that complicated or that slow. So, it is practical to do just that. An octtree can be used to track the location of mobile objects and support fast volumetric searches allowing you to quickly find the potentially visible set of objects. Then you need to do a quick BSP visibility check on just their bounding box to classify them into definitely invisible and possibly visible sets. IF you only render the potentially visible set of mobile objects in Z order (as obtained from the BSP tree) you will not have anyhave eliminated the 99% of the advantage of cheating drivers while not significantly affect rendering performance
And, on any open source OS a skilled programmer can hack the X server, the DRI, the tcp/ip stack and anything else that might make it possible to cheat.
Cheaters will cheat. It is upto the developers to stop the cheating. Having transparent walls does you no good if the game doesn't draw things that you can not see. This is one reason to prefer BSP trees for HLHSR (Hidden Line & Hidden Surface Removal) instead of Z buffers.
StoneWolf
I'm not a gamer, I'm a developer - so I'm not their target market - but I think the see through drivers are cool and would've considered a purchase of their card to get the opportunity to play with them. So I think their decision stinks. However, I still may buy their hardware in the future - I think it's great for a company to actually listen to their target market. It simply doesn't happen enough anymore.
>If you want to see through walls, fine:
>It makes playing games lame, but thats your choice.
Same with spawn camping. It's a stupid tactic, and it isn't very fun to do, but it really makes the game suck for everyone else. Some people have too much time on their hands, why should the game suck for me?
room101 -- how much can you stand before they break you?
(they always break you eventually)
Is for game companies to get serious about cheat protection especially of the fps variety although I don't think drivers like these could be stopped other cheats, aimbots, skin hacks etc should be eliminated. Non standard clients should give notification that something is not right with the person who just connected at least.
However, where are the people who scream bloody murder everytime a corporation forces an individual to end a project it doesn't "like"?
Napster was a cheat (quit kidding yourselves), but everybody balks at the notion of shutting them down. The same goes for Gnutella (and clones), iMesh, et al.
I say if Asus wants to be known as a bunch of assholes and release a driver that helps cheaters than so be it, but I certainly don't advocate "forcing" them to stop.
Make up your mind.
The ratio of people using this card versus the number of servers is very tiny. I don't like cheaters, but I'll just practice more because when you 0wn a cheater and they whine, you get that warm fuzzy in your tummy. :)
=-=-=-=-=
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Oh bother.
You might be able to see through the walls or mountains, but this could give you more of a disadvantage than an advantage if the walls are totally transparent.
After all, you won't know if they're behind a wall or not.
Do you like German cars?
Many people who have TNT2 based cards with the Detonator 3 drivers are able to see through walls when they use Direct 3d in Counter-Strike. If nvidia can do it "accientally" I doubt much R&D went into ASUS developing this hack.
Mod my comments down. It'll be fun.
...is not whether cheating is OK or not, or whether these drivers make it easier for script kiddies to cheat. If someone wants to cheat in a multiplayer game, there are more than enough neatly boxed, plug-n-play cheats out there to keep them happy for a long time.
;)
I think the real problem with what Asus did is that they are a graphics hardware company. One of their biggest markets is the gaming community, a commumity that is almost unilaterally opposed to cheating in multiplayer games. To officially publicly release these "see-thru" drivers and encourage their users to cheat with them shows extreme disrespect for one of their largest customer bases. At the least, it was a very stupid marketing decision...but even more than that, it's insulting to us gamers who abhor cheaters.
If the drivers had been programmed by some third party or leaked accidentally, and not in an official company release, that would have been a different situation entirely. The problem is, Asus is encouraging gamers to cheat...and what's more, by their actions, it would seem that they believe that a large number of us gamers *are* cheaters...at least enough to make those drivers a worthwhile marketing tool. To me, that seems a little insulting...
DennyK
On another note, it's difficult to tell sometimes who is actually cheating© There are situations where one "bad" player can demonstrate a rash of good luck / good decisions and appear to be cheating, and there are instances where someone who seems to be "too good" just happens to be "too good"© It's hard to know if the person turned the corner and fragged you because he's good, or because he saw you there thru the wall©
Reducing the availability of such technologies is a good thing for the gaming community, if only in that it lowers the number of cheaters©
---
BLAM!
Meanwhile, those of us playing Counter-Strike are looking for a more realistic game, as far as such is legal. We're not looking to duke it out with the predator, either! (Thank god!)
