Hack Shield?

[banjee]

With shootmania being a FPS I don't know if you guys in France and the rest of Europe have problems with hackers but here in the US it is almost impossible to play on a server of Call of Duty or other such games and not be destroyed by hackers with they're aimbots and wallhack and telekill and so on... I was just wondering what kind of hackshield you were going to use because depending on how good it is it could make or break the game. Take Combat Arms for instance. The game is almost useless to begin with but it is so plagued by hackers and other such because of the weak hack shield that they have to update the game every month just to keep the hackers at bay. I don't want this to happen to shootmania because it sounds like it has potential to be a hit in the US (I have showed it to some of my friends ) but like I said a hack shield is very important to an FPS.

[Trackmaniack]

Use PunkBuster. BF2 and BFPlay4Free both use it, and I've yet to run into a hacker. Some high K/D ratios, but nothing really that I could consider a hacker.

[zixxiz]

Punkbuster has a pretty good rep, but may not be the best choice. How has Trackmania managed to stay mostly hack free? And high K/Ds are not indicative of cheating, as I can personally attest.

[Xymph]

How has Trackmania managed to stay mostly hack free?

Uhh, it isn't.

[Trackmaniack]

However, hackers -are- very rare in TM...I've yet to come across one...and I think it's because of the nature of TM itself that discourages griefing. I, personally, don't give a hoot about my ladder score, and only race for fun. If I end up in a top slot, great, more bragging rights for me, but if I don't, I'm not going to worry about it. In a shooter, things are a little different. In collision-less-TM, if there's a hacker wasting everyone's records, you can just ignore him and race around him, especially if there's no collisions. But in a shooter, if you have a guy with an aimbot, he can really ruin everyone's day, cuz it actually affects the other players.

[haenry]

That's a good point, trackmaniack. In TM it just does not make so much fun and sense to cheat. That's why cheaters a rare. TM is not hacker/cheater-free, but they are so rare, that it doesn't matter that much.
So let's just hope the same will count for the MP-games as well.
A hacker free game is actually impossible in my eyes, but a rare amount of hackers is pretty much the same

[Xymph]

TM is not hacker/cheater-free, but they are so rare, that it doesn't matter that much.

There are 2500+ logins banned from Dedimania, and another 1400 one-timers that got away with a warning. That's not rare. If left alone, they would have polluted the online world record lists for thousands of tracks with tens of thousands of cheated entries. Actually, they did, and cleaning that up takes me 1-2 hours every day, since spring 2009. That certainly matters a lot to me.

Something similar, though on a smaller scale because it costs coppers, happens with the official single player records. It must take Nadeo valuable time (that can thus not be spent on constructive work) to clean that up too. Read the links in my previous post.

I'm not looking for applause or anything, just correcting the misperception by you and zixxiz. You only think cheaters are rare and don't matter because you don't see the mess that would result if they had free reign.

[haenry]

I'm not looking for applause or anything, just correcting the misperception by you and zixxiz. You only think cheaters are rare and don't matter because you don't see the mess that would result if they had free reign.

I guess you are right. I only saw one cheater in my whole years of playing TM. That's why I thought they are rare.
But I was wrong at that point...

[zixxiz]

I am well aware that there are cheaters here and there, but I have seem maybe one or two first hand and a couple in the Single Player ladder. But I think that saying Trackmania is mostly hack free or even that cheaters are rare is justified if there is an incidence rate of under 5000 (a total of your figures) out of a few million.

I do not know how the various anticheat applications work, but in addition to a memory sniffer like PunkBuster, if servers are properly administered, as most good Trackmania servers are, global reporting and banning (perhaps through Mania Planet) are powerful tools.

[Alter-Fox]

One thing I'd add is that the availability (and accessibility, most likely) of maniascript could compound the problem. I'm obviously not sure exactly how it will work but it sounds like it can do more than just create set pieces and other functions on maps... Nadeo will have to be very careful it doesn't provide too many ways to hackers and cheaters to gain an unfair advantage.

If shootmania has no AI to begin with (which is what I've heard so far) it would be much harder to create bots though. And the maniaplanet system itself could provide ways to check whether the actual game files have been hacked or changed, and simply not allow connections to the maniaplanet server if they have been.
But again, maniascript would be the real loophole.