Open Source 3D Games

[Jack]

--- Justin Dugger wrote:

> 
> Of course, there is also the concern over cheating
> made simple with
> open source.  ...
> Personally,
> I think that this is a failing of the server design.
>  If a player is
> being excessively disruptive, there should be a
> social mechanism in
> place via the server to manage, arbitrate and
> facilitate the
> curtailing of that disruptive player, either by
> kick\bans or other
> means of punishment.  This is probably one of the
> most important
> aspects of multiplayer gaming that has gone
> unsolved, but not for a
> lack of trying.

Not being a gamer [for health reasons. ;')], I don't
know all the issues here, but it seems to me it should
be fairly easy to deal with the cheaters. Of course it
really does seem to depend on handling it at the
servers. It seems that some fairly decent coders could
write a routine to detect the cheaters and either ban
them or strip their powers and points. Alternatively,
it should also be possible for some decent coders to
write a plug-in for users to download andinstall that
could detect cheaters and take some action based on
that, by any or all of:  posting to everyone in the
game the "identity" of the cheater, cheating back
against the cheater, using some force to terminate the
cheater from the game, intercept the cheats and
reverse them, etc. Now like I said I'm not a gamer but
it seems some of these things should work, or I may
just be uninformed to how it all works. I'm assuming
all the servers are owned by the game vendors and thus
out of the control of the players? It seems to me that
this would be a good use for p2p to build rogue
servers, with ligitimite clients. Should someone build
a server that valdiated legitimite copies of the game
software, then there really wouldn't be any angle the
vendors could use to sue the servers/clients. I know
that someone in St. Louis did build a server for some
game, but I don't believe they included verification
of clients, which of course just leads judges to
believe they are up to something.
 

just some random thoughts,
Brian

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