Re: Cheating in OS games?

[Gregor Mückl <GregorMueckl@gmx.de>]

Am Montag, 15. Dezember 2003 12:51 schrieben Sie:
> On Mon, 15 Dec 2003 madsdyd@challenge.dk wrote:
> >On Mon, 15 Dec 2003, Jan Ekholm wrote:
> >> IMHO developers should focus on the game, leaving all these tuning
> >> issues for later. It's far too easy to focus on totally irrelevant
> >> things when there is a game to get done. Nobody will care if your game
> >> has a nice effect or something else if there is no game to begin with.
> >>
> >> I'd actually consider it a measurement of success that someone would
> >> bother to create a cheat for something I had done. That would mean that
> >> the game is more or less mainstream and actually has an audience,
> >> something very few OS games actually has.
> >>
> >> Comments and/or flames?
> >
> >OK, I'll bite.
> >
> >The moment people starts cheating in your fancy game, the game goes dead.
>
> I'll counterbite. :)
>
> The moment you start considering adding extra complex bloat that adds
> basically nothing but draws tremendous amounts of developer time, the game
> goes dead.
>

How much developer time this takes is actually a matter of how you do it. If 
it takes too long, the project is doomed anyway.  Usually, anti-cheating 
measures are part of the networking code, which should be fairly contained 
and therefore easy to replace or alter. So if implementing some anticheat 
measures takes too long the source code wasn't modularized enough beforehand.

So if the team actually wasted time with that it's likely that they wouldn't 
have finished the game at all. Or isn't it?

> >IMHO, you need to at least _consider_ cheating, and understand what
> >you need to do to prevent, very early on, or your design will have a hard
> >time fixing the problems. So, if people start cheating, you can change
> >your program to fix as much as possible.
>
> This I can agree with, you can add an empty method call to a antiCheat()
> method and fill it in later when the game has reached 1.0 and is released.

If it only were that easy! :-)

I think that making something cheat-proof is rather a running than a single 
step. You should always keep in mind while writing your game code and ask 
yourself: Is it safe to send this data? How much does the game rely on this 
information? Is it a bad thing if it gets modified on the way? Finding 
answers to this questions is relatively easy while you are coding on the 
protocol and is not much extra effort in my oppinion.

Regards,
Gregor