The obvious result is that each machine has access to everything that is happening in the game. It will actually wait for all messages (thats why when one player lags everybody has to wait). When every machine has the user input from all players it will calculate the next "step" of the game. To make this work each machine sends the user input to all other machines. Each machine does the same operations in the same order with the same outcome and this way we can all play the same game. In this system every single machine runs the entire game. The most popular system for multiplayer RTS games is the Deterministic Lock-Step system. I believe those anti-hack tools detected whether a specific hack was running, rather than trying to determine if map hack was being used, as stated by users above, a simple map hack could be impossible to detect. I remember several legit users lost their account with many games on it, while hackers didn't care too much since they usually had only a few games on there anyways. Then there were other 3rd party programs that I have forgotten now because Blizzard banned every single user that used a 3rd party tool, whether that tool was a hack or anti-hack or not even a hack like chaos launcher/penguin plug. However, if a player was smart and used a map hack without clicking on opponent's units/buildings, it wouldn't detect it. It also added the player's nickname to a database and would alert you if you were to come across said hacker again. There was also 3rd party tools you could use to detect hacks, it would alert you of what hack was used.īWHF comes to mind, it was highly effective at detecting auto-mine and used a system that detected if an opponent clicked a unit/building that they wouldn't otherwise be able to see under fog-of-war / shroud-of-darkness. I still have these maps, if you are interested I can upload them. RoV, BlueStorm, Paranoid Android, python, lt, to name a few off the top of my head.
It was available for several popular maps at the time like: I believe it would drop an observer too if they had one on (say like a rally-point hack or drop hack) #6 There used to be several anti-hack tools available and I'm betting that they are still effective now.įirst off there were highly effective anti-hack observer maps that would drop a player if it detected a hack. The only way to prevent these kinds of hacks effectively is to change the entire architecture of the application and re-write it from scratch. You can not prevent a hacker from reading his own memory and showing it to him. There is absolutely NOTHING an anti-hack can do against that. He could have a second monitor showing him all the information. If YOU run your anti hack it does absolutely nothing to prevent somebody else from hacking.īut even if the hacker is running an anti-hack and is not overwriting his own memory with malicious code he can still simply read the memory and display it some other way. Another problem is that the hacker needs to have the anti-hack installed and running to check for the hack. Of course, the anti-hack can be hacked to disable it again. These kinds of hacks can be detected by the game itself by checking its own memory for any changes. Some hacks manipulate the game directly (by rewriting their own memory) thus they make everything accessible within the game. You can NOT prevent a remote computer from reading its own memory. You can NOT detect what the remote computer is doing with the read data. You can NOT detect if a remote computer is reading its own memory. All the hacker has to do is read his own memory.
The full map, with all units, all buildings, all research, all resources, etc is available in memory. #5 There is nothing you can do against certain kinds of hacks, the reason for this is simple:Īll the information is available on the computer of the hacker.