anti-hacking system

[chains]

I'm under the impression the current anti-hacking system is doing more bad than good to this game. I've thought about quitting after getting banned for no reason at all and I'm sure alot of ppl have felt like this.

The serverside anti-hacking system is a good try to fight cheaters but it's impossible to be 100% sure if someone is cheating or not no matter how good the system has been written.

Cheaters are a problem in every game of this type and a generic solution to this problem is still inexistant. One thing that really should be kept in mind is (to my opinion) is that fair players should never get hurt at all costs, even when it means more cheaters.

I'll explain one of the most effective free system I've encountered while playing online games thru the years which shouldnt be that hard to implement. There might exist better systems, altho i have my doubts, but those will cost you (such as nprotect, punkbuster and so on.. ).

The admin privilege system.
Server hosts get the ability to add admins to their servers, these admins have the power to kick/ban/mute players when needed. This is the most basic form but the problem is that a server host might not want to put his time into finding trustable players.

So how about a global admin system? The soldat staff adds trustable players to a list and they are able to kick/ban/mute cheaters in any soldat server.
This list could then be hosted on the website for ppl to see so they can contact admins when they encounter a cheater. The current IM systems such as msn, aol, icq, .. provide services with which you can see which admins are available, but it could also be done with IRC for example.

Now that I think of it, how about a universal system like this? Online games get the ability to implement a framework like this and admins get listed per game. If this would work it might even be possible to pay people to be admin

Anyway, what do you think?

[Sytrus]

I'd like to see this, but I don't think that this'll happen since it seems to be a lot of work to set up.

[Clawbug]

There is new anti-hack system for Soldat, server and client-side - BattlEye. I am still VERY sceptic with it, as hackers have got past it even before Soldat does have it... And as far as I know, it lets hacks to scan and modify the addresses.

I hope someone can prove me wrong. Soldat needs more regular update cycle, 15 months between updates gives hackers alot of time to deal with any anti-hacking stuff.

They know they will be able to fool around next 15 months, then again. But what if they got 2-3 months time to create the hacks? Would be alot more frustrating, I think.

[chains]

Such a system aint hard to implement, of course it depends how sophisticated you wanna make it. You could basicly just let soldat connect to a webserver and read the list from there, im sure there are webclients for delphi available.

And its a pretty effective system, ive seen it work in other games.

There is new anti-hack system for Soldat, server and client-side - BattlEye. I am still VERY sceptic with it, as hackers have got past it even before Soldat does have it... And as far as I know, it lets hacks to scan and modify the addresses.

I hope someone can prove me wrong. Soldat needs more regular update cycle, 15 months between updates gives hackers alot of time to deal with any anti-hacking stuff.

They know they will be able to fool around next 15 months, then again. But what if they got 2-3 months time to create the hacks? Would be alot more frustrating, I think.

true, updating regulary is really essential to stop hacks from spreading. If someone makes a hack its not that big of a deal, just 1 person, the problem starts when they start spreading.

I came up with an idea for a generic client side anti-hacking method, but the problem is that its too hard to make, thats why I proposed the admin list thingy.

I'll try explain my idea in short anyway...

The basic idea is to send a player a freshly compiled binary every time he connects, this binary would be completely random each time. The ultimate goal would be to make it random enough so it can only be cracked by hand and generic solutions would not work. The good thing is that youd be fighting hacks on the same level (right now hackers have the time advantage, 15months is more than enough to create a number of hacks and spread them around), the downside is its extremely difficult to make.
Youd need for example an algorithm generator which can generate totally different algorithms each time (used for data encryption), code generators to create junkcode and alot more..
And last but not least youd need a custom compiler, for c/c++ I'd suggest modifying gcc cuz it would take you at least 10 years to write a decent compiler by yourself.