Bot Arena 3

Some of you probably have already watched my video guide for "Bot Arena 3" since Sunday and are waiting for this article, so here it is, finally.

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So someone has mentioned a while ago that this blog can serve as an important reference to all game coders. I really think not, because most likely those who are capable of coding will also have a rough idea on how to build up some basic anti-cheating checks, and chances are they didn't code them in simply because they do not care that much about cheating, as long as they are receiving damn good money from their sponsors. Still, we are going to explore two simple yet efficient countermeasures against hacking in our following paragraphs, if there really are clueless developers out there that are reading this blog.

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Do we have any amateur coders here that think local shared objects are really a hassle? You need them to create a saving feature but are also fear of them being easily tweaked and hacked, like this?




One thing that will only take you a few minutes to do but can probably help you fending off more than 90% of .sol Editor users, is to create a hash - using MD5, SHA-1, etc. - out of all your variables that's gonna be stored inside the LSO, and put that hash inside the file, too, to be checked by your game when it is about to load up any save. It won't stop smartasses like me from decompiling your .swf and see what kind of hash algorithms you were using so to create the necessary hacking hash I need, but will be sufficient enough against most of the average guys always crying for helps out there.

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Trying to use text strings instead of numbers is a good idea, because most people who are using Cheat Engine just know about searching numbers; but the method has been proven powerless against real thinkers like, yes, me once again:



[How to Kongregate] "Bot Arena 3" Challenge 4 Modification

(For the hex segment mentioned inside the video, it goes as below.)

43 49 52 43 45 53 20 22 58 54 22 00 4B 55 52 4F 4E 20 22 53 48 52 45 44 2D 4D 4B 33 22 00 52 41 00 4F 4E

Now one of the methods being mentioned oftentimes to solve this issue is to employ a certain degree of obscurity like, using something as random as J97_IDdtH instead of CIRCES "XT", or dN92_p_oCCTy in place of KURON "SHRED-MK3", and recording the correlation down in some other isolated place. However, my own estimation is that all these shit jobs can probably block out only around 30% of hacking for you; there are still many other ways for us resourceful people to stitch out the correlation ourselves through the rest part of your codes, and chances are if someone knows how to decompile your file and locate those text strings at the first place, a little more extra analysis and deduction over your codes won't baffle him either.

Rating



Let's conclude this with a good question: what kind of players are the lamest?

I'd answer that with "whichever stupid scum that thinks changing a few integers with Cheat Engine is all about hacking and whichever fucking teenage idiota that thinks hacking is wrong." Just to think about how much information NSA, CIA, and the USA government in general are hacking around the world on a daily basis? Oh wait, they don't call it hacking - they call it information monitoring, homeland security ensuring, terrorist activity recognizing, etc. etc. Now anyone, please tell me where in the fuck you see anything wrong in that? We will be all dead if there are no hacking! The US will collapse under the evil threat from the terrorists and we will become plain farts! Hacking is vital for US, how the fuck can it be wrong?