More Carmack on Cheating

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A bit more on the whole cheating issue, the guys on /. carried a story today about the earlier .plan update from John Carmack on cheating with the Quake1 source release. Well Carmack has a quick comment here which basically states the obvious to programmers but may interest a few of you guys on the slow-slow weekend: (Thanks King_Darius)

There are server-side countermeasures that look for sequences of moves that are likely to be bot-generated and not human-generated, but that is an arms race that will end with skilled human players eventually getting identified as subtle bots.

Media cheats can be protected by various checksums, as we do in Q3 with the sv_pure option. This is only effective if the network protocol is not compromised, because otherwise a proxy can tell the client that it's hacked media are actually ok.

If the network protocol is not known, then the extra-information cheats generally can't happen unless you can hack the client source.

Steve Gibson is the cofounder of Shacknews.com. Originally known as sCary's Quakeholio back in 1996, Steve is now President of Gearbox Publishing after selling Shacknews to GameFly in 2009.

From The Chatty
  • reply
    December 26, 1999 6:36 PM

    Wow Carmack is really concerned about this cheating stuff. He is posting a lot about it. I don\'t care because I only play QW on a LAN now that Q3 came out.

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