All the driver does is basically make a surface transparent instead of drawing it. The drawing of the surfaces in the first place is handled by the driver, so it's not a problem with the game. There's not much you can do about it.
--
>So why - oh - why do these client machines know >so much? Here's why: When you have a multiplayer 3D game, it requires a considerable amount of data to be transferred over the network, particularly for something like a dialup connection. With, say, about 10% packet loss on these connections (and high latency), most multiplayer games would simply not work if the client had to request data at the exact moment it is needed. Most multiplayer game clients, for example, a QuakeWorld client, recieves information of unrevealed objects beforehand, so the client will be able to estimate their locations even with some packet loss. >In particular, why does the video card know so >much? Are the programmers that lazy that they >are trusting the video card to figure >everything out? Man, back in my day we had to? >render each pixel. The video card knew only >what we wanted it to know. No, the programmers are not "lazy;" most of the type of games concerned use maps that are available on the client side. It's simply not feasible for the server to dynamically stream environment information to a client, nor for the video card to continuously flush the scene information and redraw...
--
As for the effects on multiplayer gaming, I actually think they could be positive. If you play games with people you know and trust, you don't have to worry about cheating: people play for the fun of it, and cheating would only spoil that. People who do cheat are unlikely to develop those kinds of relationships, since their opponents will notice. And if you play at LAN parties, you can make sure people don't cheat. So, it seems to me that the possibility of having modified drivers really just encourages people to be more social.
Berk Watkins
Code Master of the Gameshark Code Creators' Club used that exact same arguement when he posted cheat codes for Phantasy Star Online, and those codes ultimately wrecked the distribution of special weapons and allowed script kiddies to kill their own teammates. People stopped playing the game over this and it thrashed the servers that Sega had so thoughfully provided the players of the game free of charge.
Thankfully, the cheats have gone on to other things since the fun has gone out of the game for them. Alas, we lost a lot of good players in the PSO community thanks to those codes corrupting 100s of hours worth of save data per character among other problems.
Online gaming can be construed as a community, and when the understood rules of that community are violated it isn't just the cheater who is deprived of a good gaming expereince, but the entire community as well. These drivers are not an isolated incident, not just one person has them.
Berk Watkins
As if people haven't hacked their own drivers or made proxies to do this already. If Asus had stuck it out so that everyone could have this then developers would have been forced to write decent code that doesn't send redundant information to the clients and stopped all cheating. As it is, it just means that the people that want to cheat will be able to and the developers get to sit on their hands and do nothing. Good for developers, bad for players.
In the long line of cheats that have ruined games, this Asus see-through is pretty much a drop in the bucket. Online gaming is inately unfair to begin with, differences in computer speed or connection latency can easily overwhelm the skills of a player. It irritates me only slightly less that the reason I just got sniped in the head was not due to any cheating, but rather that my opponent had a much lower ping time. Sucks either way.
What also makes many of these cheats so ridiculous is that a proper client/server implementation would have prevented them in the first place. Game designers shove way too much of the game onto the client side, a proper architecture shouldn't allow the client to do anything the user can't do himself. Granted, this isn't perfect; the client side bots ruined Quake despite a near ideal architecture. But in the online world companies have it in their power to arbitrarly alter the program binaries and the communication protocols periodically, this would go far in defeating client side cheats.
Put simply, there is really nothing to prevent a vigilant game company from producing an online game that is pretty close to cheat free. It seems like this would be a good way to get an edge over the competition, it might be worth the energy to implement
Of course, if you really don't want to deal with cheaters, just play an unpopular game. It's the popular ones that get cracked the fastest.
People are going to break into your house, why bother locking the doors?
People are going to kill, so why not freely sell guns?
People are going to reverse engineer thingies, so why bother about a DMCA?
Because some things are just wrong. What's the big deal with saying that out loud? Cheating is well.... cheating and it's wrong. period. sjeez.
Well, looks like Asus buckled under the pressure. It IS too late; I'm sure the drivers are available all over the internet now.
I think, if someone wants to cheat at a video game, that's their choice. It's not that big of a deal. If they can't play the game the right way, let 'em cheat. Who cares?
As far as online play, if you don't want to play with cheaters, then don't! Play with people you know and trust.
It's inevitable that people are going to cheat, whether it's games or otherwise. Asus taking down the drivers isn't going to change that.
I KNOW I'm right. And if I'm not, I'm STILL right...