04-08-2003, 05:16 PM
Quote:-> Blizzard is forbidden to scan your computer for 3rd party hacks.
Bots simulate player behavior, if player behavior is close enough to how a bot operates, how are they going to tell the difference? Instead, why not simply ask people's permission to 'detect' known hacks or bots running in memory, and simply ban 100% of those who use them and leave the legitimate users alone?
Unfotunatelly locally detecting hacks would be ultimatelly futile. Someone out there would just invent a anti-detect hack circumventing the detection. Hack simply skips the said detection code and returns a 'this client is legit' response to the server. I'm speaking from years of experience with client server software programming and its not possible to locally enforce server rules against a hacker who has administritive access to the client (and therefore has the ability to change the client code at will and still remain "compliant" aslong as enough knowledge has been gained of the client and the client/server protocol through reverse engineering etc.) ... or in other words the server should not entrust to the client crucial functions and accept on face value what the client states.
The sending of the map for entire area (in D2) down to the client is one of the most visible examples this... we have MH as the result. The alternative would have been to have increased client/server lag as the map is revealed to the client in small chunks. Blizzard compromised there (its hard to fault them for it though ... they took a realistic option) and the result was quite forseeable.
BTW, the ultimate MH prevention server-coding would require the whole screen to be sent to the client as either graphic bitmap or drawing instructions for the area layout on each frame update (there could be some minor optimisation here with action-prediction by the client). Special handling of map-fog-of-war for position of hostile (PvP) players would have to be considered, not letting client know they were nearby until they closed in. This would make the client very 'dumb' (it would just draw what the server said happened) and the interaction extremely laggy unless everyone had immense network bandwidth at their disposal for the purpose of online play ...well, maybe one day.