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First Person Shooters (Games)

Doom 3 Beta Patch to Address Config File Cheating 63

Posted by Zonk from the does-this-bug-you-i'm-not-touching-you dept.
Jason Shoulders writes "There's a discussion at Quake3World about an upcoming change in the first Doom 3 patch. Specifically, Id Software's Robert Duffy has updated his .plan file and mentions making 'r_skipNewAmbient, r_skipSpecular, r_skipBump, and r_shadows cheat protected'. This will force players to use features such as bump mapping and shadows. What settings gray the line between tweaking and cheating?"
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Doom 3 Beta Patch to Address Config File Cheating More

Doom 3 Beta Patch to Address Config File Cheating

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  • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:Why? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Goldberg's Pants ( 139800 )
      Funny... They're making graphical stuff mandatory, thus screwing over to a degree the scaleability of the game.

      Back when I had a REALLY lame machine and I played Unreal Tournament, I had a lot of graphical stuff off, including dynamic lighting. Game ran well. Problem was, when I went to play online, it forced the options on, making the game unplayable.

  • Hold up! (Score:5, Funny)

    by FooAtWFU ( 699187 ) on Friday September 17, 2004 @09:39AM (#10276372) Homepage
    Doom 3 with all the special effects *on*? Darn. I'm going to need a new computer.
    • Parent modded improperly. Doom 3 + all effects = murder on some computers. It was a legitimate comment.
      • Those are basic effects, not advanced ones. Even with those settings enabled, Doom 3 is relatively modest in its hardware requirements (it's just that some people think a system that can run Counterstrike should run Doom 3). These effects give you a great advantage by disabling them and forcefully disabling them would anger all those people who don't care about these advantages and just want to play a game that doesn't look completely ass (Doom 3 without Normalmaps is ugly). So, who would you rather piss of
        • it's just that some people think a system that can run Counterstrike should run Doom 3

          You're implying that if you're system can run CS, it SHOULDN'T be able to run Doom 3:) Is this some weird new game company gimmick? I mean they already blacklist perfectly legal software with their copy protection, surely blacklisting competitors products is the next logical step.

          My system is below the minimum specs of Doom 3 on a couple of spots, and runs the game just fine.

  • cheating? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by alatesystems ( 51331 ) <chris@NOSpAm.chrisbenard.net> on Friday September 17, 2004 @09:41AM (#10276389) Homepage Journal
    I don't see how this would be cheating in the single player experience. Cheating is when the company doesn't let me do what I want with property I purchase.

    If they are talking about multi-player, whatever. The multi-player in doom3 sucks; they are leaving that up to modders.

    I still don't see how it is bad? Are people hiding in shadows and other people aren't seeing those shadows? Wouldn't that make the ones hiding campers? I hate campers.

    Chris

    • Re:cheating? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by August_zero ( 654282 ) on Friday September 17, 2004 @10:00AM (#10276559)
      The multi-player in doom3 sucks; they are leaving that up to modders.

      That is exactly what I thought, and it seems like this is only going to make it more difficult for that all so important "it can carry our mulitplayer capabilities" mod community to actually mod it.

      I wonder though, are adding cheats and mods to single plyer games some day going to be sited as violating the DMCA? It could be argued that cheats make game easier, lead to quicker completion and thus lower sales (not that I am saying it is, but I believe nintendo once used an argument similar to this in one of their long ago battles with cheat devices like the game genie)

      Maybe what they should do, is add a little feature that forces the client to provide the server with a copy of their config file; if the host wants to block people messing with the lighting effects, they could turn on a filter that could block the would be sort-of-cheaters or choose to ignore them if they don't care?
      • Erm, I still can't see how this makes modding harder. Cheat protection very likely means the game enforces a value for the CVAR unless the server set sv_cheats (or what it's currently called) to 1. A mod could change this setting andit's not exactly something that will interfere with your mod making. Oh no, I can't offer the user the ability to turn of the normalmapping or shadows! Seriously, what effect does enforcing a certain minimum of visual quality have on mod making?
      • If game companies were worried about cheaters reducing sales why do 99.999% of all games have cheat codes built into them? The DCMA doesnt come into it when you can type "god" and "give all"

        Personally I think that cheating drive up sales of single player games. The sooner I complete a game the sooner I want to buy a new one so if I cheat to complete a game I will be putting my hand in my pocket quicker than I normally would. I am sure I am not alone here.
        • Actually, the purpose of "cheat codes" is to let quality assurance testers duplicate bugs. They're actually dev tools.

