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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.
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.
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 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
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!
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
> 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.
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
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.
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
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,"
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
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!
Meanwhile, the Asus see-through driver is BAD.
Go figure.
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.
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
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