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Asus Dropping See Through Drivers 174

Posted by CmdrTaco from the would-you-like-cheese-with-your-whine dept.
Stijn Wuyts writes "Asus Taiwan marketing manager Kent Chien e-mailed today the company will delete the See-Through cheating code in their future drivers, as a result of the protests from the gaming community. But maybe this move comes too late, because the company already released the drivers for their GeForce 3 video card. As long as this driver works with current DirectX versions, it can be used to cheat. Removing the code in future versions will not stop current Asus buyers from cheating. Even the cheating detection by checking the Windows registry (as Asus proposes) can be disabled by a skilled programmer. I think Asus realised too late what were the consequences of their newest driver "features"..." Personally I think this is lame. If you want to see through walls, fine: It makes playing games lame, but thats your choice. But wow have a lot of people cried over this. As if crying is going to make any of this stop. Oh well, Asus will remove the driver, and anyone who wants it will just keep using it.
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Asus Dropping See Through Drivers More

Asus Dropping See Through Drivers

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  • See Through Walls?!?!?!??? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Dammit. I bought one of these cards because I thought it would let me see through clothing.

  • Acid dropping (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    God.

    I read it first as "Acid dropping see through Drivers"...

  • Re:Whining over this is lame... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Well, there is a flip side. It would be nice if cheating was impossible so people wouldn't routinely accuse good players of cheating.

    It's annoying to be kicked from a server after 48 unanswered kills because people think you're a bot.

  • Map Making (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    As a map/level designer, being able to see my maps in-game WITHOUT textures is a HUGE trouble-shooting tool, since it helps me find inconsistencies and errors in my models. What I dont get though is the people whining and complaining about the see-through drivers. Its already out there, and future versions of the drivers may not have the See-Through feature, but the current ones do, so cheaters (and map developers like myself who need this) simply wont upgrade (I just wont upgrade my dev machine, but I use BETA dets from nvidia for my gaming rig).

    Just because you don't see a viable reason, it doesn't mean there isnt one.
  • This could just as easily be implemented in the level editor. There is no reason to put it in the drivers, where it is obviously intended to override places where a programmer chose that something should be opaque.

  • Oh, bullshit.

    There *is* a legitimate purpose -- sheer coolness. I may want to use it while in single-player mode, or to show up my friend by trouncing him while he's using it (in effect using the thing as a reverse handicap).

    Anyhow, it's a tool. Tools don't have to have a legitimate purpose, they just have to be. Any other attitude stifles innovation, and otherwise Just Plain Sucks. Innovation is more important than fairness in some game, or who has more little green pieces of paper, or lots of other things.

    (Yes, I'm showing a bias here... I think that there's no reason not for nuclear weapons to exist, for instance, while I'd really prefer that they not be used. However, ya can't knock me on consistancy).
  • That's a hard argument to refute -- consumer choice having the importance that it does. I ask only if this tiny facet of What A Company Does is sufficient to justify automatically overlooking all other factors.

    For that matter, in discussing the reasons you might favor the nVidia product, you imply that you *are* considering other factors -- and thus that this isn't really a boycott in its purest form, but rather Just Another Factor included in a buying decision.

  • Why?

    Damnit, this thing is a Cool Hack. Yes, it can be used by bad people... but that's the fault of the bad people, not the cool hack. Video drivers don't cheat in multiplayer games, people cheat in multiplayer games.

    I just don't understand the fuss.

  • I know exactly two things about Asus -- that I've heard of the GeForce 3 (but don't recall whether it was good or bad) and that they released this driver. The former would've been enough for me to at least look into them. The latter is enough that I will not bother.

    You probably already know this, but the wording of your comment makes it sound like maybe you don't: Asus don't make the GeForce3. Nvidia does. Asus is just one company (of many) that make graphics cards based on the Nvidia GeForce3 chipset. So you can boycott Asus until they sink beneath the waves, and still buy a GeForce3-based card from someone else. What a deal!

  • On PunkBuster's website, it said that they eventually hoped that all game servers would be using PunkBuster. Then they go and make their software so that it won't let anybody using Asus graphics drivers on their server. Their suggestion is to download the latest version of Nvidia's reference drivers. However, this disables some of the utilities Asus gives you to monitor the card fan speed, temperature, set the clock rate without having to hack your registry, etc. Sounds to me like Asus could get a good lawyer to spin this as illegal restraint of trade or something.

    I don't cheat. I haven't even played a game of Quake in months. However, this sort of holier than thou attitude among people (in this case, the PunkBuster developers) really pisses me off.

  • As a map/level designer, being able to see my maps in-game WITHOUT textures is a HUGE trouble-shooting tool

    The driver doesn't do anything that a half-competent programmer couldn't do in 5 minutes with the game code. If you're doing this commercially, why don't you just have those lazy programmers compile the engine in a "debug" mode with features like this?

    so cheaters (and map developers like myself who need this) simply wont upgrade (I just wont upgrade my dev machine, but I use BETA dets from nvidia for my gaming rig).

    And when games use something like Punkbuster, they won't be able to play online. That's fine.

  • Sure, a skilled programmer could cheat. It's been possible to look through walls in games since there was access to hack up openGL drivers to add 50% opacity to all surfaces.

    This is about cheating for the masses. When users have to click a checkbox to enable a cheat, there is bound to be more cheaters because it is more accessible. In that respect, Asus opened the door to something new and bad.

  • Er, neat idea, but considering the average Half-Life environments, I think it would not make sense.

    I mean, Lara chose to do the archeologing stuff wearing relatively light clothes - no need for anything more complicated; Freeman wanted the protective suit, and I think he, as a scientist, had a good for that. "Common Sense Says We Shouldn't Go Naked To Test Chamber That Has Some Dangerous Stuff In It That Creates Interdimensional Gates And Stuff Like That"...

    (Well, personally, I play HL deathmatch with the Kain-9 player model - a wolf guy who doesn't need clothes, he already has a good fur =)

  • Re:Lame? I think not. (Score:3)

    by Alan Shutko ( 5101 ) on Friday May 18, 2001 @12:43PM (#212925) Homepage
    Munchkins are going to find ways to ruin any game, even if they don't have see-through video drivers, or source to the game. The solution is not to play with them.

  • Bull! (Score:1)

    by Chas ( 5144 )

    Cheating is best dealt with, socially in games.

    You sorta need to KNOW the person's cheating. With see-through, unless the server is telling you (PunkBuster), you have NO WAY of knowing.

    If a person cheats, you don't play with that person, and then they'll either cheat all by themselves or they start to not cheat.

    And I repeat. BULL!

    Again, this presupposes the notion that you're able to discover that the person is cheating? What about Internet games?

