Opened 13 years ago

Closed 13 years ago

#614 closed defect (fixed)

Disable developer tools in multiplayer

Reported by: Kieran P Owned by: Philip Taylor
Priority: Must Have Milestone: Alpha 2
Component: Core engine Keywords:
Cc: Patch:

Description

Obviously! I can't kill units or buildings, but I can control them and build things, depleting the other persons resources. Not to mention revealing the whole map right away.

Change History (8)

comment:1 by Kieran P, 13 years ago

Owner: set to Phillip

comment:2 by Michael D. Hafer, 13 years ago

Yes, this would be good for official Alpha and Beta releases. Keep the Dev Overlay for intervening development though.

comment:3 by Philip Taylor, 13 years ago

Hmm, but they're sometimes kind of useful when debugging the game (and we'll probably need to debug the release versions occasionally). Removing the controls wouldn't really prevent cheating (since people can edit their GUI files to re-enable those controls) so that's not a long-term solution anyway.

Maybe we could add some kind of console command (enableCheats(true);) which displays the dev controls, disables any cheat-prevention built in to the engine, and sends a message to all the other players saying "Player X is cheating" - might that be sufficient for now? It would allow debugging when we need it, and it would discourage mostly-honest people from cheating (and there's nothing we can do about really-dishonest people without adding a lot more protection to the engine).

comment:4 by Erik Johansson, 13 years ago

That sounds like the best solution for now, more serious cheat-disabling techniques would probably be much easier to implement later in any case. To some extent it's better to make cheating possible, but only as long as the other players know of it. For those who just want to cheat because they can it's probably better that it's not too difficult to do, but easy for the other players to see. Otherwise people would just find other ways to cheat which we haven't yet found a way to stop, and that would not be apparent to the other players.

comment:5 by Michael D. Hafer, 13 years ago

Perhaps when one player enables the Developers Overlay, then it is also enabled for all other players with a notification saying "so and so has enabled the developer's overlay".

comment:6 by Kieran P, 13 years ago

I agree with Mythos. A shared developer overlay. If one person turns on reveal map, all players see the revealed map. Same with control all units etc. So if they cheat,they work against themselves (allowing others to cheat just as much).

comment:7 by Kieran P, 13 years ago

Owner: changed from Phillip to Philip Taylor

comment:8 by brian, 13 years ago

Resolution: fixed
Status: newclosed

Fixed in r8376 (settings window) and r8377 (hotkey)

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