[bf1942] Anti cheat tool

[James Gurney]

Prevention is better than detection. Anyone who ever ran a CS server 
will remember that 'Cheating death' was far, far superior to Punkbuster. 
Trying to detect cheats on the client and then send that information to 
the server is far too easy to work around, and the game becomes an arms 
race to see who can release fastest; The cheat coders, or the anti-cheat 
coders. History has shown that usually, the cheat coders release a lot 
faster.

I don't want another client/server app like PB. It's a hassle for the 
players on the server, and it flat out doesn't work long term. The only 
feature of PB that I liked was the screenshot upload ability. Something 
like that could be useful, but again, still requires the client/server 
part and still is comparitively easy to work around.

I don't claim to have an answer or a better suggestion, but I think the 
place where this needs to be tackled is by DICE internally, and not by 
licensing a kludgy third party technology that doesn't work properly.

There's stuff that could (should) be done in the server code now that 
would help. For example, the cheats that show where the opposing team 
are on the minimap wouldn't work unless that data was sent to the client 
- so don't send it in the first place. Likewise, positional data should 
only be sent if the opposing team member is within your sphere of 
vision. This was how Cheating Death worked with CS and it was highly 
successful.

On the other hand, I don't find cheating in BF based games to be that 
bad yet. The style of gameplay means that being able to tell where your 
opponents are isn't a massive help like it is in a closer quarters game 
like CS. Sure, there's some cheating going on, but I don't think it's 
ruining the game like it did with CS. Not yet, at any rate.

James

Miguel Filho wrote:
> 
> Shure! Punkbuster is the first name that came to my mind in this cases,
> it did a good job in quake3, RTCW and others.
> 
> And by the way, works on windoze, mac and linux.
> 
> Miguel
> 
> 
> Ideally EA/DICE should just license PunkBuster, and offload that whole
> development path. It doesn't sound like they have the internal resources
> available for this.