CodeMercenary

We will, of course, let you be the judge of that.

TS and XFire could write a plugin for our software, I suppose, but it would be kind of odd for someone to use the technology of their competitor to do half of what their product is supposed to do.

I quite understand, and I didn't intend to insult the hacker community with my statement. I only meant to express the difficulty associated with our approach. It took our team of researchers nearly a year to perfect this system, and while it is POSSIBLE that a hacker would try to replicate our efforts, we aren't sure that it is likely.

I do, however, recognize your call for caution. Talking to PB-type services in an effort to register ourselves with them may be the best long-term solution. Though...I think that we will have to wait until we're as popular as World of Warcraft before they'll pay much attention to us. As far as I know, Steam is a very popular overlay system that STILL triggers punkbuster in some games.

Then there's also the matter that getting publishers to do anything is a bit like pulling teeth. Not to knock them, or anything, but they have a product to release, too, and unless you make a pretty sweet deal for them, they are reluctant to do anything for you.

ScratchMonkey

I welcome developers who want to come chat about their game-related products. Having an inside track on what's happening with the stuff we use is of tremendous value. (I try to cultivate such relationships at the office, as well. Quality bug reports have gotten me visits by tool developers looking for input on the next-generation tools, as well as very fast turnaround on fixes.)

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ScratchMonkey

Not at all. I don't buy the "one product to do everything" high-integration approach. I prefer several high-quality products written by specialists to one half-baked all-in-one written by generalists. Let TS and XF do what they do best, and you do the video side, and we'll get the best of both worlds.

I have the same desire for games with server browsers: One always finds some volunteer has written a better server/buddy finder after a game's release, but because it has to operate outside the game, it suffers the need to spawn the game with arguments and possibly lose the open slot in the time the game takes to load. A better architecture is to let the game remain running and have the 3rd party server finder use IPC to tell the running game to connect. (ETQW will reserve the slot before starting the connection attempt, so you know before the lengthy map loading process if you successfully grabbed the slot.) I keep hoping some game authors will adopt this style of communicating with an external launcher.

Yep, I know it's not a trivial thing. The OS driver documentation is never complete, and there's a ton of it even so. Look at how hard it was for nVidia to get a working driver for Vista after MS shuffled the architecture. OTOH, Linux was written by a guy working in his house without pay or hope of pay. So it's not inconceivable that a kernel-mode crack might get written, esp. once your "proof of concept" (of video access, not cheating!) shows them what's possible.

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CodeMercenary

Thank you for the words of welcome. I must admit, it does feel a little weird to be posting in a thread that's about a product I worked on, but our community managers kept telling me that I should just jump right in.

That mentality is exactly the reason that we decided to open our API freely to independent developers. If you're interest is only to make the games you play a little better, then we won't charge you a dime to use our API or our framework. And if your interest is to use our software, then you can do so freely without worry that we'll make you pay for anything. If there's one thing Web 2.0 has taught us, it's that a big user base is what gets you far.

Man, you have no idea. Sometimes it feels like an uphill battle. I must have submitted thirty or forty documentation bug reports to Microsoft regarding their driver documentation, never getting any response back from them. That's when I realized that there are probably around sixty guys, total, who have to write display drivers professionally, and that they all knew about these bugs already. The only thing that's trustworthy, I've found, are the WDDK header files.

Hopefully, though, the hurdles involved with replicating our approach will delay would-be cheaters for long enough that we'll get our own exceptions.

Rincewind

Kernel-level injection? This not only would be the preferred method of cheating in online games it is the preferred method of cheating in online games. It was/is one of the only ways to skirt around Valves VAC and punk buster. There have been tools available (publicly and semi-privately) that have taken advantage of this fact. And most exploit it successfully until enough data is collected and accounts get banned. Kernel injection is also a favorite tool for trojan writers....

This interview was from over a year ago. I noticed it said that that you planned on releasing to the public last summer. Has that changed? I ask because I couldn't find a download link anywhere.

Also, I have a feeling you may want to get on white lists regardless of how well you think you avoid VAC/PB detection. If your application becomes as widely used as you want it to be, and it actively calls DirectX API's you better believe VAC/PB/WoW bans will be handed out. Regardless of your intentions, VAC/PB/et al. are not "smart" programs, but they do play the numbers game.

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ScratchMonkey

The MS bug tracking system seems to be a black hole.

I was trying to track down and confirm a bug in VC6 C++ exception handling and googled a few claims that it had been reported but never acknowledged. Fortunately it's fixed in VC8. But a customer is using VC6, so I have to provide a different mechanism. (The issue arises when you try to rethrow from inside a catch; the exception ends up getting freed twice. I was using an exception dispatcher idiom that does exactly that, and getting mysterious heap corruption. I switched to an RTTI-based dispatcher instead.)

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ScratchMonkey

It wouldn't be calling DX because it's running below the DX API level.

But I can see an overzealous detector falsely triggering, as a bunch of WoW-on-Linux users had their accounts falsely suspended until Cedega convinced Blizzard that Cedega was being falsely detected as a cheat.

http://www.linux-gamers.net/modules/...p?storyid=1852

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Rincewind

Hmm, my understanding of the sparse information I saw online was that the overlay is calling the DX API but the kernel level processes place the overlay directly in the video "stream" and not through a "shared" space like game memory or .exe-injection. And by "shared space" i mean "not really, but we'll force it in there anyway."

I do admit that the program is compelling and I really would like to see it succeed. Getting it white listed is a great start to build confidence in it. The deal with SOE is another

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CodeMercenary

I know. I think you're referring to rootkits. The other cheating technologies you're talking about all involve breaching the address space of the target process by modifying IATs, DirectX detour patching combined with code allocation, and/or the enqueuing of user-mode APCs from the kernel, all with the eventual aim of calling DirectX APIs in a covert fashion.

We don't call any DX APIs. No part of our overlay runs in user mode. Furthermore, in a year of testing hundreds of online games, we have never triggered any game guardian software. It's possible that game guardian software exists that would detect us. We haven't seen it.

birdie_in_Texas

uh...so for all of us "dummies" trying to read this "stuff" and figure out wtf you guys are talking about..

how about an easy one..

where/when can i get this to try for CoD4 and FFoW..?

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Acreo Aeneas

I don't think that's Merc's department. He might not have a answer he can give...officially anyways.

Ah, well that explains. Now if larger corporations started doing that (cough...Steam...cough).

Does PXP present problems if we alt-tab out of game to do something on our desktop then alt-tab back in?

For example: locking up our CPU/system, draining free RAM, crashing game to desktop, etc.


And since I'm on the subject of system resources...

How much RAM and CPU processing does PXP take up from startup to entering a game with PXP enabled?

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Acreo_Aeneas
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Trooper

No kidding. He said kernal so i went and popped some popcorn.


And welcome to TG Code. We really do like it when we get developers on here that know what the gaming community wants. Alot of the members here are programmers/coders themselves. If you need help testing or debugging your software, by all means ask. Im sure we can screw it up really good.

Acreo Aeneas

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Acreo_Aeneas
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Trooper

does anyone have an older version of the client, it seems to be removed.

Acreo Aeneas

That would be nice...

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Acreo_Aeneas
Former 9th Member