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Cheating Online Gamers

An anonymous submitter writes: "The NYT has an article - Do Cheaters Ever Prosper? - Just Ask Them. Hmmm.. Wireframe walls in Quake?"

4 of 485 comments (clear)

  1. Re:I hate cheaters! by PerlGuru · · Score: 5, Informative

    replace the www at the beginning of the link to the article with archive. this works for any story at NYT

  2. Wallhackers and the honesty of surveillance by ergo98 · · Score: 5, Informative

    I'm a fan of the game Urban Terror, a mod for Quake 3, and play online a fair bit (I usually run Visual Studio on one monitor, UT on the other: One good thing about being a rambo player in team survivor games is that I'm dead the majority of the time, and hence find it to actually be a remarkably productive time): While recently an anti-cheat tool, PunkBuster was added to Q3 (and it is constantly updated), there is still a serious issue of cheaters, the most common among them being wallhackers. What is a wallhacker? Well it's what was mentioned in the summary: Wire frame worlds, allowing cheating players to view other players whereever they are on the map, obviously giving a pretty clear advantage.

    So what does this have to do with the honesty of surveillance? Well in team survivor when you die you can ghost other players as they move around the map, and it tends to be that wallhackers are discovered quite quickly--Their behaviour and actions in the game do not correlate with the information that they should be visually receiving (from what we can see ghosting them). Usually this quickly leads to cries of cheater and a vote to kick the offending player.

  3. World + Models should be rendered in 1 pass. by Otis_INF · · Score: 4, Informative

    Now, the worlds in most FPS games are rendered first, then the models and other entities are rendered, using clipping /depth buffer info of the world. A lot of engines use 2 different render routines to do this: the world is mostly static and uses a different routine than the model renderer.

    THe result is, that when you 'patch' the world renderer so that it f.e. renders wireframes instead of solid polys (in OpenGL based engines this is 'not that hard', you just change the value passed to glBegin()) the models still are rendered solid, plus because most renderers for models rely on the depthbuffer filled during the world rendering, the models close to corners are fully rendered, since the depthbuffer is empty. So you can easily 'see' the models close to corners. If you also 'patch' the model renderer for not doing world clipping, you will see ALL models rendered in your window.

    This can't be done if the world + models use a single render routine, i.e.: model polygons and world polygons are packed together as THE set of polygons to render, then the single render routine will eat these single pack of polys to render. If you patch the routine for wireframing, you will see the models also wireframed, if you patch out the world clipping, you will get the complete world in your window, not what you want.

    I think in future game engines there will be a merger between world + model polygon sets, because worlds are more and more modfyable in game by the player, which in the end requires that the modifyable parts are 'models' too. However games based on the current crop of quake * engines will keep on suffering from this.

    --
    Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
  4. Re:I hate cheaters! by misterhaan · · Score: 4, Informative
    even better is to set up your computer to route requests that are trying to go to www.nytimes.com to the archive instead. the ip of archive.nytimes.com is 199.239.136.212

    windows users can find a file named hosts (no extension) under system32/drivers/etc and add the following line to automatically go to archive.nytimes.com instead of www.nytimes.com: 199.239.136.212 www.nytimes.com

    --

    track7.org has all kinds of interesting stuff!