[T:V] The answer to cheats

( ignore this part if you want )

Here's the deal

i know they're doing tons of new demo features, not only because we want them and they're practical, but because the ability to have good demos and good demo options makes the game more marketable post-release.

They could show a demo, or an edited series of demos from diff POV's of a previous match and couple it with an overlayed shoutcast as an advertisement for the shoutcasting of upcoming matches, coupled with real-time serverside demos or in-game observer-based tribesTV so that people who dont have the game can log into irc, turn on winamp, loadup media player and experience intense gaming.

Adding in really good demo features is a way for Sierra to get completely free marketing and promotion from the community in exchange for giving us the features we wanted anyway.


That being said, while you guys at Irrational are over there adding things in, here's something else that you can boast about post-release; a cheat free game.

Here's how it will work - stop ignoring

Built into the demo program, have it take screenshots at the start of the game and randomly throughout the game and store them in an inaccessable file, OR store them serverside, OR store them in the master server located at Sierra or wherever. The problem with this is of course memory storage, but hopefully it will be worth it with compressed files, and a recycle life of 48 hours.

The only way for people to still cheat would be for them to write a program that turns off the cheats whenever the line of code is sent that takes the screenshot. To counter this we'd use the autoupdater, and have it upload to users a new encrypted line of code that activates the random screenshot delivery system. That way the code could never be hacked within the amount of time between updates and a workaround could never be produced.

edit: damnit, i edited out one friggin extra period and i did it too late... sigh

good idea but i would think the memory strorage would become a problem, just say it would take maybe between 20-50 screens per game?
probly more for it to be really affective, even in a 48hr time ALOT of map cycles around the world take place in 48 hours.

maybe im not grasping the idea?

however if done well it would be affective i would think.
a cheat free online game, dont make me cream my pants.

i was thinking 3-4 SS's a game, you really dont need anymore than 3 - start, middle somewhere, near the end.

edit: if you meant everyone in the match added up... lets say 11v11 teams, 22 ppl, at least 2 SS's each. 44 shots?

If it were stored on the local server, they could have the option of only turning it on for matches, and otherwise running things like andrew's anti-cheats for pubs. That would be more reasonable, especially considering compressed data and pics that are very low quality.

Come to think of it there's really not much reason it can't be stored on the local client machine. It would take quite a while to edit 2 screenshots that perfectly in 48 hours, AFTER you've hacked the encryption which gets auto-updated.

yeh thats what i thought, in a game of 20 players thats 60 SS. but alot of time and people would needed to check these, it would have to be accessable by the admins of the server, and only checked if someone was suspected, and maybe a few random spot checks to keep people on their toes.

wouldnt this lag/freeze people,or the LQ ss wont?

Wouldn't work for several reasons:

1) This would require someone at Sierra (or where ever the screenshots are sent to) to be tuned 24 hours a day reviewing pics for hours to sort out that 1% of people that use cheats. You could try to automate it to recognize a 50 foot flag for example, but that has a chance of mixing it up with a tower or w/e and kick/ban people for no reason.

2) Just from a screenshot you can't tell if someone uses a cheat, at least not always. Sure, you can tell if someone uses perm IFF's (that would require manual checking though), but there is no way to tell if someone's using an autoaim by simply taking 2 screenshots.

3) Anyone who is a bit experienced in programming could make an .exe hack that would disable graphical cheats just for the moment the screenshot is being sent to the server.

Random screenshots is a very bad thing to put in the game, unless you could somehow prevent it from freezing your pc for a sec while it did it. 2 seconds of being frozen up and not moving could mean the difference between a cap and no cap, a return and no return, a win and a loss, etc etc. Imagine a capper coming home, the screenshot thing being activated, him losing control for 2 seconds, then unfreezing in a canyon near the flag stand with no life (when he would have capped otherwise). Imagine a LD after just killing a capper about to make a routine return, freezing up, having a mf capper pick it up, and come cap? These aren't even far fetched scenarios, these things would almost assuredly happen on a consistant basis with random screenshots.

Random SS's are only doable if they don't effect the client at all, if they lag or freeze up the client in any shape or form they aren't worth putting in.

zp, t2 screenshots only lag you because of the png compression. a single t1 sshot doesnt pause too badly.

You cant prevent cheating, you can only discourage it and make it hard to do.

Example: Flags spawn underground in Fstat servers, cheaters see flags everywhere including the real one.
Ex2: Zadmin spawns playermodels underground and moves them, they have player names from the server. Cheaters see these "fake" players with their playerfinder. Zadmin was also adapted to do the underground flags (I think).

Niether of these will stop someone from DLing happymod and loading it, it would make it more of a hurt than a help to use though. Thats where it is successful.

this has already bee thought of for other games.
doesnt work too well, and they find ways around the ss

In Legends we have an option for jpeg screenshots, they take at about 6-7 quality. On my system (pretty middle of the road nowadays) there is no lag when you take one shot, and on a slower system its nothing over 0.2 seconds or so, appearing to be a minor network hitch. Therefore it could be done without lagging peoples PC's too badly

This sounds a lot like my idea for a screenshot script for T1, that would take screenshots at timed intervals when recording a demo. I am not sure totally on the uploading the screenshots to server part. I think that would have to be an exe file, and getting people to download it voluntarily would be highly doubtful. I dont think the dev team will add a upload to server feature because then you get into privacy rights, and I would assume there would be other security risk when implementing this feature. Let alone there would be a shit load of extra code they would have to write for all the functions.

This idea is fucking stupid. Some moron tried to come up with this for T2. It doesn't work for several reasons... One, it lags people's computers (long or short, it shouldn't happen). Two, it can easily be "got around", because this isn't information being sent to the client... it's the client taking a screenshot on the client's side. Three, bandwidth. Ther are a ton of reasons this won't work... these are just some (and some were already mentioned).

Moker said:

this has already bee thought of for other games.
doesnt work too well, and they find ways around the ss

Click to expand...

Punkbuster works great... for sof2, it busted a lot of people who thought they were getting away with it with random screenshots.
And I believe every server stores it's own screenshots, so it wouldn't overwhelm one central location, like Sierra.

Validuz said:

This idea is fucking stupid. Some moron tried to come up with this for T2. It doesn't work for several reasons... One, it lags people's computers (long or short, it shouldn't happen). Two, it can easily be "got around", because this isn't information being sent to the client... it's the client taking a screenshot on the client's side. Three, bandwidth. Ther are a ton of reasons this won't work... these are just some (and some were already mentioned).

Click to expand...

By far the best answer!!



I just love it when cheaters complain about other cheaters.

The thing is this, if the punkbuster did take screenshots, its from the server perspective as far as im aware> its not client side. So its still totally subjective to what the players/server admin thinks the player is doing. Only client side SS that show model replacements, terrain hacks, wall hacks, whatever type of hacks, is the only way to truely catch them. I hate to say it that way, but its the truth.

-posr-

Clan IBA

You will never get the level of success of such a screenshot script that you want. I remember in early T2 (when I played) people would turn off the CRC checks on the server because it would "lag" them. Of course you can see the problems that this caused, anyone who could model or skin was basicly alowed to do whatever they wanted w/o needing to bypass the CRC check. I would hope the more popular servers would keep this option on, but there will be those that wont. TWL could make it a rule, but people will still ignore it and leave it off. The same would hold true for this screenshot deal, if it was an option (I would hope it would be) servers would disable it.

IMO anything to make cheating a complete pain in the ass (see my first post) is the best way to go.

How about random file integrity checks throughout the game while playing?

thats what CRC checking was...and people claimed it lagged them, plus it was hacked anyway.