[biggerUniverse]

I feel as though I can finally relax my mind somewhat: I finally released a pre-alpha version of JEROME onto an unwitting world.

I was a little taken recently that IBM already had something similar, and that they had used it to run MMOQuake2. But I gathered myself and continued.

It has been about a year since I started development of JEROME.

I had some obstacles that seriously set me back, like finding I would have to write Fabric from scratch since no free alternative existed. But I am proud to say that I have never taken a project so far along the way to completion, and I fully intend to continue. Yay me. Heh.
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We are on the outer reaches of someone else's universe.

[tcaudilllg]

Good for you. :)

[Nephilim]

I sure enjoyed reading your developer's log for JEROME just now. Lots of interesting stuff in there.

I particularly liked your musings about reducing the need for server-level cheat-checking with clever game world rule design. Some compelling stuff to think about in there. Still, the very nature of cheaters is to find ways around rules, whether they are in the communications logic or the game world logic, so I'm not sure I buy the argument that game world logic would be sufficient.

For instance, in the example you gave about preventing instantaneous travel by incurring stamina penalties over the incremental distance travelled, yes, it precludes someone from "teleporting" 1000km away. But does it preclude someone from teleporting ten feet over a chasm, through a wall, or over a trigger for a trap or difficult encounter? And even if the system manages to thwart cheaters' attempts at teleporting because they'd arrive at the destination dead, it could give cheaters a handy way to kill fellow players by teleporting other people.

Anyway, it's an interesting train of thought, and I think the idea that smart game world design can reduce cheating opportunities is a sound one. But I'd still want server-level cheat checking. Heh.
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Visit the Sacraments web site to play the game and read articles about its development.

[Mark_Y]

(I think Nephilim essentially made this same point, but just to put it in slightly more stark terms. . . .)

bU: Your reasoning regarding cheating seems to me to be based on a somewhat inaccurate assumption. Basically, it looks like you think the game's physics engine (or any other engine) can account for the consequences of cheating in a way that imposes costs -- so a player that teleports will be treated as having flown at incredible speed over the distance and punished accordingly. But that presumes that you've written your engine for modeling movement in a really weird way (that that you determine how fast the character is moving by how far he's traveled, rather than determining how far he's traveled by how fast he's moving). Writing the engine that way is not the easiest way to handle player movement, and indeed seems a major hassle (for example, you'd now need a work-around when you actually DID want to teleport the player somewhere, so that he wasn't DOA).

If you are going to hassle with writing your movement engine in an non-intuitive fashion, just so that it can handle cheating, why not just write your game engine to forbid cheating? Your response might be that writing your engine to "handle cheating" doesn't require the same patchwork approach, but I totally disagree. The way you've proposed to handle teleport cheats only works if the player can't also bypass your code for determine injuries caused by g-force changes. More importantly, it only handles teleport cheats. It does nothing for, say, no-clipping cheats, cheats that let the player see things he shouldn't (map cheats or see through walls), stat-boosting cheats, etc. A robust physics engine doesn't solve this -- note, for example, the cheats used in very good FPS games.

Moreover, I'm not even sure that your premise -- that one cannot cheat IRL because anything a person can do has real-world consequences -- tracks what happens IRL. In fact, when something wildly unexpected happens, we presume cheating. In sports, for example, when an athlete performs wildly above expectations (Ben Johnson beating Carl Lewis, Lance Amstrong winning so many Tours d' France, etc.), inquiries are almost always made into whether they cheated some way. Same with when someone makes unexpectedly high short-swing profits in stocks: a legal investigation often follows.

It's true that we can't cheat the fundamental laws of physics (whatever they may actually be), but that's because those laws can't be hacked, not because those laws impose a cost for hacking.

Shrug. Somewhat silly point, but eh.

[tcaudilllg]

WOW. This is grid computing. Way of the future man. :)

[biggerUniverse]

I need to post more to my log. I have lots more silly ideas, but they never get written down. ;)

Nephilim: you make a good point about "flying under the wire" as it were, and that brings up a good point about thresholds. Basically, "at what point do we not care?"

Mark_Y: If you want to ensure users aren't doing any cheating, the server has to play the game too. For everyone. That's difficult when there gets to be a lot of people on, hence the various ways that current MMOGs attempt to handle this: shards, "areas", reduced cheat-checking. But if it takes so much hardware to run the software, there must be a fundamental flaw somewhere.

What I was getting at was that "magic" is a suspension of the rules of physics/thermodynamics as we know them. A physics engine built to accurately simulate reality usually needs to be finessed to handle something like teleportation correctly. They usually get the jitters when the position changes all out of wack like that. Even quantum teleportation is not transporting the actual matter, but only the state of the matter.

Yes, perhaps my example is not a good one, but what I am getting at is more what Nephilim said: solid game design reduces or eliminates the need for cheat-checking.
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We are on the outer reaches of someone else's universe.

[Mark_Y]

[biggerUniverse]

Interesting that this should come up in such a timely fashion: http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2005/09/magic.html#more
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We are on the outer reaches of someone else's universe.