OpenGL - GameHackers ?

OpenGL OpenGL: User Software
1

Are the developers of OpenGL not aware of the problem that OpenGL is easely hacked (or cracked, whatever) or are they just choosing to ignore it?

Ok … Im no hardcore geek So if i am wrong please let me know!

I am playing the ever so popular Counter-Strike ( www.counter-strike.net )
And we have prayed and hoped that the WallHack (OpenGL hack) cheat would be fixed in the upcoming version of CS 1.3. CS is a MOD as many of you might know which means it is based on the HalfLife engine, so it is ofcourse HalfLife next update 1.1.0.8 that have to fix the WallHack. But it seems the havent made any changes on that point!!
And if they did a new openGL hack would be out quickly … And it seems Game developers really cant do a thing about it…

So then i thought … If you have to solve a problem … Go to the root the problem … Which in this case i thing is the developers of OpenGL…

My point is that something you (“OpenGL team”) created works very good … It is almost standard in all games … but it is actually destroying the game play in alot of online multiplyer games… CS … And i think Quake players can also OpenGL crack so they can see through walls on the maps that are played …

Isnt there something OpenGL can do about it ? It would really … And i mean REALLY increasy OpenGL popularyti

I would like to hhear what people think … Am i stupid thinking that OpenGL can do anything about this ?

Well … im out!

*RedemptioN

Isnt there something

2

I would like to agree.

I just stopped playing a few moments ago, and I was hoping this subject was brought to OPENGL’s attention also. This Hack that these idiots are replacing in the opengl directories will destroy gaming entirely. If everyone can see through walls… whats the point of playing? I dont know if theres anything game devs could do about it.

Maybe having an OpenGL update that creates the directory not to be messed with would be a great way to stop the mass of cheating going on. I dunno, Im an idiot trying to be fair.

piece out

3

“Am i stupid thinking that OpenGL can do anything about this?”

Well, more like confused. I can see how people would point the finger at OpenGL for allowing the infamous ‘wallhack’ cheat, since it is in fact an OpenGL hack that enables this particular cheat. However, OpenGL was never intended to be ‘hacker-proof’, and never will be. Allow me to explain.

OpenGL, as you know, is an API for displaying high-performance interactive 3D graphics in real time. It can be used to achieve a variety of complex visual effects, but at the core it consists of only about 120 commands to draw simple triangles, lines and polygons, use various color schemes, perform matrix math operations, etc. OpenGL is simply a basic set of tools that can be used to build the games we all like to play. While OpenGL is used to draw all the graphics in games such as Half-life, it is not responsible for moving the player models around, determining what each player ‘should’ be able to see, displaying the correct complexity smoke grenade, etc. All of these things are determined by programmers. Trying to make OpenGL ‘hacker-proof’ would only degrade performance, and probably wouldn’t stop the cheating in the long run. So if OpenGL isn’t the problem, what is? Here is my opinion:

Computer security, which might include making games cheater-proof, is always a tradeoff between user-friendliness, performance and optimum security. One of the principal design factors in a multiplayer game like Half-life is bandwidth - most players are still using 56k modems or even slower connections. Rather than making the user query the server many times per second to find out which players are visible, which crates are half-way hidden behind walls, etc., Half-life reduces network traffic by simply taking in all this information in a large chunk and using OpenGL’s occlusion capability to determine what is and isn’t seen. Occlusion refers to the fact that when a solid object is drawn, then another, smaller object is drawn ‘behind’ the first one, the second object will not be displayed. As I’m sure you have guessed, the wallhack subverts this procedure by making the walls transparent even though Half-life asks for them to be drawn opaque, allowing the other players to be drawn regardless of whether they should be displayed or not. So as you can see, the real issue is that each client is allowed to have information (the position of other players, even when they should not be seen), that the client really does not need to have, and this information was used to create a cheat utility.

So how can the wallhack be stopped? I don’t know, but clearly the ball is in the court of Valve and the mod community, not the OpenGL developers. Hope you found this info useful!

4

The problem is that asus had the famous idea to give its drivers these features. Same could be done to D3D drivers as well probably. You have to specificly enable this feature is recent driver versions.
It’s only bad that it also happens “by accident”. I remember the old days networking when I finally could see thru walls. I didn’t even know about this cheating feature then…
Only thing that helps there is to check wether the card does NOT use asus drivers. In a simple home-network that is easy…

5

Oh… to the technically aspect. Half-Life uses a BSP, and this implies that it is always drawing more than actually visible. It relies on the drivers functionality of z-Buffer (which tests for each pixel, wether is should be draw, ie if it is in front of the pixel already drawn). If the driver overwrites the requested z-Buffer mode, finally things that would not be visible are drawn over the geometry which should occlude the normally.

6

Actually, most of time, the engine only “guesses” where the other players could be right now. I doubt you can get 60 scene updates per second over an internet connections, even if it’s a bit faster.