          Trust me, it's no fun to play a pre-alpha game for an hour just to replicate one crash bug, if you can do the same thing in 5 minutes with liberal applications of iddqd and summon_weapon plasma rifle.

          --AC
    • I still don't see how it is bad? Are people hiding in shadows and other people aren't seeing those shadows? Wouldn't that make the ones hiding campers? I hate campers.

      If you force me to turn shadows on, I can't play the game - it's too slow. I guess I won't play online, because somehow it's been decided that turning shadows off is cheating.

      • Re:cheating? (Score:3, Informative)

        by delus10n0 ( 524126 )
        How did you even play it single player then?

        I can get Doom3 to run in single player just fine-- high quality setting, 1024x768 on a Radeon 9800 Pro 128meg card... .. but the instant I go try to play multiplayer, my framerate is just about halved or worse, and it's very sluggish.

  • What's cheating? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by TheLink ( 130905 ) on Friday September 17, 2004 @10:00AM (#10276553) Journal
    Simple: if everyone agrees to play by certain rules and you pretend to (but don't), you're cheating.

    If everyone but you agrees to play by certain rules, and you still butt into the game, then you're an arsehole.

    Simple as that. It's not "the game physics/programming/server allows me to so it's not cheating".

    For example: if you get on a server where the players already on are playing "knife/melee only" AND they tell you so when you join. If you then go blow them to bits with a shotgun, you're just being a juvenile prick. If you don't want to play knife only, convince them to play the way you want. If the only way you can convince them is by being an arsehole, well then you really are one.

    There could be implicit or unwritten rules - e.g. if you install a custom video driver that lets you see through walls AND the _default_ way people want to play is "no see through walls" then you're cheating.

    There are so many ways of cheating that writing down the explicit rules against various cheats would make for a very thick and unwieldy rule book.

    That said players themselves may quietly agree that certain nonexplicit rules can be broken/bent occasionally - after all playing a multiplayer game is a "people" thing. You are playing the game _with_ other people. If you want to be an arsehole/cheat you may find yourself playing alone.

    Perhaps Hell is you playing alone for eternity - all the powers and toys you want but nobody around to play with you.
    • The D3 EULA provides a pretty clear description of what they consider to be cheating. I can't remember it word for word, but it was something along the lines of changing the game to provide the player with an advantage, i.e. moving beyond the normal limited speed, auto-targetting (aimbots), etc. Take a look.
      -ReK

  • Doom3? (Score:1, Troll)

    by Sevn ( 12012 )
    Oh yeah, I remember that game. The game I QUIT PLAYING BECAUSE THEY HAVEN'T RELEASED THE FUCKING LINUX BINARIES. It got boring. I was all fired up to put up a Linux dedicated server too. Too bad they dragged their feet.

    • Re:Doom3? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Dreadlord ( 671979 ) on Friday September 17, 2004 @10:15AM (#10276655) Journal
      Why the heck is this troll? I was going to post something similar.

      What I'm afraid of now, with the long delay of the Linux binaries, most Linux gamers will use Wine or get Windows somehow, and play the game, and when the binaries and boxed sets are released, a minority will buy or download, and it'll apprear as if there were no Linux gamers out there.

      Id, where are our binaries?
      • It's marked as Troll because the poster chose to convey his message like this "I QUIT PLAYING BECAUSE THEY HAVEN'T RELEASED THE FUCKING LINUX BINARIES".

        Even though it's probably 100% factual and non-inflamatory, its presented in such a way as to almost scream "TROLL!"

        Note: I did not moderate the post, but if I had, this would be why...

      • Re:Doom3? (Score:2, Insightful)

        by ildon ( 413912 )
        Let's just forget the fact that they're making the linux and osx binaries practically for free, and that 95% of games never even have a linux client so that we can cry and whine that it's taking more than a week for them to come out.
      • > with the long delay of the Linux binaries, most Linux gamers will use Wine or get Windows somehow, and play the game, and when the binaries and boxed sets are released, a minority will buy or download, and it'll apprear as if there were no Linux gamers out there.

         Heh. Welcome to gaming in Europe, where big brands don't release games and when (if!) they finally do several months after the US and Japanese releases they claim poor sales as an excuse not to bother with it. It's not because everyone who h
    • Demo first, then Linux binaries. See Duffy's .plan [webdog.org] where he says "The Linux Dedicated server is also ready to go and will also be available as soon as the update is non beta." Also see an interview with Dustin Reyes [linuxgames.com] (porting was done by Zoid, then contracted to Loki, now Dustin) about the progress he's made in porting the client.

