[MUD-Dev] DGN/TECH: exploiting/hacking in MMOGs - sources of info?

[Daniel.Harman at barclayscapital.com]

Damion Schubert wrote

> For non-MMOs twitch games, the hacks gravitate more towards speed
> hacks and wall hacks, and aim-bots, while probably not technically
> a hack, are right up there in terms of horrible technical problems
> that are plaguing the dreams of those programmers right now.  MMO
> devs haven't worried about those quite as much, although as the
> MMOs get faster paced and more action-oriented, as well as start
> becoming more centered around PvP than they currently are, these
> issues will rise in importance.  Unfortunately, these are much
> more difficult problems to solve than packet sniffing, which is
> usually solved by slapping some junior programmer on the back of
> the head for trusting the client too much.

Dunno if this is too techy for this forum, but does anyone know how
speedhacks are implemented? Is it just a case of hooking
GetTickCount() and/or QueryPerformanceCounter() and advancing them
artificially or is there more to it than this? Very hard to find any
info on how these things work, but they don't strike me as that hard
to combat with an implementation of NTP in your protocol to check
for ridiculous clock drift.

Completely distrusting the client side strikes me as a far harder
problem as it becomes entirely dependant upon the quality of ones
client working set partitioning algorithm, on the server. That makes
it pretty hard to not broadcast updates to the client for entities
hidden through walls etc. I don't think this is by any means solved
yet, but given that spatial partitioning is a reasonably well
explored problem space, there seems a reasonable chance that brute
force is the only answer.

Dan
_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev mailing list
MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
https://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev