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It is possible to make a game such as Dom2 much more hackproof against various forms of cheats, including "dreaded" hex editing.
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Putting on my software engineering hat for a moment:
While it is possible to make a bullet-proof server, it is not necessarily practically possible to make an existing server bullet-proof. Judging by some of the previous bugs, I suspect that in Dominions 2 the GUI is mashed in with the underlying game logic to such a degree that it would probably take an almost complete redesign and rewriting of the game engine to accomplish.
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It is hard to tell for sure without actually looking into source code Leif. But I also have noticed that Dom2's GUI is indeed likely to be mashed with arhitecture code.
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That would be too much work to invest over some very rare incidents of cheating.
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How can you possibly know that these are rare incidents? If you have followed this cheat discovery story, you know that this particular cheat was catched only because of unique combination of many factors. And if cheater would not be so blatant with the amount of which he cheat, it would be impossible to prove. It would also be compltetly impossible to prove if the game would not be stoped by turn 23 but Lasted even 20 more turns. Et cetera...
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Remember, if it was easy to make secure software, people would do it more often.
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Hey, I never said it was
easy.
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The combination of better and more powerful encryption methods that those that are being used now,
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Just a very minor nitpick here, but you can't really encrypt the turn files from the eyes of the player. As the player has access to the binary which generates the turn-file in the first place, he has always theoretical access to the plain-text - regardless of what encryption method is applied. The correct term to use would be "obfuscate."
(And yes, this is hair-splitting - at least when we're talking of nothing more important than turns for a game.)
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You are right.
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Finally, I just don't think that the solution that Gandalf proposed "Sorry, but this game can always be hacked, just choose your partners carefully" would be an acceptable solution to a lot of Dom2 players.
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Why not? It's not like anyone plays this game professionally for money, and even if people did, the existance of some amount of cheating is accepted in other games and sports that people play for money.
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It also know to devastate computer games communites in many other MP games. I have witnsses several examples of this myself, and I've heard and read of many more. And Dom2 is very time intensive game as far as strategic MP games go.
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A long bow and a strong bow, and let the sky grow dark!
The cord to the nock, the shaft to the ear, and the king of Koth for a mark!
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Great signature/quote Leif.
