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Sentient AI
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Dark Side of the Moon
May 2000
time: 05:12
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As some of you know, I have been researching a program to stop cheat'o'matic. For those of you who have never heard of it, It was a program written about half a decade ago meant for individuals to cheat in shoot 'em up games. There is also on the net the codes that can be used to cheat your gold in Civ II MPG. This is all fairly common knowledge and can easily be caught saving every turn. Or can it?
The program can change any variable you can get the hex address for. This makes it possible to create/remove city improvments. Get 1-5 new techs every turn, resurrect dead units or settlers who turned into cities, change barbs to your units, modify any cities amount of food and/or shields. The problem here is not only can someone beef themselves up, but they can also set someone else up. Someone else can give your cities granaries, save it, and turn it in as you cheated when they were the ones who did it. There is no way to check the IP traffic to determine who in the game is cheating. So the solution then is just duels, right? Wrong.
Another, probably more common cheat involves those lucky people with two computers. They can load the game on the second computer and reveal the entire map. Civ passwords can be erased easily, and then not only do they know where you are, they know where every hut is. How do you catch this? You can't.
All the bugs and glitches in the game are minor things compared to these two forms of cheating. I honestly do not know what can be done about it. It is possible to write a program that monitors values for wild changes, but not to catch a subtle cheater. There is no way to catch a two computer user. Should there be a program that will show the map so everyone gets that knowledge? Should there be a limit on the number of huts you can open and in what year you can start war? Personally, I believe these are serious concerns and something needs to be done. Now SMAC locks up if you try to cheat with anything but money, and even then it locks half the time. Will Civ3 be cheat proof? I hope they spend the time to do so, but what does everyone reccommend we do now to curb/stop the cheating and make GameLeague as fun as it should be?
Sentient AI
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Wulf
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>All of this cheating can be eliminated by going from the peer-peer connection model of Civ-TOT to the client-server connection model of FreeCiv.
Another way of eliminating cheating is an integrity check in a peer-to-peer system. Any anomaly can be detected and players informed.
One game which has such a system is Myth. It only transfered orders, ie "move unit there", "attack that unit". The result was then calculated on all peers and a checksum calculated. If checksums mismatched, you got an "out-of-synch" error. It had no good provision for detecting WHO had cheated (or were using a faulty plugin), but it was a good example of checking game integrity.
The system was despite this open to some cheats, not related to hexediting, but to loopholes in the system. For instance, the validity of a target was calculated when an attack was started, not at impact. Using this loophole it was possible to start an attack against empty space close to your own units and then tell a unit to attack an enemy unit far away. The attack would then impact with the far away unit. Hilarious, at least for those of us who never confronted the cheat in a competetive game. The makers of the game (Bungie) closed that loophole in a patch.
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08-06-2000 10:26
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