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Doom 3 Beta Patch to Address Config File Cheating
Jason Shoulders writes "There's a discussion at Quake3World about an upcoming change in the first Doom 3 patch. Specifically, Id Software's Robert Duffy has updated his .plan file and mentions making 'r_skipNewAmbient, r_skipSpecular, r_skipBump, and r_shadows cheat protected'. This will force players to use features such as bump mapping and shadows. What settings gray the line between tweaking and cheating?"
Also on the subject of shaddows, many monitors have a contrast setting that can go pretty damn high. What's to stop me from making my monitor so bright that I won't have shaddows wheather they are on or not in game?
Also once the Linux version is out there will be nothing to stop us cranking up the gamma by running something like xgamma -gamma 1.7 (and I presume there is an equivalent in Windows) before we launch the game.
"Madness is something rare in individuals - but in groups, parties, peoples, ages it is the rule." -- Nietzsche
The multi-player in doom3 sucks; they are leaving that up to modders.
That is exactly what I thought, and it seems like this is only going to make it more difficult for that all so important "it can carry our mulitplayer capabilities" mod community to actually mod it.
I wonder though, are adding cheats and mods to single plyer games some day going to be sited as violating the DMCA? It could be argued that cheats make game easier, lead to quicker completion and thus lower sales (not that I am saying it is, but I believe nintendo once used an argument similar to this in one of their long ago battles with cheat devices like the game genie)
Maybe what they should do, is add a little feature that forces the client to provide the server with a copy of their config file; if the host wants to block people messing with the lighting effects, they could turn on a filter that could block the would be sort-of-cheaters or choose to ignore them if they don't care?
On Wall Street they say "buy low, sell high" On the pad we say, "buy high, sell high" Isn't that somehow better?
Most of the options for scripting commands and binding controls should all be disabled during multiplayer. Just like they should be disabled in counterstrike. You should not be able to zoom in, fire, jump and switch weapons with one key press. The "feature" of scriptability of commands and consoles in games has been one of the biggest problems with games lately.
Seen it with Counter Strike players as well. They play the game 640x480 (on insanely powerful hardware), with gamma and digital vibrance all the way up, huge FOVs, and turning off absolutely everything they can; i've even seen a few that turned off the map textures.
Lunacy. But still, as long as the client has to render the scene, there always be "cheats" like those to be used.
Funny... They're making graphical stuff mandatory, thus screwing over to a degree the scaleability of the game.
Back when I had a REALLY lame machine and I played Unreal Tournament, I had a lot of graphical stuff off, including dynamic lighting. Game ran well. Problem was, when I went to play online, it forced the options on, making the game unplayable.