    Shouldn't you be able to drop onto a random server for some gib-action without worrying that R001ZU is using a wall hack?

    The only time cheating should be an issue is if there is money to be gained.

    God you're naive. Cheating should be an issue if you're interested in fair and equitable gaming. What fun is a game if you have to join an arms-race for cheats just to achieve parity with the llamas?

    Excuse me for prefering to match my GAMING SKILLS against the GAMING SKILLS of others, not their CHEATING SKILLS, CODING SKILLS, or their EXPENSIVE CARD BUYING SKILLS.

    Games should be for fun and excitement, and it seems too many gamers take them FAR too seriously.

    What's so fun about getting smeared by a guy with an aimbot who can see through walls who fires no-look rails out their ass?

    I think it's abominable for the community to make a company restrict its drivers for this reason

    It's abominable to restrict driver-hack/cheats? Sorry, I disagree. When I want to play someone, I want to play THEM, not their cheats/hacks.

    The ONLY legitimate use for these driver hacks is CHEATING. Most games, if you need to look at the wireframes and scan maps, come with the options to do so, outside of a competitive environment.

    Supplying a driver that allows this IN-GAME, is ridiculous. And if you can't see that it's only purpose is cheating, I'm not going to argue it with you. You're already too deluded.


    Chas - The one, the only.
    THANK GOD!!!

  • What's all the whining about? It's a two hour hack to recover the "functionality" with the new drivers. Move your OpenGL library out of the way, create a fake one with all the necessary entry points, patch glEnable() to do glPolygonMode(GL_FRONT_AND_BACK, GL_LINE) and you are set. It will probably screw menus and lots of other stuff, but once you have it up and running it's just a matter of fine tuning. Why glEnable? Because it's probably the function that's called earliest in any OpenGL program. The careful reader will note there are some details left out, but that's an exercise for, uhm, him. This works with any program, free or non-free software and with any driver. There's some minor performance hit involved, but hey, you are not filling polygons anymore! This is actually faster! For extra credits, use alpha blending instead of disabling polygon filling altogether. And for some more extra credit, make it look good. Adjust as necessary to the Windows World. It's possible to do it, ergo someone already did it.

  • In a multiplayer game people using this RUIN the game for others. I run a UT/Tribes2 server that is NOW passworded because of a rash of cheaters. Was a good public server on a T3, but I don't have the time or the desire to babysit a bunch of 13 year old hackers. So I just Pword'd the servers and limit the players to people I know. Sorry for everyone else that was enjoying it.
  • but do we have to make it easy for any script kiddie to do it. Writing a good hack takes skills, installing a cracked driver any idiot (err most idiots) can do. Half the fun of the online games is the openness, but if everyone is worried about cheaters it detracts from the game for all players.
  • That and I want to know just what game's programmers are dumb enough to draw major amounts of detail that normally will never be visible? Me thinks a lot of the sheep are riled up over something that's more their imagination than reality.

  • 27000 votes for NO (Score:4)

    by BrookHarty ( 9119 ) on Friday May 18, 2001 @11:43AM (#212931) Journal
    Every game site out there had links to the ASUS voting site, urging people to Vote NO, dont release the drivers.

    How many sites urged people to Vote yes?

    Bunch of freaking lemmings!

  • A shortcut to designing a matrix-like (read: Shadowrun/Cyberpunk matrix) FPRPG. Being able to see nodes and such would be a pain to program but would be a simple matter if I could turn transparency on/off via driver.

    Often wrong but never in doubt.
    I am Jack9.
    Everyone knows me.

  • GNU/Llama! (Score:3)

    by Admiral Burrito ( 11807 ) on Friday May 18, 2001 @11:47AM (#212933)

    I wonder how difficult it would be to add the feature to Mesa?

    I'm sure that would result in a large increase in Linux usage. There are a lot of llamas out there.

  • I've made this point before, but would you play poker with a bunch of random people you don't know? Probably only if there was some sort of authority (like a casino) warrenting a fair game.

    The fact that you can play games with anyone, anywhere, anytime is cool, that I won't deny. But, you'll have to suffer the riff-raff. Probably the only longterm solution is identity checks (credit cards, X.509 certs, etc) and a much more regulated and monitored environment.
    --
  • 1) I keep hearing people talk about "neat" or "useful" ways to use this see through technology. But I never hear anyone provide an example. I'm curious to hear a couple of real, possibly interesting, examples.

    2) Someone else has already said this, but I'll underscore it. If I was restricted to playing half-life with people I knew, until about 2 months ago I'd never have played multi-player half-life, and even now I'd only have one opponent (who is significantly less experienced, though he's catching up fast :-).

    Most of the people I know who play fps games have had trouble setting up half-life and abandoned it in favor of the games that work without a lot of hassle on their machines (quake, unreal, etc). I don't know why this is the case, as I never had real trouble, but I tried helping several of them set up half-life at a lan party and didn't have any more success than they did.

    So because I can't find people with equipment that works easily with the game I prefer, I can either take my chances with cheaters or with only one other person? That hardly seems reasonable. The whole point of having internet games is so you *don't* have to be isolated into some small clique and you *can* find numerous and skilled opponents to play with/against.

  • Bah, no one told me if I changed my sig, it would change in already posted comments. That's stupid.
  • Poker is usually for money, even if it's only play money (quarters or whatever). Online fps games and the like are not even for money, they're just for fun and the challenge. Yes, there are other ways to cheat; most of them take some effort to achieve. Having ASUS remove the see through drivers continues to make it take some effort.

  • Lame? I think not. (Score:5)

    by elmegil ( 12001 ) on Friday May 18, 2001 @11:29AM (#212938) Homepage Journal
    I suppose it matters how whiney the tone is, but I think everyone who *likes* playing games for *fun* can agree that the munchkins who have to have the best score no matter what (typically exploiting every possible loophole in the rules) ruin any game they have anything to do with. This goes for "real life" games as well as those affected by "see through" drivers.
  • Agreed, I hate the see-through driver bastards. And sure, people will cheat, but at least now there's ways to prevent them from using some of the more obnoxious ones. Now if punkbuster would just keep people from playing in the same room and reporting to each other on the other team's movements when they're dead...

    -=lx=-
  • You and me both, pal. Another heads up, those X-Ray glasses sold in comic books don't work either.

    --
  • I don't really think any real "damage" was done by releasing the see-through drivers and then these newer ones. As performance improvements and tweaks get added to newer drivers, people will gradually move on. Anyone who would keep older drivers just to cheat is the kind that would stoop to other kinds of cheating anyway. And I guess they deserve the performance hit they're going to take. It's hard enough just keeping honest people honest. Asus is fine.

