Battlezone 1

Maybe I will just hack the crap out of the original untill you all migrate over there.

btw spock i have changed my mind make me a casual stratter after those last 3 games with rip and anthlon were really fun and NO hacking or cheating in them (besides rip pawned us)

reaper you can hack BZE its just harder and when we are talking about RIMB you can just block him with your firewall.

No game is hackproof.

Biohazard Jan 15, 2007
Howdy all,

I still think Battlezone was the best game ever made, didn't know ppl still played until just today.

I was reading the posts to catch up, and came across this about snipe hacks, and if you don't mind, I'll comment, because the snipe-hack was my arch-enemy for years....

For the last six years I've been working with the Tribes platform on expansion projects, scripting products and making maps, and one of my tasks was to detect and correct cheats, because such knowledge would improve future projects (there's another decendant of Tribes in the works do in March '07 by the way). One of the things about Tribes is its nearly cheat-proof with rare exceptions, and one of them is the snipe-hack. Yes, there are some incredible snipers in Tribes too, and then there are the impossible ones. For six years I struggled to figure out how to spot the cheaters, and how to avoid accusing the talented. I scripted, fielded and scrapped many attempts and chased many theories trying to pin down what was being exploited in what I thought was an auto-aim script, or a modified sniper-round with exaggerated collision conditions. I hunted scripts and code trying to figure out how the heck an auto-aim worked... how did these snipers make the game aim for him to allow for such amazing sniping ability, how are they alluding my safegaurds, and how can I write code to detect the auto-aim? I even used the internet. I'd scourred the internet using key-words such as "autoaim" and what not, and never found anything useful. For six years this stumped me. I was never able to solve this dillema... until one day...

One day I did an internet search for a product I made, to see what the fans were saying about it... and true to all internet searches... it pulled up some forum comments. Not even looking for the sniper hack or autoaim, but simply to read fan comments, I followed every forum that had my keyword in it. And one forum I found was a hacker forum... and they were sharing the settings needed to use their snipe hack in a new game. Then I understood the reason I was never able to find this hack. I was always searching for "autoaim", and "snipehack", and keywords such as these. The hackers don't call the snipe-hack those things. The hackers use 3d rendering titles in the name of the hack, because that's what it really is, its a graphics hack. A newbie hacker was needing some instruction... instructions which I read, and now I see the light.

What I learned was this...

The snipe hack people use is universal, meaning it works in every single 3D online game out there, and unfortunately there's nothing can be done about it. A player can buy a brand new game just released, and in minutes have that snipe hack up and running and everyone thinking he's a snipe stud in the brand new game already.

It works like this (don't mean to over simplify but not everyone is a coder)...
While online, your PC needs to know where every object in the mission is, so it can track it and render it for you as the screen you see when you play. It tracks this stuff in RAM, of course.

Every object that it is tracking is represented in RAM by a variable, and similar objects have similar variable names, or addresses. The snipe hack does not interfere with the game or its files at all. The snipe hack runs in the background analyzing the RAM that renders your screen. The snipe hack mearly needs to know what addresses represents a player. Once it finds that, the snipe hack will trigger the fire key, a legal input in every game, anytime the player's reticle (more specifically his line-of-sight) is lined up on an object that matches as a player type. A legitimate input for a legitimate situation. The cheat is that the player didn't pull the trigger, the hack did. So, the player still has to aim to an extent, even if just to successfuly pass that reticle across the target player just once for a split second.

There's a reason its always the sniper weapons that get used in this cheat... it requires the reticle to line up on the player to work. As we all know, sniper rounds in every FPS have perfect line-of-site accuracy, as it is by definition a sniper. If you need to lead your target with a sniper weapon, its not because the game dynamics require it, its because you are compensating for your humanly slow trigger reflexes, so that by the time your nerves have done their job and you do press the trigger, the target IS lined up, and you trigger a line-of-site round to kill the target. Most other weapons require that you lead the target to compensate for a slower bullet traveling to meet its moving target, and the hack can't compensate for that. Thus we don't see insaneGodlyGood players who fire plasma rounds, or machinegun rounds, or landing that grenade right through that tiny hole to plug his target, because all those DO require leading the target to hit it.

This is why a player in Battlezone was able to successfully snipe even though he was tumbling head over heals in mid-ejection. His reticle obviously lined up by chance with a player, pulling the trigger and successfully sniping under impossible conditions.

I would guess the BZ snipehack doesn't target the player per se, but the white dot itself.

Since this hack runs in the background, scanning RAM for the collision of the reticle with a player, no cheat protection on earth will prevent that hack from triggering that players trigger for him. It plagues every FPS out there, and every game developer I've worked with curses it, because lets face it, sniper weapons are cool, and the games we make wouldn't be the same without them.

It took me years to learn this lesson, and to quit wasting my energy trying to fix my games for a hack that had nothing to do with my game. I hope this helps y'all, at least if it keeps you from trying to fix your Battlezone, because that's not where the problem is. BZ rules.

I'm on a mac currently... maybe I need to get that 'ol PC outta the box and fire up the noisy MAG cannons again. Kewl to see you still play BZ.

Biohazard