Left 4 Dead Bug Patched Quickly, EVE Exploit Takes 4 Years 157
Earlier this week, news surfaced that some savvy modders of Valve's Left 4 Dead were able to find a way to enable console commands (meant for the PC version) in the Xbox 360 version of the game. This allowed players to increase the size of their character models to ridiculous proportions, spawn unlimited weapons for themselves (or unlimited enemies for other, unsuspecting players), and go around the map deleting objects as they saw fit. A video posted on YouTube showed how to enable the commands. Valve reacted swiftly to the issues, releasing a patch to disable access to the commands a few days later. Several readers have pointed out another exploit-related story which broke recently; in EVE Online, a bug that was reported and went un-patched for four years has recently come to light, apparently responsible for the fraudulent creation of trillions of ISK, the game's currency. An anonymous reader says that (illegitimate) sales of ISK between players and farmers run on the order of $35 per 450 million ISK.
What about Castle Crashers? (Score:1, Interesting)
Valve patched this problem within a few days? How did they do that?
Players have been waiting for a patch for Castle Crashers for ages now. (The game is plagued by bugs that result in connection loss and even savegame deletion.) According to the developers, the patch has been done for a while, but the slow Microsoft approval process hasn't allowed it to get released yet.
What's going on here?
The article is WRONG, no gigant, but a 3D skybox. (Score:5, Interesting)
Half-Life engine uses a tecnique to have "3D skybox" using a special room where stuff displayed here show in the sky, so anything there looks gigantic.
Tutorial here:
http://www.moddb.com/games/half-life-2/tutorials/3d-skybox-tutorial [moddb.com]
Pathetic (Score:4, Interesting)
As someone who played Half-Life and particularly Team Fortress Classic for numerous years and clans at a fairly advanced level (not to mention all the Quakes, Unreal Tourney, etc. etc.) this whole story is a gigantic WTF for me.
The ranting and frothing of the various console owners who, quite simply don't have a clue - or appreciate - what the in-game console is or does is stunning. I suppose it's kinda to be expected from not really having a keyboard to access this stuff but the responses from the vast majority are shocking (see the kotaku article on this:
http://kotaku.com/5106048/left-4-dead-xbox-360-hacks-to-ruin-everything [kotaku.com] ).
First off these aren't hacks or exploits in the traditional sense and generally can't be run unless the server owner has set their server to cheat mode on (console command: sv_cheats 1). The reporting of this isn't crystal clear in the Half-Life engine and can catch people unawares, but only the server host/admin can adjust it. I suppose this wasn't such a big deal back in the day when a 'server' was usually dedicated as opposed to the way it runs on todays consoles (the host player runs the server and plays in it at the same time). At any rate, I imagine that even on the Xbox only the host player can run these commands (or anyone with remote server admin logon). It's not like JoeySmacktard can join your game and use these commands without you going out your way to allow him to do so.
Secondly, this kind of tweaking is absolutely HILARIOUS (at least amongst consenting adults ;) ). I've some fond memories of many games and mods run on my LAN with friends running around maps in low gravity, movement speed set to several hundred miles per hour or friction set to be negative, throwing everyone all over the place. If valve truly has nuked these commands for good on xbox then I can only say it is a sad day for console owners of the game. It's a co-op game for god's sake, you're probably playing with good friends and once you've worked your way through the standard game such 'tweaks' really give it a new lease of life.
If these commands were left in without sv_cheats being the toggle and usable by anyone on the server - I will humbly stand corrected. But frankly I doubt it. Glad I'll be getting the PC version so that this sort of stuff is left optional to me - as it should be.
Re:Eve-online exploit: more information (Score:2, Interesting)
You have to have the methods in the game to tack this stuff... records have to be kept about the creation of minerals, etc. and then all of that has to be tied together. Sure, you may have records that moon minerals were being created... there's lots of that going on and it's something probably logged. But you have to correlate that with certain stations not using fuel to create these minerals, if such a think is recorded... "station X used Y amount of fuel and created Z amount of minerals" is something that probably isn't logged (but may be soon). Plus, if there's a bug in the code, those messages may be in the log anyway... just wrong. You can notice large amounts of isk moving around from player to player in-game, but how do you correlate *that* 0.12 isk (out of literally many trillions of ISK in the game) entered the game through an exploit? I don't know of any game that's able to tag every unit of in-game money that way.