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Rockstar condemns Max Payne 3 cheaters to play only against each other

arstechnica.com

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Re: Rockstar condemns Max Payne 3 cheaters to play only against each other

#81

Post by marvin »

walexander wrote: post #49

> we're a bit intrigued by the potential for the "Cheaters Pool" to evolve into a new mode of play that some players might actually prefer. Unregulated cheats and hacks led a friend and I to inadvertently invent a proto-minecraft over a decade ago. Around 1998, I was playing Dark Forces 2: Jedi Knight when I started to experience cheats and hacks. Someone taught me how to do it, which was incredibly easy (each weapon…

Hahaha...that's great, Jedi Knight was my first real exposure to programming. Great times trying to make more and more sophisticated modifications of the game files...either legitly (custom levels, mods) and to use in unsuspecting multiplayer games on MSN Gaming Zone. I remember some members of the modding community ending up becoming serious level designers or game developers.

You could actually make more complicated hacks by making deeper modifications to the weapon/force power scripts. The game had a simple checksum on the client-side script files where it did a rudimentary count on the number of statements (method argument: one statement, pair of parentheses: one statement), and if you had a count identical to the server file, the rest of the contents of your script didn't matter. So you could basically do a lot of stuff as long as you were careful to keep the script file statement count intact: Change the properties of the levels or surfaces, give yourself all sorts of superpowers, freeze or insta-kill opponents, teleport yourself or others, etc etc etc. The scripting language was somewhat C-like and carried over pretty easily to more traditional programming.

Re: Rockstar condemns Max Payne 3 cheaters to play only against each other

#82

Post by visionpol »

younata wrote: post #79
nohat wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I made blaster rifles that shot destructions, but never realized you could shoot map features. That sounds like the potential for interesting fps: remake the map as you go.

There's a TF2 mod that is kinda like that. You start the game, and have 2 minutes to create defenses. After that, it's a normal game of CTF. I forget what it's called though.

The game mode is called Fort Wars.

Source: http://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/FortWars

Re: Rockstar condemns Max Payne 3 cheaters to play only against each other

#83

Post by ricree »

feral wrote: post #63
jiggy2011 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The approach you have suggested is actually very similar to what is used in the THQ game "Supreme Commander". In this case they use a fairly P2P architecture and have clients exchange hashes of the game graph every so often and check that they match. The problem with this is that the game needs to be fully deterministic and you'd be surprised how many games use random numbers to help determine outcomes like damage et…

As gms7777 points out, for the RNG, surely you can just share seeds? Your comment about the differences in how CPUs deal with floats is very interesting. I found the following interesting comment, from a GPG employee, talking about how they take care to ensure their float math is deterministic: "I work at Gas Powered Games and i can tell you first hand that floating point math is deterministic. You just need the same…

Interesting link, feral.

For anyone else reading, I'd also suggest reading some of the followup posts such as this one: http://www.box2d.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1800&...

Re: Rockstar condemns Max Payne 3 cheaters to play only against each other

#84

Post by icebraining »

Retric wrote: post #80
icebraining wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That only prevents impossible actions, like teleporting or such, but that's already not feasible with most games, since the server double-checks those. The hard thing is knowing whether a certain sequence of actions was done by a player or by an All-Knowing cheat doing it for them.

Another option is to send false information to a client. So someone using a wall hack might see 7 people on the other side of the door and or players only get shown in their correct location when it's possible for someone to actually interact with them.

You can't really do that in many FPSs nowadays because you can interact with others even without seeing them; for example on Call of Duty 4 (2007), you can shoot and hit people through most opaque walls, and you get feedback from hits. So if the server were to put fake players behind walls or doors and a player just happened to shoot it, the game would provide false feedback.

Re: Rockstar condemns Max Payne 3 cheaters to play only against each other

#85

Post by jiggy2011 »

Hemospectrum wrote: post #64
jiggy2011 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason that the client may need to know about other players locations when they are not visible is sound. You can hear somebody moving on the other side of the wall to you and for the sound to be realistic it needs to be played at the correct volume level determined by distance etc. This isn't a big issue in some games , because you can just make peoples movements silent (of course there is still weapon sounds).…

Sound sources can be anonymized, though. If the source of a given sound is on the other side of a wall, the player can't see who it is, and the client doesn't need to know. I'd go so far as to not even notify the client about sounds that are too quiet and far away for the player to be able to hear in the first place. Calculating echoes on the server and having the client treat them as separate "original" sound source…

Even if you don't know who it is, knowing that someone is around the other side of the wall is a huge advantage in an FPS game. Also players tend to have their teammates displayed on a map, so the cheat program could take this into account and mark as friend or foe.

