[edit] People new to this thread should skip to the end of page 3, where the first round of good ideas is summarized.[/edit] technical details aside, assume you are working on a game engine designed to deter hackers. assume one feature is to delay expression of a detected cheat, making it harder to work out whether the hack worked. assume to create this delay, we corrupt or somehow alter the game behaviour so as to make it unplayable after a while. (to avoid pissing off potential customers, a crack detection message is eventually displayed to point out the game is hacked, not bugged.) what imaginitive things could be done in the meantime which are A) subtle, and B) likely to make the hacker REALLY angry? ******** A Problem Worthy of Attack Proves It's Worth by Fighting Back [edited by - walkingcarcass on February 4, 2003 7:17:33 AM]

Been done b4 see Spyro. BTW correct word is cracker.

Indeed. A hacker is fundamentally non-destructive and tends only to look at information; a cracker is usually destructive and/or interested in changing things.

I think it would depend totally on the game. In an FPS - make the gun jam from time to time (added realism too ).

In an RTS - make units ocasionally unavailable for no apparent reason, or make units out of view disappear ("eh? I thought I had *three* tanks with those infantry..." gradually driving the player insane ).

In a game where time is important - for example, a racing game - tell the game that there are 50 seconds in a minute rather than sixty.

(You can have a LOT of fun with these :D )

Superpig
- saving pigs from untimely fates, and when he''s not doing that, runs The Binary Refinery.

please people, bofor you start arguing whats a cracker over whats a hacker. please read http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/The-Meaning-of-Hack.html from the New Hackers Dictionary (jargon file).

quote:
• If you are a writer or journalist, don''t say or write hacker when you mean cracker. If you work with writers or journalists, educate them on this issue and push them to do the right thing. If you catch a newspaper or magazine abusing the work `hacker'', write them and straighten them out (this appendix includes a model letter).

sorry, sorry, CRACKER it is (my brain is too simple)

yeah, i''ve read about spryo. that''s why I posted this: to pool a few ideas

********


A Problem Worthy of Attack
Proves It''s Worth by Fighting Back

Well, I think that a better way to handle hacking may just be to yell at the hacker as soon as anything''s detected- I can see people having nightmares over things like version changes tripping a "hacker detection". Also, you should probably try to make it clear to the player what they''re being punished for- if a game unceremoniously becomes unwinnable if someone tries to hack it, and players aren''t told that its'' because of the hack, then the game''s going to get a rumor for being unwinnable.

As for frustrating the hacker... There are lots of subtle ways to do that- I''d start by putting checksums on the game''s data files, nad then making certain flags and such not turn on if the checksums didn''t work out- such that the game does, indeed, become much harder to progress in. Eventually, you can give the player a "Winners don''t cheat"-type message to let them know why they''re having so much trouble.

Although, I might warn you that- sadly- after the first time that happens, said hacker probably isn''t going to keep playing your game, and they also may think twice about buying your game 2: the return of your game... So, all in all, it may not be a good idea. My suggestion is that you may want to limit yourself to encryption/checksums on data files and saved games, and perhaps a "This file has become corrupt" error message immediatley after the player has tried to open a modified one.

- HC

-- EMail: cloweh@rpi.edu
-- AIM: SeigfriedH

Yeah, I think that the best way to deter crackers is to make it hard for them to tell in a short amount of time if they have been succsessful... You might even try to anticipate some cracks and trick the cracker into thinking that they have succseeded... maybe only check for cracks 90% of the time... this way the cracker tries something.. and it doesn't work.. he tries something else... it doesn't work... tries one more thing... it WORKS!!!he doesn't notice a single problem... what he doesn't know is that the game just desided to not check for cracks this time...next time he tries to run the game... doesn;t work... No computer/programming problem is more annoying than one that is not consistant.

hopefully I made some sence...

"The only thing worse than not having that new _______ , is when some rich kid has it, but can't and/or doesn't appreciate it."-me
Tazzel3d ~ Dwiel

[edited by - tazzel3d on January 18, 2003 6:23:33 PM]

A really simple way to slowly mess things up: Write a function that is inlined that picks a random byte in the memory space of the game and checks if it is writable. If so, it reads the value and sets it to a random value. Repeat every 10-15 minutes or so to slowly corrupt the memory space of the game.

Okay ladies and gentlemen, I''d like to point out one final time to all those who do not understand.

A HACKER is involved with infiltrating systems for the retrieval of information. Whether their motives are good or bad or whether they''re malicious or not has nothing to do with this term.

A CRACKER alters software on a machine to bypass things like 30-day trials.

Most of the people you hear about that are "Hackers" are actually 12 year old script kiddies doing things like DoS attacks and running code to get buffer overflows and crap.