Multiplayer/Online saftey against cheating.

[Mikey]

man i just carnt wait

[stocksy129]

yeah it's going to be sick i just hope that my pc can handle it. when i play with the riders i can have 10 riders but everything has to be on 0 hahahah.

[yomo]

yeah it's going to be sick i just hope that my pc can handle it. when i play with the riders i can have 10 riders but everything has to be on 0 hahahah.

Im pretty sure online will be able to have more because when u have computer players your computer is actually working out 11 sets of rider physics. Whereas for online your computer works out 1 set of physics and shows 39 other bikes coordinates (correct me if im wrong)

[stocksy129]

i hope your not wrong that would be crazy 40 of us going into the first corner if you don't crash you would be a legend hahahha.

[Phathry25]

You are right about why it gets bogged down w/ 10 AI riders. That's not to say that displaying a bike on your screen in multiplayer won't bog your computer down in other ways. Your computer has to send and receive data constantly, while trying to place the bikes in the right position. If the game were to display everyone's bike exactly as each computer received the data from the server we would be seeing bikes that are actually off in position by 1/2 a second, and more if someone has a bad connection. If a few packets of data were lost a bike would disappear then magically reappear. Coding a game to show other peoples coordinates/rider position isn't the hard part, the game needs some sort of prediction code to predict where said rider is going to be at a certain place in time, this is the hard part.

From my understanding this is how it works in most modern games. What you see on your screen is what is actually happening on the server. So say player a lives in California, and player b is in Texas, and they are connected to a server in Kansas. Each player has a ping (time it takes to send information) to the server of 100 milliseconds. (m/s) So if the game were to display the bikes in real time there would be a 200m/s difference on each riders screen of where the other guy actually is. As it takes 100m/s for the info to reach the server and another 100m/s for the info to reach the other player. What needs to be coded is a prediction code. What this does is predicts where player a is going to be in 100m/s and then sends that information on to player b. Where this will be most noticeable is when contact is made. You won't necessarily have to actually hit the other guy for the server to detect you hitting him then predicting him falling over, then he'll snap back into place because the server figures out later that you never actually hit. This can work the other way also and when you think you had a close call or just nudged someone they go flying off the track and start yelling at you. I know my explanation is pretty rudimentary, and probably over complex, sorry.

My question is what is going to be done server side to prevent cheating. With some other current racing games out there cheating is pretty easy, dead obvious, but pretty easy. I know some of you are familiar with rFactor so I'll use it for an example. In rFactor what is displayed on your screen is basically what the server see's happening, including your car's position. So by overclocking your CPU or RAM via software your computer and the server disagree where your car should be because your PC is processing the data faster than it should be according to your hardware. So in rFactor the server is king, and what happens is it will magically jump your car ahead to where it wants you to be, this will also happen on your screen. I run the ASUS EPU engine on my computer so I can turn down the fans/ram/hd's, etc. for idling. I also have the choice to overclock them through the utility. Now I didn't realize this until I joined a rFactor server and proceeded to set fast lap by 1.5sec. Some people got really angry and figured I was doing it on purpose, others realized I just built a new rig and had a problem and helped me solve it.

Another way to cheat is with RAM Cheats. These utilities access certain aspects of the game stored in the RAM and can change them on the fly. So say the game checks your objects file when it loads the track but after that it doesn't. Well you can use the RAM cheat to switch out your objects file and like magic theirs no more hay bales for you to run into, yet the game thinks all your files are correct. This was happening in rFactor at the beginning also, guys would update their engine files when in game and give themselves a hefty HP advantage. There are programs that you can run server side that will detect these types of cheats, but I'd prefer that the ability to detect these be built into the game right from the start.

Maybe I shouldn't be posting all of this information, but I feel its better to have this stuff out on the table right from the start and hope most of these issues are addressed right from the get go, so its not something that needs to be rebuilt later on down the road.

[DJ99X]

Wow Thats one of the best posts I've seen in this place.

The internet is such a complex thing

[yomo]

are we going to have erode on for multiplayer? if so how does that work with the system (does each computer work it out or from a server?)

[Joe]

i dont think erode is planed for multiplayer

[stocksy129]

this is a question but i didn't know where to post and didn't want to start a new 1 ok can you use your wireless xbox 360 controller if you have the battery pack and the charger? or could you use the one with the cord?

[ddmx]

this is a question but i didn't know where to post and didn't want to start a new 1 ok can you use your wireless xbox 360 controller if you have the battery pack and the charger? or could you use the one with the cord?

wireless: not without an adapter, search for it
wired: yes, download the necessary drivers

back on subject.................

Phathry25:
Wow, that was one amazing post and I learned a ton from it. Hopefully this knowledge won't go to waste and jlv can devise a system that detects for cheating in the best way possible. Although from reading some of the posts on this site I wouldn't think that some of us could cheat.

[Pumaxcs]

lol thats the greatest thing ive read all day haha
thats pretty agreeable

[DannyBoy]

i would just hope that people wouldn't be so gay as to cheat i mean its a video game -_-

[Kawasakis]

it would be awesome if would be like mtx mototrax online gaming.. everybode join in to the server and you could practic and then who hosted server just press button and race begins.. or something like that...


sorry for bad english

[yomo]

yeah i agree that would be pretty cool...

When are you looking to release multiplayer JLV No pressure after spending ages on the rider but yeah...