      TuxGames is preselling a Doom3 DVD [tuxgames.com] with Linux binaries, quoted to be coming out October 1st. So Linux server should be out, and client soon after once Dustin is finished.

      It's in

    • He's not trolling (not much atleast :) ). I'm also waiting for the promised linux binaries, i hate dual booting.

  • A similar thing happened with Wolfenstein ET (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bear pimp ( 695195 ) on Friday September 17, 2004 @10:01AM (#10276572)
    In Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, one can gain an advantage by turning off all foliage rendering. This means anyone hiding in long grass is easily spotted.

    Some mods just turn foliage off for everybody. It's so boring that the problem of cheating in online games means the game has to run for the lowest common denominator.

    It always seems like the developers get the flak for this too: yet what are they supposed to do? The whole situation is getting like that with cracks - the only way for developers to 'fix' things is by constant updates. Such a shame but I suppose that's the way of the world - a couple of idiots ruining everyone else's fun.
    • Wow, I totally didn't know that. I can't recall the name of the map, but there's a side entrance the Axis players have to watch (the Allies are trying to take out two communications towers) -- and it's covered with grass, and even though I can't see someone hiding in the grass, they'd snipe me or take me out pretty easily. This cheat explains a lot.
      • Actually you probably weren't being sniped from the grass.

        Believe it or not, if your in the grass you can see less then someone outside the grass looking in at you.

        On your screen it would look like your hiding in the grass but on the person on the outside looking in at you, you would be perfectly visible.

        Wierd huh?
    • There's a similar "feature" that you can change the appearance of explosions (so that you no longer get the large billboarded explosions). This improves visibility when there are lots of explosions, e.g. during an artillery strike.
    • It's so boring that the problem of cheating in online games means the game has to run for the lowest common denominator.

      Welcome to America, land of the lowest common denominator. Our games, TV, even our politics are all aimed at that LCD.

    • Actually the opposite is true.

      If you turn off the foilage you can shoot out of it easier, but you are still seen by people outside of the foliage.

      If you were on a lan you would be able to see what I mean.

      Say player 1 was hiding in the foliage, he is directly behind a leaf on his screen so he can't see people coming directly at him.

      Player 2 is coming the opposite way can see player 1 with no problem because the leaf that is covering player 1 screen doesn't get rendered unless your right on top of it. (ie

  • Makes sense... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Shufly ( 808040 ) on Friday September 17, 2004 @10:31AM (#10276806)
    Making these options cheat protected in Multi-Player is the only way to make it fair. Especially the shadows, I've found it quite fun to be hiding in a shadow waiting for my roommate to grab the RL, only to be blown to bits by my other roommate running on a slow PC with shadows off because he just saw me sitting there, no problem. Also, IIRC, all of the lighting data is synched between the clients, so that everyone is seeing the same enviroment light wise. This is why they originally made the game peer to peer, and why it is only 4 player, because all that data takes up bandwidth. So it would be a waste to be sending all that and unifying the lights across clients if they could just turn them off. I think Doom 3 DM could have been fun, but they should have left the adreneline meter in, IMO. I've played standard, fast-paced DM to death. I was hoping the movement speed in Doom 3 DM would be a little slower, and to compensate there would be a lot of hiding and seeking in the shadows, but as it stands it is just a mindless fragfest, which isn't a bad thing, I just don't have fun with it anymore.

  • This just in! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by DeltaSigma ( 583342 ) on Friday September 17, 2004 @10:31AM (#10276809) Journal
    Reportedly the r_showtris, r_showLightCount, and r_showIntensity commands will also be inaccessible in multiplayer! Oh the humanity, the outrage, the primal struggle between innocent gamer and tyrranous developer!

    Come off it. Cvars starting with "r_", mostly, concern renderer debugging. They're good for modders, and good for "oh neato wow" adventures in single player, but the very nature of the commands is to tell us more about a scene.

    It wouldn't be fair if I was running around with bump-maps while someone else isn't. In most cases the difference between light levels is minimal, however this all depends on the bump maps. Some bump-maps can drastically reduce the amount of light visible on a surface, thereby giving the user with bump-maps enabled a handicap compared to the user with bump-maps disabled.

