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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.
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.
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!
The driver doesn't do anything that a half-competent programmer couldn't do in 5 minutes with the game code. If you're doing this commercially, why don't you just have those lazy programmers compile the engine in a "debug" mode with features like this?
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).
And when games use something like Punkbuster, they won't be able to play online. That's fine.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
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
You and me both, pal. Another heads up, those X-Ray glasses sold in comic books don't work either.
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"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
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.
The thing is, I COMPLETELY agree with your points about cheating. I simply fail to see their relevance. There are more important things than whether or not someone can frag you at will.
:). It won't help with past poorly written applications. However, if coders in the future know that players will see the code, they will implement stronger security measures. Many of the current 'security' features are workarounds for low-speed 'net connections. As these go away, it will become easier to implement stronger security - like sending info only when needed.
Freedom of speech means you can call me a jerk. I think that's a real downside to free speech. It makes me enjoy my day less. (wipes away a tear) In fact, to make my day more enjoyable, I think we should eliminate freedom of speech.
Which does what, exactly, to cut down on cheating?
Open soure makes it IMPOSSIBLE to cheat at a well-written application (theoretically
And insisting that everybody does it your way (open source software) is no freedom at all.
Oh, get real! If I insist that everyone wear broccoli and cheese on their head, how does that take away your freedom? If everyone (including you) agree that wearing cheese and broccoli is the cool thing to do, then where have I taken away your freedom? I'm not king; I can't force you to do my will If I could, do you think I'd be worried about such a small thing as code? The world would be my plaything! Lighten up.
To sum up:
Open source is not a means to an end; it is an end in itself. As with ANY choice, there are tradeoffs. One of them is that people who write games will have to work harder.
If the source were open, it would be impossible to get rid of every version with the see thru code in it.
If the source were open, the source would be open. Sort of like, if you have freedom of speech, you have freedom of speech. The issue is not "But if you have freedom of speech, some people will say bad things!"
With it closed at least ASUS knows can inform people exactly how it works and how to prevent it from being used.
Yes. Sort of like how Microsoft can tell you exactly how Windows works and can prevent criminals and terrorists from launching DOS's from Windows boxen.
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!
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.
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Camping is only really evil on single-player maps, where there are few resources and only a few spawnpoints.
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Trusted clients are technically impossible.
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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.
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.
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+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.
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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.
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!
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.
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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....
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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 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
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/
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
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.
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,"
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.
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.
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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.
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Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
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
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fat lenny's gonna lick your brain today.
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.
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.
Meanwhile, the Asus see-through driver is BAD.
Go figure.
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.
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?
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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.
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--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
"// this is the most hacked, evil, bastardized thing I've ever seen. kjb"
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
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.
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.
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>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...
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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.
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