Making My Mod Less Exploitable

[QQuix]

The fact is: WATHEVER you do in a standard mod to create a safe score screen, I can create a cheated, perfect score screen spending 10% of the time you put in (maybe even less).

 

So, as far as I can see, your only 'defense' is to spend, say, 100 hours of your time creating all kinds of disguises and hope that very few people will be willing to spend 10 hours to figure out your mod and create a cheated score.

Edited September 13, 2011 by QQuix

[Ranokoa]

No, all in all it should take me an hour or two to make the safety precautions. Please read muh last post. :)

 

And yes, you can go ahead and spend your time duplicating the situation to make it look like you had a better score when in fact you didn't even play the game, but most people who would cheat would do so in order TO play the game, but with advantage. If people really just want to make it look like they got real far when they didn't do anything at all, I can't stop that. Not unless they do a bad job. But what I can stop is the advantage. And really, it's not a whole lot I have to do in order to protect the essential few things.

[Arthmoor]

One does not even need to edit your mod in order to cheat. Second mod tacked on that silently makes the player immune to damage, or grants them an uber-healing spell, or some other thing that keeps them from actually dying.

[Ranokoa]

You are correct. But I can only control so much. This is all just a secondary concern. I'm putting the precautions I can into play and moving on to different features.

[Hickory]

You are correct. But I can only control so much. This is all just a secondary concern. I'm putting the precautions I can into play and moving on to different features.

 

You cannot control anything once it is released. To be quite frank, you have made such a song and dance about hiding elements from the end user that I would bet most people reading this (since it's a modder's forum) would be more inclined to go right for the innards to either crack it, or see what steps you tried to take, before playing it. You know what they say: the best way to get a person to do something is to tell them not to.

[tunaisafish]

@Ranokoa, Security through Obscurity is no security at all. There are people here that can bypass any measures you take if they wished.

To most end-users the stuff inside mods is completely obscure already.

 

I still don't understand the anti-cheat concept. Not for single player games anyway.

When I download mods I do normally have a look at it in an editor before putting in my load order, but that's just my own quality check. I don't look too deeply for the same reason I avoid 'spoilers'. If your docs explained that you wrote it as a challenge with specific rules, then that's how I'd probably play it :)

 

If you make it too obscure, then you may find it biting you in the ass. Come 3 months from now when you need to solve some bug you'll be kicking yourself if you've made your code into spaghetti.

 

FWIW though, you could write a script that checked/reset tons of values, and you could also detect if other mods were installed.

The easiest way to obfuscate your mod would then be to just strip out the script source from a copied version of the final file. At least that way you'd still have your nice commented source scripts to read in 3 months time.

[Quetzlsacatanango]

I remember seeing a mod that would crash the game if you tried to use the console :)

Maybe that would be good enough.

[BlackBaron2]

I remember seeing a mod that would crash the game if you tried to use the console :)

Maybe that would be good enough.

 

Which is, to say the least, malicious.

[Quetzlsacatanango]

It's not malicious at all if you are warned up front.

[HeyYou]

Trouble is, use of the console != cheating..... I use the console all the time for mod troubleshooting......