Re: Game idea....

[Ingo Ruhnke <grumbel@gmx.de>]

Lutz Sammer <johns98@gmx.net> writes:

> Rick Genter wrote:
>> The solution I've chosen to use in AT '41 is for the client to checksum its
>> plugin and ask the server to verify the checksum; if the checksums don't
>> match, the server downloads the plugin to the client. In this way everyone
>> is guaranteed to be playing the same game.
>>
>> Now, if the server is running a plugin that gives one particular player an
>> advantage, well, people just won't connect to that server for very long :-).
> 
> This also didn't work, checksums+downloads+peeks didn't help.
> If someone want to cheat with free/open source, I know now way to stop him.

Two posible solution I can imagine.

First, if the cheat is something like look ahead things, like highlight
the other player or making an invisible player visible, this could be
solved by the server sending bogus data. For example the server could
send simply some invisible players to the client which are not real,
only there to irritate the cheater, so the cheated client would render 
them visual and the cheater would shoot on them, not knowing that they 
are not real and unkillable. The other non cheated clients would 
simply render them invisible and the player's would not notice
them. The same could be done in all situations where the normal player 
wouldn't see the enemy and only the cheater could see them (for
example in dark rooms or when the player is hidden behind some wall or 
so).

Second, the player could need a pgp key or something similar to log
into the server. The server would send some data, the client would
sign it, the server would check the sign, if its ok he would let the
player look in, if it is the key from a known cheater the server would 
refuse him. From time to time the players could sign the keys from the 
other players which they feld have played without cheats and which was
fun to play with. So the non cheating players would get a more trusted 
key, while the other cheating players would not get there keys be
trusted and will posible marked as cheaters on the server side. Of
course they can simply generate a new key, but that key will be not
thrusted and they have to start new with an untrusted key. So if
cheating becomes a problem special areas of the game could locked and
only people with a thrusted key can log into the area.

The solution with releasing the game only in binary form or parts of
the game binary only, is possible the worst solution. It won't make
cheating impossible, it would simply make the cheating a little more
harder. An if someone discovers how to cheat, he could simply put a
patch on the web to cheat the client.

Bye

  Ingo
-- 
                                  http://dark.x.dtu.dk/~grumbel/pingus/ | 
Ingo Ruhnke <grumbel@gmx.de>             http://home.pages.de/~grumbel/ |
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