    What would be kinda nice is to have newer patches for games detect players with the see-through drivers. I run a Tribes2 server, and would love to be able to find out who likes to cheat. I'm not saying I'd boot them automatically or anything (the maps in T2 are big enough that I'm not sure a player would get any benefit out of seeing through stuff), but if I saw a player with an absurdly high score who was also using the drivers, I'd be very tempted to ban them. A guy using those drivers (especially after they've been phased out for a while) is probably the sort who would cheat in other ways as well. And it would be nice to look at the players on a server and see if they are using the drivers. I wouldn't like to play on a server where everyone but me could see through walls. Then again, I play for the fun of it, so...

    -B

  • John Carmack himself said that one of the things that made the DOOM community to strong was the hacking that other people did after they shipped it. But if someone wants to learn how 3D works, or just wants a new perspective on the game that's not ok?

    Wow, ac's are dumb. Did you stop to think that maybe there's a difference between hacking an engine to learn/and/or make cool mods and hacking just so you can win?

    If you want to reduce cheating, then don't play with cheaters -- how hard is that?

    Basically impossible, does that answer your question? Where it is really hard is telling if a player is cheating or just very very good.
  • In the Great Scheme of Things (tm), cheats don't matter, but closed-source software, is a Bad Thing.

    Um, no, when it comes to cheating in multiplayer games, having closed source is a GOOD THING. Not having the source makes it a great deal more difficult to add a "gimme 10,000 gold" to a game like Age of Empires or an aimbot for Half Life.

    Denizens of slashdot, why, oh WHY are you worrying about what features are in closed source software?If the source were open, the source would be open.

    Which does what, exactly, to cut down on cheating?

    The issue is, always has been, and always will be FREEDOM.

    No, the issue is about a company releasing lame drivers for their products that can interfer with other people's enjoyment of a game. And insisting that everybody does it your way (open source software) is no freedom at all.
  • So why do we care what Asus does to their drivers? As long as we can hack the code, we...

    WHAT?!?

    You mean their drivers aren't Free? They're not even Open Source?

    Denizens of slashdot, why, oh WHY are you worrying about what features are in closed source software? Why do you complain to the vendor that their features suck? Do you also complain because your congressional representatives take too much bribe money, instead of rioting over their acceptance of ANY bribes? Do you petition the police to shoot unarmed black men only ten times? Do you ask the RIAA and the MPAA to charge you only $14.99 per CD instead of $15?

    GET REAL!

    The issue is, always has been, and always will be FREEDOM.

    In the Great Scheme of Things (tm), cheats don't matter, but closed-source software, is a Bad Thing. Instead of wasting rhetoric to change a companies policy WRT the functions of their code, why not change their policy regarding the OPENNESS of their code?

    /me stomps away in disgust
  • Am thinkink that you are wery funny...

    But here's a point-by-point analysis of How Wrong You Are.

    Open Source is the ONLY way to write software
    Agreed.

    everything must be free
    Yes.

    What we need is a balanced approach
    Exactly. I don't have all the rights, you don't have all the rights, we SHARE the rights.

    On second thought, you're not wrong at all!

  • The thing is, I COMPLETELY agree with your points about cheating. I simply fail to see their relevance. There are more important things than whether or not someone can frag you at will.

    Freedom of speech means you can call me a jerk. I think that's a real downside to free speech. It makes me enjoy my day less. (wipes away a tear) In fact, to make my day more enjoyable, I think we should eliminate freedom of speech.

    Which does what, exactly, to cut down on cheating?
    Open soure makes it IMPOSSIBLE to cheat at a well-written application (theoretically :). It won't help with past poorly written applications. However, if coders in the future know that players will see the code, they will implement stronger security measures. Many of the current 'security' features are workarounds for low-speed 'net connections. As these go away, it will become easier to implement stronger security - like sending info only when needed.

    And insisting that everybody does it your way (open source software) is no freedom at all.
    Oh, get real! If I insist that everyone wear broccoli and cheese on their head, how does that take away your freedom? If everyone (including you) agree that wearing cheese and broccoli is the cool thing to do, then where have I taken away your freedom? I'm not king; I can't force you to do my will If I could, do you think I'd be worried about such a small thing as code? The world would be my plaything! Lighten up.

    To sum up:
    Open source is not a means to an end; it is an end in itself. As with ANY choice, there are tradeoffs. One of them is that people who write games will have to work harder.

  • Re:Ummm...open source? (Score:3)

    by dillon_rinker ( 17944 ) on Friday May 18, 2001 @12:43PM (#212947) Homepage
    If the source were open, it would be impossible to get rid of every version with the see thru code in it.

    If the source were open, the source would be open. Sort of like, if you have freedom of speech, you have freedom of speech. The issue is not "But if you have freedom of speech, some people will say bad things!"

    With it closed at least ASUS knows can inform people exactly how it works and how to prevent it from being used.
    Yes. Sort of like how Microsoft can tell you exactly how Windows works and can prevent criminals and terrorists from launching DOS's from Windows boxen.
  • SHUT UP

    GO AWAY.

    fucking OSS fan boys, I swear. :\
  • Cheating in single player games is a possibility. Debugging programs is another (although that could easily be done with changing rendering settings). There are other possibilities too. Unfortunately this is a moot point because it's obvious that this feature is not going to be tolerated in today's world of online gaming with so many people using it to cheat.
  • It takes a skilled programmer to write it once, then anyone can run a batch file.

    Or do you think script kiddies are highly skilled too?

  • <music>

    Trollin', trollin', trollin'
    Keep that AC trollin', rawhide
    Write 'em up, post 'em out, send 'em in
    Keep 'em coming, Rawhiiiiiiiide

     </music>

    Yet another day at the funny farm.

  • What happened to doing it the ol'fashion way? (Score:3)

    by redsmoke ( 37560 ) on Friday May 18, 2001 @11:47AM (#212953)
    What happened to x-ray vision? If people are going to look through walls in games if worse comes to worst they can always order those cool glasses out of the back of their favorite comic book! Then poof - m3 b 0wnZ y0u w1t aWp thru w@LLz 'n c0uNt3r-$tr1k3 G!
  • Some relatively simple work could be done to clip stuff that it's relatively easy to determine isn't visible. The rest would be sent to the driver to figure out by Z-buffering (or whatever). This would, at least, minimize the value of a see-through driver.

    I would point out here, that it would be quite possible for a reasonably skilled programmer to put transparency into any open source driver. I think that about the only thing stopping it from happening is that most programmers with the skill wouldn't want to put up with the kind of public censure that Asus has suffered through over these drivers.

