Cheating in SupcomFA
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Nevermind that:
- Most UI mods aren't cheating but are to enable enhancements to visual display or selection, which may be a very personal choice.
- A blanket ban with whitelist would create a lot more work for developers to check all submitted ui mods.
- Will alienate a lot of players who aren't cheating.
- Will discourage modding which is one of the points of interest to some players and has helped to give faf its longevity.
- Is completely unenforceable anyway.
If there is a particular ui mod which is causing you sleepless nights you should probably discuss that.
Automatic eco management style mods have always been the big bone of contention but funny how most top players don't seem to use them.
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@Reckless_Charger said in Cheating in SupcomFA:
Nevermind that:
- Most UI mods aren't cheating but are to enable enhancements to visual display or selection, which may be a very personal choice.
- A blanket ban with whitelist would create a lot more work for developers to check all submitted ui mods.
- Will alienate a lot of players who aren't cheating.
- Will discourage modding which is one of the points of interest to some players and has helped to give faf its longevity.
- Is completely unenforceable anyway.
If there is a particular ui mod which is causing you sleepless nights you should probably discuss that.
Automatic eco management style mods have always been the big bone of contention but funny how most top players don't seem to use them.
- Well we need a consensus on what cheating actually is.
- A blanket ban answers your enforceability question and its only for ranked games. There would be some work involved, but that would be no different from the current process, where "essentials" have previously been integrated.
- How are we defining cheating? Macros are well known in all other game type to be considered cheats. In fact if you take any UI mod currently in FAF and mde an equivalent for StarCraft2 and used it in a tournament, i bet they would be disqualified.
- I don't see this happening. In fact, there is more incentive, because rather than you being the only one using it, there is a chance for it to be directly integrated into the game. That is a direct incentive.
- See 2
But yes, the biggest problem we're facing it was is considered cheating. I could give myself innumerable small advantages, through UI mods and then inflate my rank and no one would have a clue. Which makes the whole FAF competitive gameplay a farce.
And if you say small advantages mean nothing. That is exactly how Hannible became a historical legend. He gave himself many small advantages on the battlefield and this led to victory and conquest across most of the civilised world.
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This is just thread #6783865 about restricting UI mods. Well you just can't. You have a set of engine functions available that we can't change and the whole UI is built on top of that. How its built can be different on each computer and you will never have a way of telling if it is modified or not.
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@speed2 Can you customise the interface that FAF lobby loads? Or detect when a UI mod is selected?
I guess one implementation since we have a blacklist, is to blacklist all UUID apart from a specific set of them.
Now the only question is UUID verification.
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You can customize it but it always have to load the base game files. If you ban everything, you can always alter the base game files. At this point UI modding is prolly killed. But then you can try to verify if the base game files werent modified, but you can always go around it one way or another. And its a lot of work for no real gain.
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You can implement any UI mod directly into the base game files and no one would know, so any checks of UID of the mods is not a valid option.
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It takes 2 second to change mods UID to fit the one from the whitelist. And you will never tell it was modified
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Speed; doesn’t nx2 files get changed whenever the game detechs, a difference between them and the host files? Or you mean base base game files?
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Client, not the game, but then you can build your own client version that wont care. Right now, just changing the files to read only does the job.
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You keep giving the same argument that they'll just replace an implemented UI mod with their modified mod, and then change over the UUID. My suggestion is that the client detects when a game is loaded and calls for a access token that is then generated by the integrated mods. When a game is issued as ranked, UI mods themselves are locked out from loading or being selected.
You can do exactly the same thing for the client, when they first log into the server to avoided non-authorised clients. Sure they can still go and hack the client, but at this point cheating is very difficult, and the community is to small for any sort of wide spread support the production of cheating mods that take that sort of effort.
As it stands anyone with basic knowledge of LUA can right now make a cheated UI mod and implement it with 0 restrictions. What I'm suggesting is not a "full proof" way. Its an "idiot proof" way. Basically it locks out idiots from being able to cheat the game.
You wouldn't even need an overly complex encryption key and you can base it fully on in game values, such as user ID. Parse the user name of the individual and then push it through an encryption module to generate a key that is then collected or sent to the server. As the server also has the user ID available it can do the same and match the code.
The qualm about work required is irrelevant. I'd be happy to contribute so long as I know it'd get implemented into the client.
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You need just a basic knowledge of Lua to create a simple mod. You need more to make a decent mod and you need to know the game quite well to create a cheating mod.
You twisted idea of cheating mods is your thing, but I doubt you'll manage to change FAF to support your crusade against UI mods. -
Speed, you calling SCTA not a decent mod! /SarcasmEmojiThatDoesn'tExist
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Psions, what UI mods do you see as being cheating?
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What you suggest is the equivalent of a no-cd protection. And these get hacked, even without being open source.
But the game files are open source and so is the client. We can spend 100 hours in building a solution, and it takes like 1 hour to remove it again. -
Would it be possible to increase the volume of acu teleport sound, or add a ping to the teleport in and teleport out animation and / or change the animation to a crossmark that covers a large area? Asking for a friend.
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No. Just git gut scrub.
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Joining in here to support Speed2 - you can quite literally add in files to the base game that hook into files with no way to detect their changes if these changes are UI-related. And if you can detect them then it is some lua code that is doing the detecting, which can be easily removed too.
To hook into (hurr) your example on snipe warnings: correct me if I am wrong but as far as I can see you cannot make such a system. You can see what the UI can access from the engine at:
Searching for units in the sim (as your post suggests) is not part of that.
You can find all kinds of (interesting) UI capabilities when inspecting files in /lua/ui, of which some (indirectly) do influence the sim - such as pausing units or changing the priorities of units.
I do agree that there should be a discussion on whether we make some of the UI mods more commonly known, such as Advanced Target Priorities (ATP) (that even without CPU sniping can still have a major impact). More commonly known in terms of: users get prompted for the existence of the mods on their first launch of the client, there is some tutorial / guide that tells these mods exist and that gets prompted on the first launch or they are automatically downloaded from the vault on your first launch so that if you ever scroll through the list of mods, you'll see them in there.
I'm not sure how applicable this is (and how desirable), but I think the existence of these type of UI mods should be communicated somehow. Not knowing about / not using a UI mod like ATP does give you a distinct disadvantage in my opinion, which can feel unfair.
A work of art is never finished, merely abandoned
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If it is felt that advanced target priorities is good for new players, then it gets integrated.
If it is felt that it isn't, then it stays as a mod.
Introducing new players to it as a ui mod defeats the whole purpose of it being separate. Now you give focus to this UI mod as something new players need to get better, when really it couldn't be a worse thing to focus on. It's like worrying about the title of your book when you can't even string two coherent thoughts together.
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@Jip keyser had a thread on the old forums about ui mods, having something like that in the new ones and maybe as a side link on the news in the client might be enough to let everyone know about them?
On that note, about the ATP that was integrated into FAF some time ago (the infamous snipe mode), is there any specific documentation on how the target priorities actually change when it is enabled?
Last time I tried to look for that I just got utterly lost.
