Spring RTS Engine

Exactly how succeptable is spring to cheating?

Reason being, I have seen some odd behavior lately out of 2 people when playing games with them.

I'm a little curious here.

I think it's possible, for some things it would be relatively easy I think.
But you can't do a metal/energy cheat or spawn a unit without losing sync afaik. (and I don't know that much)

Once someone starts to cheat we can ask if he also would be so good to write a fix for it.

IIRC, the client sends the host a checksum of all the units positions, and the players resources. If these are not the same, then you loose sync. So unit/resource cheating is not possible. However, because of how the network code works, LOS cheating IS possible, and I dont think it is detectable.

Maelstrom wrote:IIRC, the client sends the host a checksum of all the units positions, and the players resources. If these are not the same, then you loose sync. So unit/resource cheating is not possible. However, because of how the network code works, LOS cheating IS possible, and I dont think it is detectable.

It would be detectable...

Every few ticks, the host computer picks one random spot on the map for each player. It then determines whether the spot should be LOS'd, radar-detected, both, or neither for that player. This information is kept on the host's computer. The host then queries the client's computers as to whether the chosen point is within LOS and/or radar coverage. If the response from the client is not equal to the host's predetermined LOS/radar coverage, then a "red flag" is put up for all to see that the player may potentially be cheating.

Of course, this could be defeated too by adding in an illicit "handler" for the responses to the host's query that determines whether the spot SHOULD be in LOS/radar or not and responds appropriately. However, this would be a little bit more difficult to do.

Just one more reason to increase LOS...

Players dotn need that on maps with more terraind eformation. Just look at the ground, you can see all the decals and the places where buildigns ahve changed the ground udnerneath to level them out....

Last tiem I checked the engine didnt check what data it had recieved to check ti was valid and not malformed...

Couldn't someone cheat «before» the game starts?
That is, before the game starts, a script file is sent from host to all players with info on how will the game ocur. Couldn't a host with a modified client always send a script where it says that himself has a handicap?

I'm thinking about that because i was once playing with unbalanced teams and the other teams had handicap assigned. It was meant that only one of them had handicap. With the game flow, i had forgotten about that and i was tottaly puzzled as to how they were putting up so many units and pop-ups with us rushing all they're metal extractors to hell. I then remembered about the handicap. And only when we left the game, did i noticed that all of the 3 oponents had a 100% handicap as oposed to just one of them who was more newbish.

Since the handicap is a valid rule for the anti-cheat checks, i guess this is possible!?

Well, in OTA how LOS hacks work was like this.

In OTA, your units would not fire on units within range even with radar coverage. They would only do this if u had a targetting facility. So what people did was this: Their units would have a larger LOS than normal, allowing this to happen. However, don't mistake this for force firing or radar targetting. IF all the enemy units are hitting multiple units of yours and they have no radar or LOS on u, then I might get suspicious. (ie. they have like 20 merls hitting 3+ of your units and they have 0 radar or spotters and their ally doesn't have radar coverage or spotters either AND they are hitting your mobile force, not ghosted buildings) Did I leave anything out?

Also, this is NOT easy to spot in-game, only the recording of it would show this. HOWEVER, I think SPring needs a command in the replay so when you are watching a person (say u wanted to see the force and res of team 3) that you can also show his fog of war and his true LOS range and not just the whole map. Like a .los or .fow command to disable the whole map view and just what the player can actually see (like the ota demo recorder)

As for unit hacking, I don't know. Only seen it in OTA, and it was very rare. Trainers? I seen these in ota, not sure hwo they work but if they worked for ota, maybe for spring? I dunno. Ask someone who is better qualified to answer those questions.

But all in all, I would VERY much like to see the demos record LOS data so when you spec a certain someone, you just see what he sees.

Have you ever try to press 'L' ?

Torrasque wrote:Have you ever try to press 'L' ?

"L" works, it has been very useful for a few replays I've watched.

all seeing eye hack will be most used one i bet ....