    Making it easy for the script-kiddie types to cheat is, well, silly.
    --

  • Selling a bunch of their cards to all the punks out there who want to cheat.

    BTW, check out www.punkbuster.com for a site dedicated to eliminating cheaters on compiant servers.
  • Thermal imaging, microwave imaging, I believe there was even a recent story on slashdot about ultra wide band imaging. Counterstrike is a hella cool mod mind you.
  • or play games that actually require things from the player that a computer cant (yet) do, like, say, intelligence.
  • Even in real life soldiers and counterterrorists have equipment that can see through walls and do you think the predator didn't have an aimbot? Make it part of the game. If everyone is doing it, is it still cheating?
  • You'd take a pretty big performance hit, doing something in software that can be done by the accelerator board.
    ------
  • Depends what mod you're playing, and how many players/spawnpoints there are. I'd say in most situations, it's fun, especially when everyone on the server teams up and targets "that damn camper!"

    Camping is only really evil on single-player maps, where there are few resources and only a few spawnpoints.
    ------

  • Trusted clients are technically impossible.
    ------
  • If a person cheats you don't play with that person and then they either cheat all by themselves or they start to not cheat.

    This statement demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of online gaming.

    Whole communities can arise around one gaming server. It's kind of like your local basketball court at the park. You get to know the people that play there, and the experience is enhanced.

    If someone came along to your court and started cheating, sure you could always drive to another park. On the Internet that's even easier than in real life.

    But the effect may be the same. The people you know aren't gonna be there. Suddenly you're playing with nothing but strangers. Which goes against your next statement:

    "Games should be for fun and excitement..."

    YOU do not get to decide what constitutes fun and enjoyment, my friend. To me, fun and enjoyment is competition on equal grounds.

  • There are several anti-cheat tools now that have been updated to disable these drivers or warn other players if someone uses them. If you play on a server that requires these tools you won't have to worry.
  • Personally I think this is lame. If you want to see through walls, fine: It makes playing games lame, but thats your choice. But wow have a lot of people cried over this. As if crying is going to make any of this stop. Oh well, Asus will remove the driver, and anyone who wants it will just keep using it.

    Sorry, Mr. Cmdr in Chief, but it is NOT lame. In fact it's extremely cool that a big, mean old company actually listened to its users and changed the future of its product because of the input. Everyone here whines about closed source companies not providing outlets for their users to voice concerns about issues with regards to their software and then suddenly we get the opposite and there's MORE whining. What's going on?

    The fact of the matter, is that it's not about whether the game player decides whether to be able to see through walls or not. No! It's about whether the game designer wants you to see through walls. If they wanted you to do that, they would have designed it that way.

    They created their games for everyone to play against each other on a fairly even playing field (barring obvious performance differences between different hardware). But what they didn't want, is for people to completely go around the basic assumptions of the game world, the major one being that you can't see through walls if the walls are solid. Having hardware drivers circumvent the creative visions of the game designers is a stab in the back and should rightly be shunned.

    --

  • What if.... (Score:5)

    by cansecofan22 ( 62618 ) on Friday May 18, 2001 @11:29AM (#212968) Homepage
    What if the drivers could allow you to see through Laura Craft's clothes in Tomb Rader?? Man I bet thaey could sell those drivers.

  • Skilled programmer to re-enable it? (Score:5)

    by PurpleBob ( 63566 ) on Friday May 18, 2001 @11:27AM (#212969)
    I think that having it exist in a form where it takes a bit of skill to enable it is fine. It takes just as much skill to download a cheat program, assuming the person already wants to cheat. And there will always be people who want to cheat.

    This driver could have had some cool uses besides cheating, though.
    --
  • > It is upto the developers to stop the cheating.

    Not a flame, but obviously you're not a game/graphics programmer, else you would know this is "pratically" IMPOSSIBLE. (You will see why I say pratically below.)

    > Having transparent walls does you no good if the game doesn't draw things that you can not see.

    In the *ideal* client/server game, yes, the server would tell the client what it can and can't see. This style of client is commonly called a "dumb terminal." It takes input, sends it to the server, and renders what the server says.

    Let's see how this would work:

    Client is standing still, looking straight ahead. Server sends updates to what the client can see. e.g. players move around.

    Now the client does a quick 180 turn. Server needs to send the client all the new objects the client can now see. Unfortunately you TOTALLY forgot about network latency. Objects "pop" into view, and you kill bandwidth since you are constantly telling the server where you are looking, along with the server constantly sending what you can see.

    This one reason it is pratically why it is impossible to write a cheat-proof client/sever game. The network connection just doesn't make it feasible.

    If you need more examples, I'm sure John Carmack could point out a few more examples, since he's been implementing First Person Shooter's for a while.

    > This is one reason to prefer BSP trees for HLHSR (Hidden Line & Hidden Surface Removal) instead of Z buffers.
    Nonsense. BSP's only really work for static objects. You still need a z-buffer for dynamic objects. BSP's aren't free.

    Are you going to generate a BSP for each "frame" of animation, when the frame is generated dynamically?? (i.e. blended animation)

  • Hacked maps are old news (Score:3)

    by UnknownSoldier ( 67820 ) on Friday May 18, 2001 @01:23PM (#212971)
    > Why can't someone just go into a map editor and replace all the surface textures to ones that have alpha-channels?

    Hacked maps have been around since Quake 1.

    The client does a crc checksum on the map and sends it to the server. If the client has a different checksum, the server sends the map. Of course this doesnt' stop the client from lying to the server about the checksum.

  • Personally I think this is lame. If you want to see through walls, fine: It makes playing games lame, but thats your choice. But wow have a lot of people cried over this. As if crying is going to make any of this stop. Oh well, Asus will remove the driver, and anyone who wants it will just keep using it.

    As the article points out, crying did make it stop. Now, crying can't reverse the damage already done by previously released drivers, but if nobody had complained, then Asus wouldn't have changed anything. Ok, so the cat's out of the bag to a degree. This doesn't mean that the drivers will be readily available for casual cheaters in the future, and as existing drivers become obsolete, the problem will be nearly completely solved. See what a bunch of cry babies can do?

  • A really silly software arms race (Score:3)

    by justins ( 80659 ) on Friday May 18, 2001 @07:29PM (#212976) Homepage Journal
    The people who don't see the harm in what Asus was doing just aren't very invested in online FPS gaming. Thankfully, the people who actually BUY Geforce cards, primarily the gaming community, have a different set of priorities. It speaks well of Asus that the community has a voice with the company regarding issues like this.

    What would happen if Asus kept releasing these drivers? Game authors would be required to check and make sure the card owners were using the Nvidia reference drivers, rather than the Asus drivers. First they would check driver versions through the registry or something, eventually they would probably be required to do something like scan through the driver binary. Bleh. All very damaging to Asus' relationship with game developers as well.