Pushing this info to the client early also allows the program to make sure all the required assets are loaded into memory before it has to be rendered.

You could stream sound from the server, but latency might be an issue.

Re: Rockstar condemns Max Payne 3 cheaters to play only against each other

#86

Post by icebraining »

nohat wrote: post #73
walexander wrote: post #49

> we're a bit intrigued by the potential for the "Cheaters Pool" to evolve into a new mode of play that some players might actually prefer. Unregulated cheats and hacks led a friend and I to inadvertently invent a proto-minecraft over a decade ago. Around 1998, I was playing Dark Forces 2: Jedi Knight when I started to experience cheats and hacks. Someone taught me how to do it, which was incredibly easy (each weapon…

I made blaster rifles that shot destructions, but never realized you could shoot map features. That sounds like the potential for interesting fps: remake the map as you go.

The Cube 2 FPS is designed exactly for that: real-time in-game map editing. It's also FOSS and multi-platform.

http://sauerbraten.org/

Re: Rockstar condemns Max Payne 3 cheaters to play only against each other

#87

Post by [deleted] »

jamesaguilar wrote: post #68
jiggy2011 wrote: post #14

I remember the old days of Counterstrike and the infamous "myg0t" clan who would enter CS servers and use things like wallhacks and aimbots as well as excessive deliberate teamkilling. After they had got themselves banned from just about every server out there they launched their own "anything goes" server which could be actually be a fun experience to play on. Another interesting thing I remember from the CS days wa…

Basically, this is why automatic matchmaking such as what we find in CS:GO is better than a server browser.

[deleted]

Re: Rockstar condemns Max Payne 3 cheaters to play only against each other

#88

Post by literalusername »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #54

I've always wondered if we had an Olympics type sporting event where 'anything goes' would be sport worth watching. My experience has been in two online games, one an Aces game where you flew against WWII planes and cheaters would make their planes make impossible turns or suddenly have 3000' of altitude etc. Made it unplayable. And in World of Warcraft where a sort of soft-core cheating or 'twinking' was making play…

I'd love to see sports leagues that allow not just performance-enhancing drugs, but also prosthetic enhancements of any kind. The athlete of tomorrow is a cyborg.

Such a league would appear unplayable or non-fun to those players who abide by the traditional rule-set. So it's important to segregate players by skill-range. I wouldn't have much fun trying to play football against cyborgs, but I'd love to watch them compete against each other.

Pro sports leagues are run by technophobes who don't even want to run lasers down the field to augment the referees' abilities, so we won't see cyborg sports any time soon. But online games are hardly run by technophobes, so we ought to see more and more of this insightful approach.

All games should accept that players choose their own level of rule conformance. Place players in competitions based on their skill level, and and the games will be playable and fun for everyone.

Re: Rockstar condemns Max Payne 3 cheaters to play only against each other

#89

Post by X-Istence »

biot wrote: post #74
X-Istence wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At some point you have to trust the client. Invincibility cheats can be as simple as the client updating its position the moment it knows there is a projectile traveling towards it, or the moment another player is turned to face them they duck. For Counter Strike: Source for example the server sends the location, and way that a user is pointing to the client. With some calculations you can then draw a line from the o…

> Keeping everything and all variables on the server is impossible [...] > Kinda like RDP for games. Are you familiar with OnLive? http://www.onlive.com/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnLive

Yes, and I have used it, and the user experience for fast/twitchy games is absolutely shit.

Re: Rockstar condemns Max Payne 3 cheaters to play only against each other

#90

Post by icebraining »

simba-hiiipower wrote: post #55

honestly don't have much value to add here (not really much of a gamer) and from reading other comments, clearly there are some points of contention around the issue, but my takeaway from the post.. that sounds awesome. again, not a big gamer here, but i think that sounds like a totally reasonable way for the studio to minimize the negative impact of cheating on the majority of players who don’t, and while keeping th…

In my experience playing FPSs online (mostly Call of Duty 1/2/4), those assumptions are not quite true. For one, plenty of cheaters are not really very good players; they're not complete noobs, but they're often average players or below. Some are, but I don't think it's correlated with it.

And for many, having to compete with other cheaters would be boring and annoying, since for them the main satisfaction is 1) making ridiculously large scores compared to others and 2) watching others complain and leave.

An indication that this wouldn't be attractive to them is the fact that there are many Punkbuster¹-free servers out there, yet cheaters still spend time looking for cheats that can evade it.

¹ Anti-cheating system.

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