MP Cheating

[KukY]

On my channel, I discussed cheating with j0shdrunk0nwar. Well, we also discussed it day before
This time, I had a cheating expirience. I know that I'm not the best player, and that there are people better then me, but this was cheating.
So, I was encouraged to find out how cheaters cheat.

So I did.
I did the changes needed to the code, Josh hosted a game so I can test.
I used the cheat code. It worked. In a few minutes I had this built up in front of my base:

Ofcourse, at that tech level, it was able to destroy any force without bigger problems.
That LasSat was also devastating:

It made a pretty big hole in that base

I am not suprised by the cheating being possible, but by the way it can be done.
It is an incredibly simple [deleted].
I won't define how exactly it is done, so anyone can cheat, but [deleted]

I also found about a pretty cool cheat code, which is not documented anywhere and allows this:

Yay, truck rush!
I'll add it to Wiki and Guide soon.

So, here ends my post about cheats.

[m1ndgames]

\edit: no moar cheat talk

[KukY]

btw.: cheats work always in debug mode, dont they?

Yes, but never in MP.

[3drts]

If you are going to cheat, why not go all out, and give yourself like 20 las sats....
Thats one firing every 15 seconds....

*wishes for the old days when you could exploit a bug and build multiple laser sats*

[KukY]

If you are going to cheat, why not go all out, and give yourself like 20 las sats....

I have no intentions of cheating, just did it to see how it is done.

*wishes for the old days when you could exploit a bug and build multiple laser sats*

*remembers all of his mods*
http://addons.wz2100.net/mod/limits

[m1ndgames]

\edit2:

Preventing Uneducated Memory Hacking
A Google search revealed a very basic and effective obfuscation method, suggested by Michael Tartre. It involves obfuscating ints as Strings. An example demonstrates this:

Code: Select all

public static function obfuscateInt (value :int) :String
{
    return Math.round(Math.random()*1000) + ";" + value;
}
public static function deobfuscateInt (value :String) :int
{
    if (value == null) {
        return 0;
    }
    return int(value.split(";")[1]);
}

You can use get/set methods to make this transparent to your program:

Code: Select all

protected var _highScoreObfuscated :String;
 
public function get highScore () :int
{
    return deobfuscateInt(_highScoreObfuscated);
}
public function set highScore (value :int) :void
{
    _highScoreObfuscated = obfuscateInt(value);
}

Thus your high score is stored as an obfuscated String that is very difficult for casual cheaters to detect, but at the same time obfuscation is transparent to your game so it can continue to function.

from here

[EvilGuru]

Obfuscation of important data chunks will not help prevent cheating. Yes, it will prevent people from debugging the program, finding where in memory the current players power is stored, and patching it, but it will do nothing to stop people from downloading the source and rolling their own executables. (That and five minutes in a debugger with a hardware break point or two will get me the algorithm used to twiddle the bits.)

The very nature of the game means that there is absolutely nothing we can do about this. Future versions of Warzone -- with more reliable network code -- may be able to compare what a player is claiming to be doing with what we believe they can do. Unfortunately such an approach is not feasible with the current code -- we firstly lack enough information about foreign players to draw such conclusions and when we do have such data it is simply not reliable enough.

Now, our situation is not totally unique, cheating is a big problem for many games. This is why many opt for third party applications (PunkBuster I believe is/was one) to monitor the game as opposed to patching the game itself. While I have no doubt that these services deal with the vast majority of cheaters they are no silver-bullet and usually can be bypassed with minimal effort (think BluePill type hypervisor attacks).

This is why I unequivocally prefer the detection of cheaters through passive observation. You know when someone is cheating. Your friends know when someone is cheating. With reliable enough netcode Warzone can warn that a player may be cheating.

Polemically yours, Freddie.

[NoQ]

I wonder if we can create some official cheater list. This will help fighting cheaters who don't visit the forum too often.

[JDW]

I wonder if we can create some official cheater list. This will help fighting cheaters who don't visit the forum too often.

I was thinking of the same thing, but names are easily changed, and so are rankings, as i have been informed.

EDIT: Someone in the game lobby mentioned that he keeps a note of the IP addresses of cheaters and feeds them to the firewall. Now, would a list of these IP addresses be worth making available to everyone?

[Zarel]

Sigh. We know cheating is easy. There are things we can do to make it more difficult, but many of those require a lot of work modifying the netcode.

Our advice is simple:

1. Don't cheat.
2. Play on #warzone2100-games, with others who don't cheat.

[WarTux]

+1 for Zarel's statement above.

Truck rush cheat? AWESOME! It works in single-player skirmish and campaign with an unmodified copy of Warzone, right?

[JDW]

Truck rush cheat? AWESOME! It works in single-player skirmish and campaign with an unmodified copy of Warzone, right?

It's actually a "Clone Wars" cheat, where the selected units are multiplied when you enter the cheat code. That's all I know.

EDIT: Cheats, to me, sound fun for a while, but playing a game with cheats enabled makes the game so booooring, less challenging. :yawn:

[m1ndgames]

hm, i think a ip banlist wont help us, many users are connected thru dial-up and dsl connections and change their ip on every login.

Obfuscation of important data chunks will not help prevent cheating. Yes, it will prevent people from debugging the program, finding where in memory the current players power is stored, and patching it, but it will do nothing to stop people from downloading the source and rolling their own executables. (That and five minutes in a debugger with a hardware break point or two will get me the algorithm used to twiddle the bits.)

u're right, but i hope that the usual cheater cant do it, so why dont make things a little bit harder?

[bravoleaderx]

all here i have a clan up with no cheaters so go to the droid killing clan post anyone can join