Another unfortunate discussion I wanted to start. As the game is programmed, I would love uber to think about cheating prevention. With the game being server-side it would be a little harder to cheat with resources etc., but what about fog of war hacks? If the game is on Steam it would be excellent to have it be VAC protected, which will at least prevent the basic array of cheats. If it's not on Steam, maybe uber should think about how to make it cheat-proof somehow. Punkbuster is usually a joke without being linked to a database, but it's the only third-party easily accessible solution... maybe that would be an option? Supcom2 has had some pretty rampant cheating (especially with research points due to a game design oversight) over its lifetime due to the absence of VAC and the publisher/developer's unwillingness to address the problem. I would hate the same thing to happen to this game.
If I'm right people ''can't'' hack the Fog of War because it's all server side instead of client. If I'm wrong then the forum will correct me
I think it depends on how it's programmed, so in that case uber should think about programming it the "right" way from day 1. For example, people can't cheat with resources in Supcom2 because the resources are part of a checksum which is passed around the clients and it causes a desync if it doesn't match, but "things researched" aren't, even though resource points are, so cheating with research amounts to a simple client-side memory modification using something as simple as "cheat engine." Programming oversights such as these should be a consideration from day 1. Rampant and obvious cheating can really ruin a game completely.
I'm fairly sure this is how it's going to be. After all, they said the server decides what to send to the players (especially los). Unless someone hacks the server, I don't think cheating should be much of a problem with this setup.
Right, there is no way cheating could work with that kind of architecture. You don't see anything the server doesn't allow you to see and all attributes are stored on the server. If you try to change somthing locally then your changes will be overwritten by the server. All you can do is botting, but no hacking.
FPS games are server-side, but there's plenty of wall-hacks available because they don't send the client just what you see, but the location of everyone on the map. I think it is likely that PA will be programmed that way as well (the fog of war will be enforced by the client only) but I surely hope I'm wrong and it will be programmed differently. I just wanted to raise the cheating issue because it's a serious one imo.
Actually, there's some fairly good hints pointing toward the fact that everything (including positions) will be hidden from other players if they can't see them with their units. They said they wanted to make huge powerful servers run extra large worlds with lots of users. Well, I doubt ordinary computers will be able to handle thousands of units from 40 different players at once. I get the feeling that one reason they decided to go server-side was to deal with that problem.
It works in FPS games, because of the techniques used to hide lag and show smooth gameplay. The client-programs basically predict the movement of all players based on the last position and inputs, so it needs the information which makes it accessible to the cheat-programs. With fog of war and the changed perspective in an RTS you can easily predict which areas of the map the player is able to see within some time in the future, so you only need to know the positions of the units and structures in those parts. So there could possibly be some enhanced view hacks, but those are way less useful than full map hacks. Or our devs are even more smart than what I guess could work and make it full on impossible.
Cheating is being looked at from day one. It's part of why we like a client/server architecture. During development of SupCom we did consider the various ways clients could cheat but synchronous severely ties your hands. For example fog of war is always hackable simply because you have the information. In PA all of the sim work is done server side. The only thing the client can inject are effectively "orders". Clients can't just randomly move objects around in an authoritative manner. Many FPS games have at least some element of local control that is hackable. For example aim hacks, speed cheats etc. that rely on the server not being authoritative for all state. So they are usually a bit more hackable than an RTS. Most of this is to eliminate latency which is not an issue in RTS (at least not nearly as much). For example you could easily play a game like this with a 500ms ping. So basically the clients input orders that come from your local UI. The server than sends back information based on your currently open views into the action. Things under the fog are not sent at all. The main issue with this architecture is that it requires more network bandwidth that a simply synchronous type setup. The server also has to do a lot of work which is why they are being architected to cluster if necessary. The nice thing is that if a local client is slow it can't slow down any of the other players in the game. It's really how fast your server is that matters more than anything. We won't be able to prevent people from using trainers or AI bots completely. But any kind of direct cheat should be very difficult to pull off without server access.