    It is likely that Asus developed an understanding of all this based on feedback from the community. This "whining" was a good thing for everyone concerned.
  • I've come to accept that there are people out there who cheat. When I choose to play a game with a bunch of faceless people over the internet, I know that some of them are going to cheat. Some might have blatant cheats going on, others are more subtle, but there are tons of people out there who cheat in various ways.

    While it is cool that a company is listening to consumers for once, I don't think it is a huge deal. I find that multiplayer games are most fun when you are playing with people you know locally. Not only is there less lag, but cheating occurs at a lower rate, from my experience. (Of course, this is the cause of many weaknesses with massive multiplayer RPGs in my book, since you can't play them locally).

    If someone on the net wants to feel "leet" by cheating, let them. Gamers who play for skill might actually benefit from taking on players who have given themselves huge, unfair advantages through cheating.

  • The fault here lies in the game that trusts anything about the client's abilities or limitations.

    Peer to peer games assume that everyone involved can be trusted to manage authoritative state of the game. Bad assumption.

    Client/server games can be more secure, but only if the server is the only machine with the authoritative state of the game.

    If these games assume that the user can't see through walls, then the games are made wrong. Don't even tell the user WHERE the enemies are, unless they're somewhere that the user would have a chance of seeing.

    What else do these games assume, that they shouldn't? They assume lighting is muddy-to-black, but the user can tweak with gamma and brightness. They assume textures are certain colors, but the user can replace those. They assume bodies are certain sizes, but I've heard of "twenty-foot-spikey" body mods which end up sticking through the nearest walls for a cheap give-away. They assume that you can only walk a certain speed, that your weapon fires at a certain rate, that you can only walk where walls aren't, or that your gravity is the same as everyone else's. Funny assumptions, given that all the tools to control those are on the client's machine.

    Game design should be learning from cryptography design: don't publish what you don't want cracked, harden your data proportional to the value of the data, and by all means, study the man-in-the-middle problems. Until then, EVERYTHING is potentially unfair.

  • Taco's Comment (Score:4)

    by duplicate-nickname ( 87112 ) on Friday May 18, 2001 @11:31AM (#212979) Homepage
    "Personally I think this is lame. If you want to see through walls, fine: It makes playing games lame, but thats your choice"

    This my be true for single-player games, but for networked, multi-player it makes the game "lame" for everyone. That doesn't provide a great incentive for people to spend $45 on the next version of Quake or Unreal....

    ÕÕ

  • Re:Skilled programmer to re-enable it? (Score:3)

    by nublord ( 88026 ) on Friday May 18, 2001 @03:59PM (#212980)
    When I use to play paintball we had several variations of the game. One of the coolest was Terminator. One individual was dressed up in a heavy duty suit (like a chem suit, or coveralls), a military grade helmet and given a mondo bad ass semi-auto paint gun with all the extra paint balls he/she could carry.

    The rules were simple: the Terminator can't run and you can only kill it by hitting a small dot on the helmet located near the forehead.

    The terminator was then unleashed into a game where two teams were sparring for the flag, or ground, or elimination. The Terminator's job was to kill everyone.

    It was a freakin' blast. There's nothing greater than being in the middle of a full out battle with the other team, trying to outflank, sniper, and rush their position and have this Terminator show up and start laying down some paint.

    I could see this 'cheat driver' being used this way. One dude loads up the driver and is out to blast everyone away, regardless of team. The other teams have to not only deal with one another but stay one step ahead of the 'cheat driver' user. Sure would test your skills to the limit.

  • Mixed Morals (Score:3)

    by nublord ( 88026 ) on Friday May 18, 2001 @04:13PM (#212981)
    Does anyone else here see something amiss?

    Usually, here on Slashdot, we bash companies that get hax0r3d and should have known better. "That's what they get for having lame security" and "They must be hiring some real dope heads."

    So, here we are, with a company that releases some drivers that let you do something you couldn't do before. Instead of bashing on the game company that made a program with an obvious game-related security flaw, we decide to bash those who made the drivers.

    My my, that does seem wierd, doesn't it? We should be banging the heads of the game developers and telling them to get it right next time so there are fewer cheaters. We all know that removing the drivers to prevent cheating still leaves the gapping hole in the game.

    Boo to Asus and all those "Waaa! My fun is ruined!" whiners.

    Hurray to anyone that lets those game companies know that they did a lousy job and should do better next time.

  • It's oft-repeated in stories like this one (especially lately, relating to the Asus drivers) that, "It doesn't matter what you do, people are still going to cheat."

    This is true. A certain non-zero number N of people will cheat. Everyone accepts this as true.

    What is NOT true is the idea that because SOME people will cheat, we shouldn't try to make it HARD for people to cheat. Sometimes, there's a tradeoff involved: sure, you can make it hard to cheat, but then the game becomes frustrating to play for people who aren't cheating. You have to find the balance point where cheaters are (mostly) prevented from doing so, and regular players are't restricted unnecessarily.

    In multiplayer games like this, most of the anti-cheating measures that can be taken will *not* affect honest players. Things like encrypting the data stream (and changing the encryption method regularly), limiting what kind of input can come from the player, obscuring technical details, etc., *WILL* help reduce cheating.

    "But, dirtside," you say to me, aghast that I've just promoted the idea of Security Through Obscurity (STO), "any technical measure you propose can be gotten around!" This is true. They *CAN* be gotten around... but by making them difficult to get around, we reduce the amount of cheating that *ACTUALLY* occurs. And this can end up saving the day: if only 1% of all Tribes 2 players cheat, then in the average Tribes game you're unlikely to encounter even 1 person who is cheating. Honest players will therefore see cheating as something that is not a problem in Tribes, and the game will flourish because people aren't frustrated by trying to compete with cheaters.

    On the other hand, if 20% of Tribes 2 players cheat, then that means in a 10-on-10 CTF pickup game you join, there are, on average, 4 people cheating. In fact, with 20%, you'd be hard-pressed to find any moderately-populated game that didn't have so much cheating that the fun is essentially ruined. Now honest players will quickly get the impression that the Tribes 2 online community is rife with cheaters, and as such it's no fun playing Tribes 2 online, and the community suffers.

    "But people WILL cheat!" Yes, but having gaming and hardware companies making it *trivially easy* to cheat will be the kind of factor that increases that cheat percentage from 1 to 20%.

