What If?

[narf poit chez BOOM]

gee, thanks.

[Atrocities]

Hey I thought you could use a ringing endorsment for single player cheating.

Afterall those evil EEE are coming and god only knows that your shipyards are still 30 turns away from producing your first defender class warship.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

only if i'm cheating in that game. if you just go cheating willy-nilly, you'll never stop.

[dogscoff]

For example, a player changes the settings on say DUC I to be as strong as WMG III for one game turn and obliterates a vastely supior fleet.

I don't think this would be possible. If you think about it the plr files only need to contain designs, political Messages and orders. Everything else can be stored and processed on the host.

Therefore, the best you could do with a hacked plr file (I'm guessing) would be to create an impossible design (ie an escort with 12 DUCs & 15 engines) which would be pretty easy for your opponents to spot in-game. Furthermore, there may be checking on the host's side to weed out this kind of irregularity anyway.

Of course I'm probably wrong.

[Atrocities]

I am sure PBW does have checks in place to keep an eye out on this. I did a search for simular topics and found one were a player was Banned from PBW for hacking a file and then posting about it.

So they are watching for it. This pleases me to no end.

[Roanon]

If - big IF - the game designer has not relied on his encoded .plr files to be unbreakable (yes, designers tend to overestimate their skills ) he could have easily made cheating impossible. Let players only submit orders, execute everything on host while error-checking as the SE programm checks where you only can enter valid orders. Hacking the strength of DUCs - impossible, should be stored in the host data file and accessed new for every combat for every ship. Hacking the number of components on a ship design - detectable if the designs are also stored in host data and applied fresh every turn, and error-checked when created. Hacking ship positions - futile if only move orders are transmitted and not final ship positions (move fleet X to system Y sector Z - ok, will take 500 gazillion turns but I'll start moving them... )

So, if proper design decidions have been made, cheating vie turn submision should be next to impossible. Of course, if the SE programm already executes the orders and then only sends the results, not the orders, to the host, hacking is possible and how easy it is only depends on the quality of the encryption of the .plr file. But the pricipal flaw of this kind of design is known for years. On the other hand, SE is very old...

Another thing is the .gam and log files that all players get. As all players get the same file and the info contained is only filtered by the SE programm, there is a lot of info in the results that should not be seen by a player. Only individual result files for each player would make this 100% safe, but also complicate the hosting process. All that remains here between cheating hackers and their success is the quality of the encryption. I hope it is good. But as the decrypting programm (SE) is available, hacking is possible and I am sure a lot of people - including myself - would theoretically be able to do it. It is not easy and will cost a lot of time - and I just don't consider it worth my time. Let's hope we don't get too many kiddies with too much time at their hands as players...

[geoschmo]

PBW itself does no file checking, but Se4 does. We had concerns about this very problem and so have been working with Malfador from the start to identify and eliminate possible sources of cheating. Se4 does check to verify that the .plr file was created using the same executable that the .gam file was, and it also does some math checks to make sure there is no hinkiness with design costs and stuff. There are other things it does, but I don't want to give away to much information.

While it checks all these things I am sure that there are ways to get around it if the person is skilled enough and dedicated to teh task. There are always ways, and the cheaters always have the advantage in this arms race. But as new ways to cheat are brough to light we will try to get Malfador to fix them.

The one guarantee I can give you is that it will ALWAYS be possible to verify if someone is cheating. Because all we have to do is go back over the turn files and see if everything that happened should have happened the way it did. It's not always easy to do, it can take a lot of time and effort, but it's always possible to do.

Geoschmo