Masterserver

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By Zapper

Date 2009-10-27 10:18

>believe me - when the OC project will be in a playable version, those broadband connections will be available. (streaming object positions is not that much data)

Well, objects, particles and landscape changes sounds like a lot of streaming data to me

By Ringwaul [ca]

Date 2009-10-27 16:49

I actually can't get anything other than dial-up at my house. However, half of the small 'village' I live in does have access to cable internet. Weak.

But to be honest, most of the time I play online games at friend's house so this isn't really a problem. Though, CR actually does work fairly fast over dial-up; assuming you're connecting to people on the same continent. :/

By PeterW

Date 2009-10-27 12:22

No idea where you took that cite from, but last time I checked, Soldat both used a specialized anti-cheat engine (BattleEye) and /still/ had huge problems with cheaters. To the point where there were top clans using them more or less openly because nobody could prove it.

By mizipzor [se]

Date 2009-10-27 11:10

I dont believe that we can ever totally prevent cheating. So I would suggest we dont bother all that much trying.

Pessimistic, maybe, but code obscurity, encrypted server communication and stuff like that yields many bugs. Those bugs and the time that needs to be spent on them is better spent on improving the game itself. At least according to my experience.

Clonk isnt meant to be a hardcore competitive game aiming for global leagues, like StarCraft or CounterStrike, its a casual game you are supposed to play with friends and have a laugh. It got more in common with games like Liero. I for one will probably only play internet games with people I "know" or that have in other ways earned some basic trust.

We will simply not be the first game in the world to make cheating impossible. Why spend developer resources on trying, which will at the same time make the code harder to work with?

By Zapper

Date 2009-10-27 11:39

>We will simply not be the first game in the world to make cheating impossible. Why spend developer resources on trying, which will at the same time make the code harder to work with?

Okay, I think you misunderstood something somewhere. The question was how one would be able to have a league and more or less fair online games (with random people you don't know) with an Open Source game. And the suggestion was to let only "official" builds be able to sign up on the league server, so that not everyone is able to play with random players with his home-made engine (since, of course, that guy has disabled FoW and is able to see the enemy's gold and stuff).
That will not make cheating impossible of course. But it is the only way to be able to have a league server and games among random people with an Open Source game (and it is not that much of additional work since it needs nearly no maintenance once implemented).

By mizipzor [se]

Date 2009-10-27 12:13

Good points. But I might still be misunderstanding because I think my arguments are still valid.

Some of the responses below here include ideas about a compile time generated checksum of the source, server polling the client in weird and indeterminable ways. My experience isnt great in this subsection of security, but to me all scenarios look trivial to circumvent as long as I have the source.

The best/only way to do this might very well to put parts of code in the client thats not open sourced. Forcing users to disassemble some dll in order to crack it.

You still think Im way off the topic? :p

By Zapper

Date 2009-10-27 15:26

>The best/only way to do this might very well to put parts of code in the client thats not open sourced. Forcing users to disassemble some dll in order to crack it.

That was the idea. To have some "secret" piece of code in the _official build_ that is used for authorizing with the league server

By Carli

Date 2009-10-27 23:02

"code" is a bit too specialized - i think a key would be enough

By Zapper

Date 2009-10-27 23:12

... and since you would put this key in a CPP(or header)-file it is code.

By Carli

Date 2009-10-28 08:40

the key would be included as a ressource and there are 2 versions of the key: one for hobby compilation and developement and one for liga games... (i don't know if it is possible to include raw files into the executable in C++)

By Caesar

Date 2009-10-29 15:46

It is possible, but they would be viewable in a disassembly.

By PeterW

Date 2009-10-27 12:30

> Why spend developer resources on trying, which will at the same time make the code harder to work with?

Because we already have a pretty active league system that proves that it pays off? It's true that we won't be able to get rid of determined crackers, but we should at least make sure that no culture of cheating gets hold - by making it as hard as possible for newbies and as undesirable as possible for those that have the skill.

By mizipzor [se]

Date 2009-10-27 13:36

A very valid argument, I can agree on that.

Is this thread about how we are to achieve that? Or are we currently going a bit off topic?

By knight_k [us]

Date 2009-10-25 02:13

> It's both unlikely that the source code will be made available or the clonk.de instance opened for OpenClonk players soon [...]

Btw, it wouldn't bee much work to set up a (temporary?) second server instance for OC tests, without getting all the possible trouble on the CR server... (as we have done before for internal tests)

By Kanibal [de]

Date 2009-10-26 20:27

(I answer your post, because there's still no "general answer" button :/)
What about doing a hash on the Clonk-Binary and transfering it, when you want to start a game on the masterserver. That'd stop all those stinky script kiddies, that are just able to comment out some lines and so on...?