News

01/04/04 New feature to help detect map-hacking

READ THIS FIRST : Definition of a potentially suspicious event = any selection of a building or unit that belongs to another player.

That means to transform a potentially suspicious event into a proof of hack event, you must watch the replay at the exact time when the selection occurs and see if the player had vision or not on the selected building/unit. Because most really suspicious events will probably occur early in the game there is a time limit on suspicious events, that is any potential suspicious event occuring after that time limit is simply ignored. This limit is defined in the screen options. The default value is 15 minutes.

Version 1.02G comes with a new feature designed to help detect map-hacking. When coming back from vacation I realized lots of people were using the "export events to text file" feature of BWChart to then search for "suspicious events", that is when a player selects another players building/unit when he might not have vision of it. I simply made that mechanism automatic so you guys don't have to do all that stuff using text files and Excell.

This principle is very basic and therefore is not sufficient to prove that someone was hacking on a particular game. You will need to watch replays to confirm any hint given by BWChart.

So how does it work? Well, if you take a look at the event list, you will notice that in the right column, sometimes a ? sign appears in red. The player name is then displayed in red too. That means the event is a "suspicious event". Repetitive clicks on the "Next" button will select the suspicious events in cycle. When a suspicious event is selected, some information about the event is displayed below the event list.

WARNING: there are small differences between when things happened in a game and when they happen in the replay, which means the sequencing of events is strictly equal, but the timing might differ slightly due to lagging, conversion errors, etc. So use some margin (at least 2 secs) when deciding that a player didnt have vision at a given time.

PLEASE : if you think you found a replay where some famous player (or not) seems to map-hack, think twice before posting about it on every forum you know. Make 110% sure the player didn't have vision at the time he did the suspicious move. Try to use more than one replay to confirm.

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