|
|||
The new game World War 2 Online is in final beta test now. (Well, actually, it was really released but it was in such dismal shape that they're not charging for online play until they get the problems cleaned up. It already requires a 600 megabyte patch to be downloaded and it still doesn't work.) And it's already been hacked, using something called "Gear". (I've been trying to find details of this.) (discuss) Update: A faithful reader has written in to point me to a location where "gear" can be downloaded, where I learned that it is another name for a program called "speedhack". I read about this last year, and it's clever. It's not surprising that it screws up games. What it does is to change the way the local time-of-day clock on your computer works. (After using it you have to set your clock again.) All these games work by synchronizing your movements to real time, so that irrespective of whether you have a fast computer or slow one, with fast frame rates or slow frame rates, you in principle can do the same thing as everyone else in wall-clock time. So if your computer has a slow frame rate then it permits you to move further per frame, while if your frame rate is high then it does less per frame. What "speedhack" does is to fool the program into thinking that its framerate is much slower than it actually is. This means it lets you do more per frame, so you can move faster and fire faster and change weapons faster and reload faster and heal faster. No wonder it makes someone invulnerable: if the game implements projectile speeds it really could be possible to run faster than a speeding bullet. Maybe what's needed is virtual kryptonite. Actually, the counter measure to this is trivial: every five seconds, every client computer would send a special "five seconds have passed" blip to the server. Anyone blipping at the wrong rate too often (say, 5% or more off on four successive blips) would get booted. |
|||