  • A lot of options should be disabled in multiplayer (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Zed2K ( 313037 ) on Friday September 17, 2004 @10:43AM (#10276955)
    Most of the options for scripting commands and binding controls should all be disabled during multiplayer. Just like they should be disabled in counterstrike. You should not be able to zoom in, fire, jump and switch weapons with one key press. The "feature" of scriptability of commands and consoles in games has been one of the biggest problems with games lately.
    • Nonsense. It adds functionality to the game that should have been there in the first place. I fail to see how turning off shadows so people can't hide ranks next to, for example, having a button mapped to toggle crouch so I don't have to hold down the fucking key to stay crouched, or having a crouch jump mapped to a key.

      It's not a problem at all.

    • The "feature" of scriptability of commands and consoles in games has been one of the biggest problems with games lately.

      I totally disagree. The ability to win a game via scripting merely points to a bad game (or bad opponent). I think it's silly to force players of any game to go through repetitive actions ad nauseam. This is especially true of level-grind MMORPGs. There is nothing wrong with having the high level view of the game that is allowed by scripting. Why reward only the fast twitchers w

  • Good. People who have seen tournaments will agree (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Drakino ( 10965 ) on Friday September 17, 2004 @11:26AM (#10277461) Journal
    If you ever go to Quakecon and watch the Quake 3 players, any of them that get into the higher ranked matches make their game look, well, like ass and worse then Quake 1. Why? Well, they do things to increase contrast, change view angles to unreasonable amounts to practicially see 360, and ensure no eye candy might distract them. It's absolute lunacy that they feel they can't compete without making the game practicially flash ENEMY IS HERE.

    This isn't about trying to prevent people from making the game run better. It's to prevent people from playing a completly different looking game in competitions.
    • Seen it with Counter Strike players as well. They play the game 640x480 (on insanely powerful hardware), with gamma and digital vibrance all the way up, huge FOVs, and turning off absolutely everything they can; i've even seen a few that turned off the map textures.

      Lunacy. But still, as long as the client has to render the scene, there always be "cheats" like those to be used.
    • Hard core players have been doing this back in the Quake 1 era.
      Remember how cool you thought that wavy effect was the first time you jumped in the water? I don't know any serious players that didn't turn that off. Most people also changed the fov settings just slightly, to get rid of the weapon model. Another tactic some DM players used was to increase the d_mipcap setting to lower the resolution of the map textures, to make player models stand out more.

      Even id software guys used these tricks. American
    • Uhh... I used to tweak the hell out of UT when I played it a lot.

      No fog. A zoom key. A locked INI because the game would reset my 150 degree FOV to 90 all the time. Now? UT2k4 doesn't have any of these abilities. FOV is an optional command enabled on the server. Fog is required "to make your framerate better". And the FOV has an engine-enforced limit of 100 now, locked INI or not.

      And the moral of this story? I still suck. I used to get about 10-20 frags in a normal CTF game, and maybe over 100 in all-out

  • wtf id (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    con_notifyTime cannot be changed in multiplayer.
    com_showTics cannot be changed in multiplayer.
    com_timestampPrints cannot be changed in multiplayer.
    in_mouse cannot be changed in multiplayer.
    m_showMouseRate cannot be changed in multiplayer.
    g_kickAmplitude cannot be changed in multiplayer.
    g_kickTime cannot be changed in multiplayer.
    g_knockback cannot be changed in multiplayer.
    g_skipParticles cannot be changed in multiplayer.
    g_g_skipViewEffects cannot be changed in multiplayer.
    image_preload cannot be changed in

  • Shared Libraries (Score:5, Informative)

    by SeanAhern ( 25764 ) on Friday September 17, 2004 @06:00PM (#10281209) Journal
    Locking down graphics settings and views and such is all well and good.

    However, if ID is relying on a shared library for their OpenGL implementation, then they're ultimately playing a losing game. There are a number of software projects [sf.net] that can swap out the OpenGL shared library at runtime and intercept all of the gl and wgl calls. With this functionality, you can make the graphics look however you want them to. Remove shadows, change fov, even change the viewpoint entirely [stanford.edu]!
  • Tweaking competitively, especially in the quake engine games, has always been accepted.

    Why?

    Because those people that get higher FPS have an advantage then those that have a low FPS. Any slowdown in your game will give the other guy the advantage.

    Tweaking allows the guy with the 1ghz pentium 3, GeForce TI 4200 computer, compete with the 3.2ghz Pentium 4 ATI 9800 Pro computer.

    Player 2 can have a significant advantage over player 1 if you turn on all the pretty stuff.

    But if you loosen the restirictions on

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