this post was submitted on 25 Dec 2023
669 points (98.4% liked)

Games

31411 readers
952 users here now

Welcome to the largest gaming community on Lemmy! Discussion for all kinds of games. Video games, tabletop games, card games etc.

Weekly Threads:

What Are You Playing?

The Weekly Discussion Topic

Rules:

  1. Submissions have to be related to games

  2. No bigotry or harassment, be civil

  3. No excessive self-promotion

  4. Stay on-topic; no memes, funny videos, giveaways, reposts, or low-effort posts

  5. Mark Spoilers and NSFW

  6. No linking to piracy

More information about the community rules can be found here.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 48 points 8 months ago (3 children)

Does this mean the hackers and cheaters will only get worse from here?

[–] [email protected] 20 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (3 children)

Unlikely, unless the source code for the anti-cheat system and the server have been leaked as well.

The source code for just the game isn't really going to help cheaters. Cheat makers typically don't care about the code, they'd look at either altering the game files, and/or the memory space where the game variables are stored. Having access to the source doesn't really help with that (well it may help them understand the compiled binaries a bit better, assuming they don't know them inside-out already - we're talking about a 10 year old game here).

But it may help modders for making mods and stuff. These mods may or may not be detected by the anti-cheat system though.

If Rockstar coded the game properly, the server won't allow the client to connect if any of the files have been modified, or if the anti-cheat system is spooked/borked. So assuming that's the case, any mods that may come out of this would be for offline gaming.

TL;DR: There's nothing the worry about, online gaming (against randoms) will continue to suck as usual, best to stick to offline play or playing with/against a trusted friend circle.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 8 months ago (3 children)

Wow. I used to use a sector editor on floppy disks to cheat on games way back in the eighties by looking for player stats and abilities and whatnot. I had no idea that modern day cheating would be so similar to the rudimentary stuff I was doing nearly forty years ago.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago

Well, software is software after all :P

It all becomes 1s and 0s at the end of the day lol

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago

The core ideas remained the same, only difference is that they've got more roadblocks now which makes it considerably tricker (security measures in the OS + anti-cheat + encryption/DRM + server-side checks etc).

But modern day cheating goes beyond memory editing, for instance there are things like aimbots which can work at the GPU/driver level, or input automation/macros which work completely ouside of the game so normal anticheat measures may not prevent it.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago

Yeah, computers have a lot more bells and whistles now, but the basics of how the system and the OS work haven't really changed that much, until you get out of native apps and into Electron and stuff. It's honestly remarkable how similar they are. Microsoft has a bunch of documentation about weird and quirky behavior they keep available for backwards compatibility, and most modern software developers take them up on that offer.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago

I agree. Most points of entry are usually via injection, and you need to maneuver around the anti-cheat defense. Once the game code isn't in parity with the server, it's also likely to be rejected; this leak is likely older anyway, so probably a non-issue since it's not feature complete at this point.

It may help identify new points of entry for injection, but that'll likely get patched once exploited.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

to my knowledge the anti cheat is basically disabled anymore

[–] [email protected] 17 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

If support has been discontinued for GTA 5 and it no longer receives any updates then yes that's likely.

edit: depending on what is actually included in the "full source code", of course.