"Anti-cheating" mode (design Q)

[mike3]

Hi.

I'm wondering about this. It looks like ADOM has a special "anti-cheat" feature involving a checksum on the save game files, so that if they're modified somehow, the mode activates. Once activated, the game puts up a message "you feel as if you have run out of luck!" and the monsters deal 1000000 DP (damage points) among other things. What I'm curious about is why did Biskup choose to implement this kind of complicated response to save modification, as opposed to simply rejecting the save file altogether and aborting back to the OS prompt with some message (like "invalid checksum" or "bad save game"), or something like that?

[JellySlayer]

Because this is obviously way more epic.

[grobblewobble]

Is there an easy way to activate this mode? Sounds like a good idea for a challenge game.

[JellySlayer]

It's kind of a pain in the ass, actually. Just modifying the savegame randomly in a hex-editor will normally result in a crash. I remember reading about some methods to get it to work, but it's a bit tricky. Maybe someone who's been around longer than I would know about this better (Grey?). I've been meaning to ask around and see if any of the people who make mods for the server would be able to install this.

For the record, my memory of what it does is something like this:

-All monsters gain ~2000000 levels. Seriously. Pretty much anything can kill you in 1 hit, even if you're a massively beefed up level 50 PC. On the other hand, if you can manage to kill anything, there's a good chance of getting an obscene amount of levels if you don't get an xp rollover. I believe that the first eternium man game was completed this way--run this mod, then go to the SMC and hope you find an altar. Sac a couple monsters and you're done.
-All of your items get teleportitis. Every so often, you'll get a message about your pack, and your items will get randomly thrown around the level. This is kind of buggy, IIRC, and can make the game unsolvable (eg. Chaos orbs getting lost)..
-You get a luck penalty of something like -100 (for comparison, doom gives an -3d5, so an average of about -7). So pretty much you fail every luck check ever.

[gut]

I could always get it in 1.0.0 by modifying gold in a hex editor.