DISALLOWING THE USE OF OTHER PROGRAMS

author=Mr_Detective

author=Vegeta 's wife
poorly designed games have a lot of people sucking on them, and thus lots of people will hack.

Based on that logic, then every game, especially competitive games, in the world sucks because they all have people hacking. Just because we have pathetic players hack doesn't make a game bad. If a game is poorly designed, leave it and play something else. If a player sucks at a game, try to get better by practicing. There is no point in wasting time hacking and ruining other people who are having fun. :)

I have seen plenty of hackers in FPS games, and most are excellent, well designed games. I am sorry to know what happened to you in MS, but I understand how the admins thought you were hacking. The excuse "I hate this game because it sucks in my opinion, which I think is fact so I hack it" that some people use is really dumb. :|

"Cheating" style hacking is most often done not because the game sucks, but because the opponent is unfairly better. In a single-player game, these two issues are actually the same thing, but in a multi-player game, they're totally different.

author=JosephSeraph
FFVI sucks.

Heh, that's a totally different type of hacking - that's game design.

Actually, when you think about it, cheating is a type of game design too. You're making a new game that you think is either more fun, fun in a different way, or just a nice change of pace from the original. In that sense we should encourage cheating, at least in single-player games.

The benefit-to-cost ratio here is monstrously skewed

author=Mr_Detective
I have seen plenty of hackers in FPS games, and most are excellent, well designed games. I am sorry to know what happened to you in MS, but I understand how the admins thought you were hacking. The excuse "I hate this game because it sucks in my opinion, which I think is fact so I hack it" that some people use is really dumb. :|

FPS shooters are probably a different story. In general, it's like an equation
higher stress (loss penalties/etc) + lower rewards + greater flaws to balance (anything that takes more effort to do than it pays) = greater incentive to cheat. Even with only one or two of these (no flaws to balance), if one of these is high enough, the condition still exists.

I maintain that MS sucks balls. LaTale is better in virtually every way concerning design, Maple is populated by 10-14 year olds who go around saying stupid stuff to each other like "STFU" or "GTFO" all day, the drops are broken (seriously, how hard would it be to internally add gold? All the looters in-game would go away and there'd be less rage), the "pro" players write long guides telling people how not to have fun, and if you build the character even slightly off your damage turns to crap and you have to grind horribly.



Yes, there are good games where people still hack. But the hack rate rises in direct correlation to how much an ass the programmer is to their clients. If the system is rigged ("random items" that fail more often than they succeed, often breaking items in the process), people will try to cheat, this is human nature. Mr. UpsideDown DrPhil needs to get a grip, and make the game more player-friendly, not more cheatproof.

When your house gets broken into, you can respond by getting the latest tech security system. And forgetting your own password, effectively creating a situation where you are shut outside, or thoroughly embarrass yourself by getting the police to help you break into your own house. Or you can say screw it, and move into a shabby hut in a forest where nobody cares what you have. When a video game gets hacked you can go penalize the hackers (this is exactly what MS did in their new patches, and all it succeeded in doing was screwing over non-hackers). Or... you can improve the game.

k, you can't tho

Phylomortis 2 had an anti-cheat system that would kick you to the title screen if you were peculiarly overleveled or gave yourself money or whatever.

It's possible to do, but it's also just as easy to get around.

author=FlyingJester
Here's what you do to be sure no one hacks your game:

Write the engine yourself. And write parts of it in different programming languages. Very different languages, that use different technology in their compilers, like C in Visual C and DarkBasic and Mercury transcompiled to compiled to Java compiled by the MingW/GCC. You'll probably want more languages involved than just three. And write several complex functions in assembly. Better if you use unusual instructions, like making use of SSE2 and MMX for things they aren't really for, in a way that most compilers would never do. Then embed a scripting language, a weird one. Or two, that's better. Have your engine use JavaScript and Python together, for example, or Pawn and GameMonkey. And then have half the scripts be embedded in an encrypted dynamic library, with the key taken from some mathematical translation of some property of the files themselves, like their MD5s or something. And use some arcane encryption, like Camilla.

Then, use a hex editor on some of the final binaries (obviously not the MD5'ed ones) and change portions of the PE header to cause misdirection by strict compliance, but still work under windows (that will throw off some debuggers and memory walkers). Same with the comments section.

Then, it will take a decent amount of work to crack into your game. Still not as much work as you put into obfuscating it, but more than normal.

heh i'm sure the guy with an avatar of an upsidedown dr.phil can handle that

Someone here should totally program an RPG in one of these.

Even from what I understand of C++ (not much), Lolcode makes sense to me.



This made me laugh.