[URGENT] Speed Gear Problems

Hello FK members,

I am in the middle of running a popular petsite and we are having a few problems with some of the members. These members have been cheating on the games and have been able to give themselves millions of website points. It is believed they are using something called a speed gear which slows down your computer enabling you to beat the games in levels without having to worry about the time. This has been serious problem over the past few days, and I am here at FK asking anyone who knows how to prevent this matter to either email me at [email protected] or pm immediatly. I perfer to do things private, because you never know who reads these threads. I appreciate anyones help.

Thank you for taking the time to read this post.

weird. but i cant help.
they're hacking somehow.

Make the game depend on time instead of frames! Just put everything within a timer loop, so that anytime a given interval goes by move x or whatever!

It will of course always be possible to cheat and hack :(

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Originally Posted by phreax

It will of course always be possible to cheat and hack

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The only way to not be cheated or hacked is, sadly, to not make a game.

I sent you a PM.

Can you put a fps counter into the game that can create a variable that you use to multiply by all the objects speeds? This will make sure the game runs at a certain speed, and if they slow the game down things will skip around way to fast for them to win at all. This might work.

Just so you get an idea of how it works:

If the movie is running at full speed, you will get a variable of the value of 1, which when multiplied by the speeds of all your objects will not change anything.
If the movie is running at half the speed, you will get a variable of the value of 2 which will make everything run twice as fast.

I think this might be a good way of fixing things if the setInterval method does not work (which would be the easiest method to quickly impliment).

I have used 2 basic ideas for "slowdown cheat":
*use time based movement as much as possible. This makes playing on slow computer harder then playing on fast computer.
*use simple fps meter and if fps drops below certain value, stop the game showing polite message like "Your computer is too slow to play this game". Get fps for example over 5 seconds to make sure small changes dont affect it.

ha ha, so you let all the objects in the game be time based and the character or whatever be frame based *LOL* so when they slow down the computer, all the objects are still as fast but the character barely moves :D That's my visual anyway :D

A nice simple way is to work out the longest time to achieve a score, and when you hit that score see how long it's taken.

It's not a million miles away from Leasons approach at pnF, where all the times are listed with the scores, so you can spot it a mile off when someone's got a high score by a couple of 1000 but taken 20 mins more to do it.

Squize.

Thanks everyone, I got a lot more replies than expected. There has been a lot of great ideas that have been brought out, and I was thinking about these, but also wanted to hear some professional help on the subject.

Also, Squize, it's not hard to find the cheaters, it's just a problem where these people take all these points and start messing around with things, kind of screwing the site around, and unless we catch them when they are doing it, it takes a load of time trying to fix everything they screwed up, when I would just perfer to have a check to prevent the whole matter. And give us more time to work on other things.

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Originally Posted by swcAndrew

but also wanted to hear some professional help on the subject.

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Your probably not gonna get any more professional than Tony round these parts. :)

Whats wrong with the current suggestions, were you expecting some out of swf support?

Oops, I guess I worded that sentence wrong. I meant to say before I came here asking for help I had similar ideas, like those mentioned here. But, I wanted to post here to get some professional help as well, and it seems like everyone has the same ideas as I did, so I guess I will try them. I apologize for any confusion.

Also, Squize, I didn't mean to post that bit about your idea negativly, I was just saying why, I wouldn't do it that way.

np problem mate, that's not a solution for everything.

I don't know how you've got things set up, but for an average game, you'd do the check like I suggested and when going to save the hi-scores, just don't :)

Squize.