    Now, STO isn't a method you'd want to use when securing data that you would *never* want anyone to see -- but we're not talking about the same kind of security we talk about when we want our emails or telnet sessions encrypted. Obfuscating the inner workings of a game so as to make it more difficult for cheaters to cheat (while not inconveniencing honest players) is not the same as relying on STO for protecting the data integrity of my web server and database.

    Some people have mentioned that, at least in the particular case of the Asus drivers, developers and other honest folks actually WOULD have some use for the see-through ability of the drivers. So would it be possible to retain those features without making them available for every d00d, hax0r and punk-ass cheater to use? No, I can't think of any. That doesn't mean there AREN'T any; I'd bet there are graphics programmers here who could think of something feasible.

  • So yet again the minority loses to the whining majority. It's pretty sad how people can say "information wants to be free", then do the opposite, again and again. I guess it only applies if it doesn't affect oneself in a negative way. Well, that's excactly what your so-called enemies say and do too. Negativity is subjective.

    - Steeltoe

  • Your missing the point... (Score:3)

    by catseye_95051 ( 102231 ) on Friday May 18, 2001 @12:53PM (#212994)
    The poster wrote:
    "Personally I think this is lame. If you want to see through walls, fine: It makes playing games lame, but thats your choice"

    Three little words:
    online multiplayer games

  • There will always be people who want to cheat. If they can't use the Asus drivers then they'll find some other method. It was a neat feature of the drivers that has been removed because people complaint that it would be used to cheat.

    I agree with CmdrTaco's [cmdrtaco.net] comments on the original article [slashdot.org]. People are going to cheat anyway. I tend to play online games against people I know. I used to spend up to eight hours a day (hey, I work for a university!) playing Rise of Rome [microsoft.com] online. It seemed that for every "good" game, you'd have to put up with about four "bad" games (people whining about options, then dropping, immature kids, etc). It just wasn't worth it. I'd rather play against people I know and I don't have to worry about them cheating.

  • Fair enough. I guess I wasn't trying to imply that people should only play with friends. I was just trying to point out that there are a lot of hassles with playing online, cheating included.

    As far a tournaments and leagues, cheating (in any form) is a major issue. Having Asus remove a driver feature doesn't solve it. I think the real effort should be to devise ways to ensure people are not cheating while playing online. While the drivers may had made it easy for script kiddies, the serious cheater already has tools.

  • Whining over this is lame... (Score:4)

    by malfunct ( 120790 ) on Friday May 18, 2001 @11:30AM (#213005) Homepage
    Cheating is best dealt with socially in games. If a person cheats you don't play with that person and then they either cheat all by themselves or they start to not cheat. The only time cheating should be an issue is if there is money to be gained.

    Games should be for fun and excitement and it seems too many gamers take them FAR to seriously. I think its abominable for the community to make a company restrict drivers for this reason. Blah.

  • I think cheating is lame, but people will always try to do it. The good thing about making it a little harder with the drivers is that it will eliminate the ease with which everyone can try. It's the AOL/Napster factor. Many MP3's were around and actively traded before Napster came out, but Napster made it so easy that even my grandfather could pirate entire albums. If it is easy for anyone to cheat, then game servers will have such a high noise to signal ratio that it will be no fun for the noncheaters to play anymore.
  • The ASUS GF drivers contain a breakpoint in the OpenGL driver. It's impossible to debug an opengl program using the ASUS GF drivers, since the debugger stops in the OGL driver :). Hopefully the 'cheat'code was THAT particular piece of code so the breakpoint is gone too.
    --
  • [sarcasm follows]
    I think people are going to die anyway. So if someone creates new ways of killing them, who cares. If you stop them, someone else will do it right?
    [ends]

    Yeah right. I think that sort of thinking is bogus.

    Just because you think someone is going to do something bad eventually, doesn't mean that you should:

    1) Be the one to do it first.
    2) Be yet another one to do it
    3) Make it easy for them.
    4) Say it's ok.
    5) Waste time arguing that it's not that bad.

    Same goes for so many other things - people justifying writing script kiddie exploits and making them publicly available.

    Just because it can be done doesn't mean it should, and if it shouldn't be done, why should you speed things up?

    I wonder whether I'm wasting my time. But anyway, this is one of my little paddles against the waterfall of entropy.

    Cheerio,
    Link.
  • It's the video game manufacturer's own problem. If games were made to only render the visible portion of the game, the Asus card wouldn't be possible. In fact, I know of someone who uses the natural clipping effects in quake to see enemies that can't see him... As always, let's attack the symptoms and not the actual problem.

    ---=-=-=-=-=-=---

  • Those crying people (Score:3)

    by MongooseCN ( 139203 ) on Friday May 18, 2001 @12:24PM (#213014) Homepage
    But wow have a lot of people cried over this. As if crying is going to make any of this stop.

    But, it did just make it stop.
  • The last time such a fuss was made in the 3D card industry was about a year ago, when Asus was talking about releasing "see through" drivers. History has a tendency to repeat itself, doesn't it?

    --

  • Not sure i can agree (Score:3)

    by TotallyUseless ( 157895 ) <tot.mac@com> on Friday May 18, 2001 @11:58AM (#213020) Homepage Journal
    I dont think playing Rise of Rome and having people whining or dropping games is exactly a fair comparison to people being able to see thru walls in q1-q3. Ok, maybe you and taco only play games like this with people you know. What about the other 95% of the community that doesn't play with just friends? What about tournaments, and leagues? Most of these are played remotely from all over the country, or even all over the world.
    I just think the whole philosophy of 'I only play online games with people I know' is detrimental to the whole idea of the internet gaming community. Playing with friends at a lan party is one thing, but most people dont do this, as the net provides much easier access to gaming oppurtunities.
    Anyway, the whole point of this ramble was that just because some people only play with friends they know, that doesn't mean the majority of the internet gaming community does, and these drivers are detrimental to the internet gaming community as a whole, neat technology or not.

  • doh! (Score:3)

    by TotallyUseless ( 157895 ) <tot.mac@com> on Friday May 18, 2001 @12:29PM (#213021) Homepage Journal
    someone must have seen my comment coming through a wall and modded me before i could react
  • I'm sorry if this has been posted already as a reply to all those people that say the drivers shouldn't be banned because they weren't designed to be cheats, but here it is:

    These drivers were designed to be cheats. ASUS promoted them as the thing that'd give you the edge over other gamers.

    If this weren't the case, then perhaps I'd be more sympathetic toward them. As it is, I don't think I'd dare post my thoughts on here for fear of being modded a troll.

  • At least now it will be more difficult for the cheaters to cheat. I'm sure the drivers will live for years on warez sites, but the cheaters will have to suffer through endless pages of porn banners to get them. Some of them might even not bother and play fair. At the very least there will be less cheaters using the drivers so when we go to play games online there will be less chance we end up with a cheater against us.

