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Author Topic: Speed Hacks  (Read 8062 times)

Vengeance

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Speed Hacks
« on: January 06, 2009, 01:15:17 pm »
I'll go ahead and kick off the new development team blog with what I worked on last night.  :-)

For years PS has had a subsystem for cheat detection called "Paladin Jr".  (Paladin used to be a clever acronym but now I can't remember what it stood for.)  As most of you know, we don't do a very good job of cheat detection today, which is because Paladin has languished and been ignored practically since Crystal Blue was released in 2003.

Anyway, last night I sat down and spent a couple hours on detecting clients with speed hacks.  With extensive testing help by Aiken and Kerol, I think we've got the basis for a pretty good detector now.  It auto-kicks anyone using speed hacks within 10 seconds.

If you are a speed hack user today, enjoy it while it lasts because the days of that working are numbered.  :-)

Thanks.
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Tontow

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Re: Speed Hacks
« Reply #1 on: January 19, 2009, 09:43:55 pm »
What exactly is a 'speed hack'?
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Caarrie

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Re: Speed Hacks
« Reply #2 on: January 19, 2009, 09:44:59 pm »
Quote from: Tontow on January 19, 2009, 09:43:55 pm
What exactly is a 'speed hack'?

a way to make your character ingame move faster then it should via a number of client side hacks.
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LigH

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Re: Speed Hacks
« Reply #3 on: January 20, 2009, 08:06:58 am »
I am afraid.

I am afraid to get kicked due to the fact that I am logging in via satellite connection, which has PING durations between 1500 and 3000 ms, unreliably.

So this system must be tested by people with slow and unreliable connections, to avoid "false alarms"...
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Gag Harmond
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Xillix Queen of Fools

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Re: Speed Hacks
« Reply #4 on: January 20, 2009, 09:22:27 am »
We will likely test high latency connections to see if they give false positives, contact Vengeance.
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Caarrie

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Re: Speed Hacks
« Reply #5 on: January 20, 2009, 09:37:36 am »
as Weltall explained on irc there is code to manage lag so i dont think this will be much of an issue at this time, but testing is always a good thing.
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ThomPhoenix

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Re: Speed Hacks
« Reply #6 on: January 20, 2009, 02:00:21 pm »
Since Caarrie is in the US and LigH is in Germany, this system's response to lag could easily be tested by having LigH test on Caarrie's server.

What do you think, LigH?
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Pizik

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Re: Speed Hacks
« Reply #7 on: January 20, 2009, 04:26:21 pm »
With the assistance of our dear Caarrie I have run a test on her server on this, Using a GPRS connection with a latency of 1500 - 2000 MS (From the UK to the US) I did not get flagged as a speed hack abuser. I also throttled my connections bandwidth using a download and even though I was getting a visible (sending chat message and waiting to see it returned from the server) ping of around 7 seconds I still did not get flagged. Obviously, LigH should have a go at this himself because there may be factors I do not understand. But for virtually everyone there is no need to worry about being incorrectly flagged as a cheater.
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Lanarel

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Re: Speed Hacks
« Reply #8 on: January 20, 2009, 05:07:22 pm »
I managed to get kicked on my local server when I had venge running around while the server was loading some more maps. Not something that will happen often, but I guess it is not nice to kick players when the server has problems either :)
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Tomislav

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Re: Speed Hacks
« Reply #9 on: January 21, 2009, 10:00:33 am »
What about people with fast connections? My own server kicked me while running arround npcroom1 ;D

Ok, seriously now, it probably had something to do with explosion effects creating a big lag sometimes (usualy just before appearing in camera FOV).
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kaerli2

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Re: Speed Hacks
« Reply #10 on: January 24, 2009, 09:11:22 pm »
Does PS use particles for explosion effects?  It is true that particles above a certain threshold cause severe lag.
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Xordan

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Re: Speed Hacks
« Reply #11 on: January 24, 2009, 09:22:52 pm »
Quote from: kaerli2 on January 24, 2009, 09:11:22 pm
Does PS use particles for explosion effects?  It is true that particles above a certain threshold cause severe lag.

We don't actually have explosion effects :P We have normal effects exploding because of a bug in or around emit.
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Aiken

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Re: Speed Hacks
« Reply #12 on: February 09, 2009, 05:45:19 am »
Have just spent a couple of hours running around NPCroom and NPCroom3. Was not having a problem with getting flagged. Except for a small incident involving a speed hack just after the initial testing mentioned earlier I have not had trouble running around.

Today I was kicked today using the AL on Smith's door which I had modified to teleport me to Fighter2. Would get flagged if moved straight away after the AL moved me.

My client and server are on separate machines. Had a player connect and he had to try hard to get get flagged. Eventually was kicked using the same AL I was playing with. I connected to his machine which has client/server on the same machine. If his client was running I was kicked very quickly. If only his server was running I could run around with no problems.
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LigH

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Re: Speed Hacks
« Reply #13 on: February 09, 2009, 07:11:48 am »
I'd love to test. But I could not build a working Win32 client recently. Get numerous unresolved external symbols (MS VC++ 2008 Express).

I hope Xordan will be available at such times when I can check it again (~evening/night GMT).
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Gag Harmond
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Tomislav

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Re: Speed Hacks
« Reply #14 on: February 10, 2009, 01:06:09 pm »
Quote from: LigH on February 09, 2009, 07:11:48 am
I'd love to test. But I could not build a working Win32 client recently. Get numerous unresolved external symbols (MS VC++ 2008 Express).

I hope Xordan will be available at such times when I can check it again (~evening/night GMT).
You might want to do a clean SVN checkout. I just comipled rev. 3007 (which was latest at the moment) without any problems. (MS VC++ 2008 Express - Debug with DLL). Check your CS version as well (you need trunk).

This time I couldn't get myself kicked even while running the client in the debugger. Good job!
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