I am thinking, when the game starts up, simply run System.Diagnostics.Process, and check for all known hack software processes. Although, this would only be helpful if they are hacking runtime, and I’m not sure if that is a common thing to do, as I am not familiar with the ways of the Dark Side.
Think it would make a difference?
It would be cooler if I could check if the hack applications exist on the computer, whether they are running or not.
And yes, this code would still be hackable if the game has never ran.
As a gamer, I love my games being hackable. If I know what I’m doing, please let me.
As a dev, I would be interested to know what solutions there are to obscure game data. For cheating I would use Cheat Engine and you start that up -after- you start the game in question. Then you just enter a value like money, buy something to change that value, and search again for the new value to eliminate wrong hits. I remember flashgames obscuring values by multiplying them with a certain number, but once you get that number, you multiply your money value with that when searching or just do higher/lower searches instead of looking for exact values. I bet you could multiply with a changing counter so the factor keeps changing as well.
So yeah, interesting topic from a programming standpoint, but please don’t.
Edit: Thinking about it: Make a hidden counter- +1, +2 or even prime numbers or whatever. Make a function which you use to change variables like money. Every time that function changes a variable, it multiplies the value with the counter value, and then alternating with 1 or -1. So you end up with a money value that is multiplied by a random factor, and also changes from positive to negative every time. Of course you then reverse the effect before displaying it to the player. No way I’m getting around that without someone knowledgeable making a trainer program.
i dont really see the point in doing this. unless you are a huge company with a big online game or something like that, you really shouldn’t care about people cheating on their own.
So… Only “big companies” should care about hackers? Yep…
If your game is dependant on selling virtual coins to make some money to you, why should you care about Cheat Engine or packet editors huh?!
@Question, that won’t quite work… Players can simply change the name of the .exe file to anything else then Cheat Engine will run as another process;
In SecureClient I check to see if a bunch of software libraries related to CheatEngine are running. Players can change its name to anything, it will still be visible to the game and the game will shutdown itself, if the game is a Windows standalone.
If you put those purchases in the game itself, only you are to blame when it gets hacked. Stuff like this should always be server-side on protected server you own; And protecting servers is a completely different topic.
no(to making a difference). Your software is either really cool in which case it can/will be cracked no matter what, or it is not worth cracking, those are pretty much the two options.