  • When you use these drivers, you don't just ruin YOUR gaming experience, you ruin the experience of the OTHER 30 people you are playing with.
  • In another place [slashdot.org], Timothy whinges "It's a sad state of things when you've got to prove that something is good in order that it not be presumed harmful".

    Meanwhile, the Asus see-through driver is BAD.

    Go figure.

  • The cat's out of the bag. It has not stopped. ASUS now pleases everyone. The cheater has up-to-date drivers with cheating ability. The rest kisses ASUS' butt for removing the see-through part from the drivers. ASUS should be treated just as if they had not removed the cheat, because effectively they haven't.
  • The game developer can always make it harder for people who want to cheat, but unless the clients run in a 100% trusted environment (hard- and software), cheating can not be made impossible. The amount of data which is sent to the client is a tradeoff between security and performance. Just like hits are not calculated for every single polygon of a playermodel, the wall-player order is not tested for every single wall polygon. Accepting a serious performance penalty just to make cheating a little harder is not worth the trouble. It's important not to make cheating easy but it's foolish to try and make it impossible. ASUS is being spit in the face for intentionally making cheating a lot easier.

  • Re:Skilled programmer to re-enable it? (Score:3)

    by YKnot ( 181580 ) on Friday May 18, 2001 @12:43PM (#213037)

    This driver could have had some cool uses besides cheating, though.

    Name one.

  • No one is likely to boycot the product because of this but come on, it clearly took some programmer some time and concerted effort to develop this 'feature'.

    Actually, I'm currently in the market for a 3D card (my current one's a Canopus Pure3D -- it's so old that the company apparently let the pure3d.com domain registration lapse) and will not by an Asus one exactly because of this situation.

    I know exactly two things about Asus -- that I've heard of the GeForce 3 (but don't recall whether it was good or bad) and that they released this driver. The former would've been enough for me to at least look into them. The latter is enough that I will not bother.

  • Tools don't have to have a legitimate purpose, they just have to be. Any other attitude stifles innovation, and otherwise Just Plain Sucks.

    Yes, but I'm not attempting to stifle them. Rather, I'm simply refusing to personally fund them. My money, my choice where it goes.

    As someone else in the thread pointed out, nVidia also makes a GeForce 3 and they're sponsoring the E3 coverage on another website I frequent. Barring some amazing technical or price advantage of the Asus product, I just don't see any reason for them to get my business.

  • What I don't get.. (Score:3)

    by infiniti99 ( 219973 ) <justin@affinix.com> on Friday May 18, 2001 @05:58PM (#213045) Homepage
    Is why a driver can allow you to cheat. Really, that's the fundamental problem here.

    Remember BBS games? Could you ever cheat in those? NO! Not unless there was a known hack on the server. Otherwise, send all the info you want to the BBS. There was absolutely no possible way to cheat by hacking. You could hack your terminal client, but big whoop-de-do.

    This is the current problem with multiplayer games: too much information is known by the client. WAY too much. And most of these games: Half-life, Quake, etc are *server* based games. So what's the excuse? It's not like you have the insecurities of peer-to-peer. There is a trusted server. So why - oh - why do these client machines know so much? In particular, why does the video card know so much? Are the programmers that lazy that they are trusting the video card to figure everything out? Man, back in my day we had to render each pixel. The video card knew only what we wanted it to know.

    Granted, there are other ways to cheat in games (like auto-aim, etc), but this? See through textures? This is plain laughable. This is not a driver vender problem. This is a game developer problem. Fix your damn games.
  • I'm left somewhat stunned by some of the responses I've read here. Although the Slashdot community often revels in their "cluefulness" in the face of FUD from Microsoft, goofy patents, or dumb legislation, this issue shows that Slashdotters are no more immune to ignorance, than anyone else.

    It seems a good many people are desperately trying to apply their favorite arguements from other issues onto a situation to which they flatly do not apply. This is not a security issue. There is no system compromise, nor privacy invasion. So bleating "security through obscurity" arguments are simply non-sequitor attempts to bring a "with-it" argument into a debate where it does not apply. Neither does the argument that online games are somehow flawed, becuase a driver *can* bypass the rendering code of the game. By arguing such, you simply demonstrate that you do not understand how such mechanisms work.

    Unless we want to limit gameservers to processing engines vastly in excess of the typical linux box, or nt server, it simply isn't practical to attempt to render a scene according to a viewpoint at the server - because the clients, all 16, 32, or 64 of them are constantly moving, and not always in predictable ways. That scene data has to be computed at the client, because it's simply not practical to do it elsewhere.

    But what really floors me, is that some of you would defend a company who have deliberately embraced unethical behavior and made it a selling point of their product.

    Understanding this situation, requires first a basic understanding of the real issues.

    First, competitive online gaming is currently being pursued by a lot of people. They join leagues like the OGL [worldogl.com] and compete in games against other players and teams. There are hundreds of thousands of people doing this now. By they have a huge achilles heel. Online games are vulnerable to cheating, and unlike offline sports, it is hugely difficult to verify that a person is playing an honest game.

    So we must live under the honor system. we have no choice but to *trust* that our opponents are playing an honest game. And indeed, the vast majority do. But those who do not, are hard to catch. But until now, the cheats available have been crude, and usually detectable at some level, or preventable by server operators. Most are fairly crude hacks, and don't work all that well anyway. But now, here comes Asus - and designs a driver whose express purpose is to help people cheat. And so, the cheaters now have a nice, professionally developed, virtually undetectable means by which to cheat, and there is basically no way in which to stop them, or ensure you are getting a fair game now.

    Now some of you have said "but these drivers might be useful for other purposes, like development, etc.". Maybe they are. But that's not what Asus coded them for, or is selling them as. They are marketing these drivers expressely to help people do something morally wrong. Cheating other people. Asus is a Corporation without ethical standards, for whom the promotion of unethical, shitty behavior is fine if it makes them money. They absolutely represent the worst of what Corporatism can produce. Yet - slashdotters are defending these dirtbags. Irony.

    There is no rational argument, which will make this right. And objecting to their despicable business practices, and this product which appeals to the very worst human failings, is hardly whining. Rather, it is simply well justified righteous indignation. And gamers are completely justified in carrying the good fight to them.

    Does cheating happen? yes. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't fight it at every opportunity. Cancer happens too - yet no one says "it's going to happen anyway, so just let the victims die".

    Some of you folks need to think this issue through a little more fully.

    Brian Davis
    President
    Online Gaming League

  • ...or is this the weirdest public relations fiasco the 3d card industry has seen in some time?

