ASM Community

Currently I am working on a game.It will use peer to peer method to communicate between players.To lessen hackers I have decided on a scheme to encrypt the data packets by using a new key generated for each player each game. Every player will swap their key with an opponent's key.If the hacker is going to get anywhere he has to hack the key he got while the game is going on, not a smart idea since he can lose the game by wasting their time. To add more security for the people who actually want to play legit:)! I was thinking of having each player report their every move to their opponents to see if their actions are possible within the game.The only problem I see with this, is that the opponent can easily hack to see what his opponent is doing, but I think this is better then having the hacker get unlimited resources and such. My basic goal is to keep secure data of their computer and program the game to be on gaurd of cheating.If they actually want to cheat then they have to rewrite the game, not very fun. If anybody has any other logical ideas to prevent cheating and such please let me know?

Errm, maybe this sounds ignorant/stupid/whatsoever BUT what the hell is this hacking stuff all about. I know that we don't live in a nice and harmless world but what is MAP HACKING and the other hacking methods you try to prevent? Can somebody enlarge upon this on a simple minded basis? Stefan

Clients connect to a server, and the client usually cheats, not the server. so do all the checking serverside.. (and a little bit clientside ofcourse). example: somebody hacked the game and set his life to 99, but server only counts 10... (if you dont have a server option in your game, just do the checking on the puter that opened the connection for listeners) but ofcourse, this wont stop all cheaters, look at Half-Life/Counter-Strike :mad: my 0.2

Hi its me again :), Sorry ,but I’m a little bit stubborn(or hell of allot inquisitive). If you look at my first post you would notice that I have the same scheme your are implementing. However, peer to peer games have growing problems with latency. Checking the status of everyone’s world can go beyond the limits of peer to peer sessions. The Internet does not have a viable multi-casting capability, sending the same message to three destinations requires three times as much bandwidth as sending it to a single destination. To aid this generally someone in the session steps in as the host to process the game data and send it out to the other peers(That way only one copy of the game has to be made).This host can now tell how the other player’s environments are affected. Each player sending packets to 8 other peers is not viable. TCP stops delivering any of the other packets in the stream while it waits for the next "in order" packet. Latencies could easily grow in a 5-second range. Second if a packet is having a tough time getting to its destination, TCP will actually stop re-sending it. If packets are being dropped then it's due to congestion. It is worthless to try re-sending because that will only make the congestion worse. So TCP will actually stop sending packets, and start sending occasional test packets.When the test packets start to get through, TCP will gradually start sending real packets again. So latency can grow out of hand. I’m sure Starcraft servers do handle the transmission of packets between peers to speed up transmissions(Their servers can handle this because they count on the players PC’s to do most of the grunt work). If you don’t believe me then ask any self respecting star craft player when Diablo II came out. The conditions were horrible. As a well thought developer the most you can count on is 5k per second until people start getting cable modems. Divide 30 frame rates a second and you get about 170 bytes per second. Also TCP/IP packets contain a 24 byte overhead. However most people won’t update their games every frame rate, mostly 2-5 is ok. Now including the normal chat thats going on in the game and sending all revelant data to be checked by the other players worlds is not efficient way of handling multiplayer support. Modifying the packet can allow the player to be able to cheat. It is very tough to implement a to good to be true algorithm, that shields honest players from cheating, without the possible effects some might suffer from actually playing honestly. So enough of my ramblings, I Guess I will have to see how you handle it in your game:), oh and if anyone is willing to add to the conversation they are encouraged, I would like to hear if anybody has any new ideas for implementing a viable security measures to their games. This message was edited by JDog, on 2/26/2001 4:21:03 PM

k, Nice chatting, hope your game does well :). I will certainly be reading the posts at this board, thanks to all the moderators for putting the effort to get this wonderful board together.

They way i look at something like this, the best idea is to stick in a design of protection, that isn't way silly, but makes things difficul for anyone that wants to try and cheat or sumthing. The next step is to make it so this method is easily modifible, so when the next version comes out, everything is changed. The person has to go through the entire hacking process again. And if after all you have done, if someone still wants to hack that to cheat, the probably enjoy the hacking side more than the actualy playing.

I have something to add, alot OT ... anyone who plays starcraft knows that the bnet servers suk bigtime.. if ya gonna build servers, go for quality IMO