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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?"
Doom 3 with all the special effects *on*? Darn. I'm going to need a new computer.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Simple: if everyone agrees to play by certain rules and you pretend to (but don't), you're cheating.
If everyone but you agrees to play by certain rules, and you still butt into the game, then you're an arsehole.
Simple as that. It's not "the game physics/programming/server allows me to so it's not cheating".
For example: if you get on a server where the players already on are playing "knife/melee only" AND they tell you so when you join. If you then go blow them to bits with a shotgun, you're just being a juvenile prick. If you don't want to play knife only, convince them to play the way you want. If the only way you can convince them is by being an arsehole, well then you really are one.
There could be implicit or unwritten rules - e.g. if you install a custom video driver that lets you see through walls AND the _default_ way people want to play is "no see through walls" then you're cheating.
There are so many ways of cheating that writing down the explicit rules against various cheats would make for a very thick and unwieldy rule book.
That said players themselves may quietly agree that certain nonexplicit rules can be broken/bent occasionally - after all playing a multiplayer game is a "people" thing. You are playing the game _with_ other people. If you want to be an arsehole/cheat you may find yourself playing alone.
Perhaps Hell is you playing alone for eternity - all the powers and toys you want but nobody around to play with you.
In Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, one can gain an advantage by turning off all foliage rendering. This means anyone hiding in long grass is easily spotted.
Some mods just turn foliage off for everybody. It's so boring that the problem of cheating in online games means the game has to run for the lowest common denominator.
It always seems like the developers get the flak for this too: yet what are they supposed to do? The whole situation is getting like that with cracks - the only way for developers to 'fix' things is by constant updates. Such a shame but I suppose that's the way of the world - a couple of idiots ruining everyone else's fun.
Why the heck is this troll? I was going to post something similar.
What I'm afraid of now, with the long delay of the Linux binaries, most Linux gamers will use Wine or get Windows somehow, and play the game, and when the binaries and boxed sets are released, a minority will buy or download, and it'll apprear as if there were no Linux gamers out there.
Id, where are our binaries?
The IT section color scheme sucks.
Making these options cheat protected in Multi-Player is the only way to make it fair. Especially the shadows, I've found it quite fun to be hiding in a shadow waiting for my roommate to grab the RL, only to be blown to bits by my other roommate running on a slow PC with shadows off because he just saw me sitting there, no problem. Also, IIRC, all of the lighting data is synched between the clients, so that everyone is seeing the same enviroment light wise. This is why they originally made the game peer to peer, and why it is only 4 player, because all that data takes up bandwidth. So it would be a waste to be sending all that and unifying the lights across clients if they could just turn them off. I think Doom 3 DM could have been fun, but they should have left the adreneline meter in, IMO. I've played standard, fast-paced DM to death. I was hoping the movement speed in Doom 3 DM would be a little slower, and to compensate there would be a lot of hiding and seeking in the shadows, but as it stands it is just a mindless fragfest, which isn't a bad thing, I just don't have fun with it anymore.
Reportedly the r_showtris, r_showLightCount, and r_showIntensity commands will also be inaccessible in multiplayer! Oh the humanity, the outrage, the primal struggle between innocent gamer and tyrranous developer!
Come off it. Cvars starting with "r_", mostly, concern renderer debugging. They're good for modders, and good for "oh neato wow" adventures in single player, but the very nature of the commands is to tell us more about a scene.
It wouldn't be fair if I was running around with bump-maps while someone else isn't. In most cases the difference between light levels is minimal, however this all depends on the bump maps. Some bump-maps can drastically reduce the amount of light visible on a surface, thereby giving the user with bump-maps enabled a handicap compared to the user with bump-maps disabled.
If you ever go to Quakecon and watch the Quake 3 players, any of them that get into the higher ranked matches make their game look, well, like ass and worse then Quake 1. Why? Well, they do things to increase contrast, change view angles to unreasonable amounts to practicially see 360, and ensure no eye candy might distract them. It's absolute lunacy that they feel they can't compete without making the game practicially flash ENEMY IS HERE.
This isn't about trying to prevent people from making the game run better. It's to prevent people from playing a completly different looking game in competitions.
Locking down graphics settings and views and such is all well and good.
However, if ID is relying on a shared library for their OpenGL implementation, then they're ultimately playing a losing game. There are a number of software projects that can swap out the OpenGL shared library at runtime and intercept all of the gl and wgl calls. With this functionality, you can make the graphics look however you want them to. Remove shadows, change fov, even change the viewpoint entirely!