    Seriously. Hands up. How many of you were planning on boycotting the GeForce 3 based on how this issue played out? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

    Why is this such a fuss? Did they have some big customer survey that said this was an important issue for them?

  • Very bad PR move (Score:3)

    by hillct ( 230132 ) on Friday May 18, 2001 @11:38AM (#213048) Homepage Journal
    How could the company not have foreseen this as a PR disaster? No one is likely to boycot the product because of this but come on, it clearly took some programmer some time and concerted effort to develop this 'feature'. Why was it even developed? It's rediculous. People who want to cheat will cheat. part of the fun for them is finding new and creative ways to do it. Let them have their kind of fun. Let the rest of us play our games in peace, and save dome R&D dollars by not wasting programmers' time with things like this.


    --
  • Simply boycott Asus products, there are mounds of competitors products who are just as good and produced by companies that listen to their consumers(the drivers were leaked before the poll was even started for those that didn't know). Hit 'em in the pocket book and they'll not soon forget that we don't want then screwing with our games, hit them hard enough, and they become a grim reminder to other companies not to try something so horrible. If you don't think its necessary to strike back, I ask you, what's to stop other companies from doing the same thing? Asus now has a marketing point to exploit: their products really do make you better at games than others, if this point is not made undesirable, other companies will adopt it. Personally, I will never buy another Asus product regardless of what they say now; they've already proven themselves an unscrupulous company in my mind. It was obvious from the beginning what these drivers would be used for.

    "// this is the most hacked, evil, bastardized thing I've ever seen. kjb"

  • Can build a shim into the D3D driver stack and enable transparency without any help from the driver vendors.

    And, on any open source OS a skilled programmer can hack the X server, the DRI, the tcp/ip stack and anything else that might make it possible to cheat.

    Cheaters will cheat. It is upto the developers to stop the cheating. Having transparent walls does you no good if the game doesn't draw things that you can not see. This is one reason to prefer BSP trees for HLHSR (Hidden Line & Hidden Surface Removal) instead of Z buffers.

    StoneWolf

  • Is for game companies to get serious about cheat protection especially of the fps variety although I don't think drivers like these could be stopped other cheats, aimbots, skin hacks etc should be eliminated. Non standard clients should give notification that something is not right with the person who just connected at least.
  • Sludge writes:
    Sure, a skilled programmer could cheat. It's been possible to look through walls in games since there was access to hack up openGL drivers to add 50% opacity to all surfaces.

    This is about cheating for the masses. When users have to click a checkbox to enable a cheat, there is bound to be more cheaters because it is more accessible. In that respect, Asus opened the door to something new and bad.

    Your argument can be extended to prove that script kiddies don't exist in large numbers, since few script kiddies have the programming skill to write their own tools... The warez scene must be dead too, since how many people that deal in warez (especially the games) know how to crack them?

    People forget that the internet provides us with all sorts of information, including plenty of client-side mods that can be used for things like cheating, as well as tools for the script kiddies and warez for those without the knowledge/resources to crack their own. To believe that the removal of see-through drivers will stop cheating is naive. People cheat because they want to. Anyways, I doubt this makes it that much easier, most of the gamers I know don't even look at their video card settings (or have any computer knowledge besides getting their games to work).

    OTOH, this does make me rather sad. There could be some legitimate uses for this driver. Just because the majority of people use something for doing wrong doesn't make the "something" wrong, does it? Or do we want to ban p2p filesharing since most people use it to trade copywrited songs? Then we can ban file transfer ability in IRC clients since 99% of the time, they only seem to be distributing songs/video, and we should really stop allowing individuals to have ftp (sure, it has legitimate purposes, but people can use it for bad things). I'm rather sick of slashdot atm. A community that rushes to defend DeCSS and yells about copywrite protection features in new versions of windows has no qualms about being hypocrits when it comes to something they don't understand.

  • > Left claw North! RIGHTCLAWSOUTH!!

    AYBABTU it aint...

    --Blair
  • All the driver does is basically make a surface transparent instead of drawing it. The drawing of the surfaces in the first place is handled by the driver, so it's not a problem with the game. There's not much you can do about it.

    --
  • >So why - oh - why do these client machines know >so much? Here's why: When you have a multiplayer 3D game, it requires a considerable amount of data to be transferred over the network, particularly for something like a dialup connection. With, say, about 10% packet loss on these connections (and high latency), most multiplayer games would simply not work if the client had to request data at the exact moment it is needed. Most multiplayer game clients, for example, a QuakeWorld client, recieves information of unrevealed objects beforehand, so the client will be able to estimate their locations even with some packet loss. >In particular, why does the video card know so >much? Are the programmers that lazy that they >are trusting the video card to figure >everything out? Man, back in my day we had to? >render each pixel. The video card knew only >what we wanted it to know. No, the programmers are not "lazy;" most of the type of games concerned use maps that are available on the client side. It's simply not feasible for the server to dynamically stream environment information to a client, nor for the video card to continuously flush the scene information and redraw...

    --
  • It's odd to me that the shoe is on the other foot now. When DVD manufacturers try to limit what users can do through closed source drivers and cryptographic means, everybody is up in arms about that. With open source drivers, open hardware specs, and the ability of users to improve drivers, it is inevitable that someone implements "see through" 3D rendering. So, what is it, are we committed to open source ideals and the ability of users to modify the software that they are using, or do we prefer closed source, proprietary software and hardware?

    As for the effects on multiplayer gaming, I actually think they could be positive. If you play games with people you know and trust, you don't have to worry about cheating: people play for the fun of it, and cheating would only spoil that. People who do cheat are unlikely to develop those kinds of relationships, since their opponents will notice. And if you play at LAN parties, you can make sure people don't cheat. So, it seems to me that the possibility of having modified drivers really just encourages people to be more social.

  • I've seen this before... (Score:4)

    by GearheadX ( 414240 ) on Friday May 18, 2001 @12:23PM (#213079)
    • And it ain't pretty..

      Code Master of the Gameshark Code Creators' Club used that exact same arguement when he posted cheat codes for Phantasy Star Online, and those codes ultimately wrecked the distribution of special weapons and allowed script kiddies to kill their own teammates. People stopped playing the game over this and it thrashed the servers that Sega had so thoughfully provided the players of the game free of charge.

      Thankfully, the cheats have gone on to other things since the fun has gone out of the game for them. Alas, we lost a lot of good players in the PSO community thanks to those codes corrupting 100s of hours worth of save data per character among other problems.

      Online gaming can be construed as a community, and when the understood rules of that community are violated it isn't just the cheater who is deprived of a good gaming expereince, but the entire community as well. These drivers are not an isolated incident, not just one person has them.


    Berk Watkins

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