Originally Posted by
Blasphemous
Save scumming is the least of your problems.
Take cheat engine program for example.
You can make your character immortal by locking health counter on a fixed number.
You can change quantity of items in your inventory.
Change those 3 potions of holy water to 300 potions.
Get two rings of djinni summoning and change the amount to 200.
Change the amount of potions of booze from 4 to 4000, give them all to Yggaz and get 4000 other random potions in exchange, around 50-60 of them PoGA.
Give me one hour, I will build you a lvl 50 PC of any r/c combination, with all stats at 99, all spells at 30000 and all skills at 100, with infinite wishes and ready to close the gate on the very same day that you started the game.
There's no end to what can be done. The only way to prevent that is to take control over save files entirely away from players, by storing them online.
There is no other workaround to this. Anything that is done client-side is bound to leave room for cheating and abusing stuff.
You can generate any unique number you wish. If I really want to, I will find it and change it so that the server doesn't recognize it as "already died" or some such stuff.
I've been cheating in online games for years, purely for my own amusement, not against other players.
I know what can be done with simple packet analyzer programs like wireshark or WPE pro, and that is in relation to online games.
As for offline games like adom, without any protection, infinitely easier to process, disassemble, decompile, inject dlls, scan memory... like I said, there is no limit to what can be done, literally speaking.
IMHO the most effective means to stop cheaters is to
- open the server files only to registered users (may I say "ADOM Deluxe"),
- provide a means to report attempts of cheating
- ban registered users for doing so.
I'm not sure if we want to go that far, though.
Maybe a hall of shame is sufficient.
Thomas Biskup
ADOM & Ultimate ADOM Maintainer
https://www.adom.de - https://www.ultimate-adom.com