Cheat Engine

Is Cheat Engine working with construct applications?

If yes, could you Ashley make a protection?

If someone really wants to cheat at your game, why not just let them? It doesn't hurt anybody.

Plus for certain things it's kinda fun. After beating Liberty City Stories and playing the hell out of it for a couple months the game just sat and collected dust for a while. I downloaded cwcheat and got another couple months enjoyment out of it, just goofing around. Flying around, making obstacle courses, doing crazy stunts, whatever.

I don't know, I just think that if someone really wants to go through all the trouble to download a tool to hack your game just to get infinite health or whatever, might as well let them do it. If they're doing it to beat the game, they're not letting anyone down but themselves. Plus, I don't think cheating like that is all that rampant anyway to be worth the trouble of making protection against it. Or is it? I guess I don't really know. Seems harmless enough though.

In multiplayer online games with ranking systems etc, cheating is a lot more problematic because it has the potential to render your game unplayable.

Anti cheating however in my opinion comes more through the design of the program than through constructs design.

In multiplayer online games with ranking systems etc, cheating is a lot more problematic because it has the potential to render your game unplayable.

Ah, you have a good point there. Not being a multiplayer-type person I didn't even think of that.

And yeah, if you want to make some homebrew protection for your game you could always do some code obfuscation. I don't know how well that would work for something like Construct, but you could give it a try.

Yeah, for multiplayer :/

I think I know what you're meaning. The key thing in any multiplayer game that makes it work good is the client-server relationship. It's actually a lot easier to do anti-cheat methods in multiplayer games as opposed to single player games. The key thing to remember is that the client is only INTERPRETING things from the server. The server should be doing any processing of any stats or variables, and it sends it to the client. The client only sends keystrokes and actions to the server, and then it sends it back.

Then, to take it even further, if someone was to hex edit it or something, it would only show up differently for them and not allow them to actually have any advantages or have anything in return for it.

But, then the possibility is always open for them to use a means of modifying the packet. The key to that is to encrypt most of the messages you send over to the server and client, and then have them decrypt it on return. But that's a lot more advanced, and you could setup means of figuring out if someone's doing packet editing. Anyways, hopefully in the future someone will make an encryption plugin, but from what I've heard it isn't too hard.

So it shouldn't be too easy for people to cheat, especially if you are doing a multiplayer game. As for a single player game, I'd have to agree with Deadeye, I don't really see any point to trying to protect against cheating.. All it'll do is ruin their experience.

Encrypting packets doesn't really achieve much because a clever hacker can always decrypt/encrypt it themselves.

Either way, I listed a lot more than just encryption. What you said is true, but I was only listing another possible precaution. You do realize that most of the big MMORPGs and such games use encryption from client to server and vise versa? Obviously it's meant to be another gate that they have to try and get through, and most new games published have put in these protection methods to ensure players don't have an unfair advantage, and it seems to work out great.

Encrypting packets doesn't really achieve much because a clever hacker can always decrypt/encrypt it themselves.

But its blocking normal users from hacking it

I think it's a worthwhile feature so you at least have the option, but Exomarc is right, it actually has limited use in multiplayer games: the server will track your score, not the client, so if you hexedit your score and send s "I have loads of score" packet to the server the server says "Umm, no you don't?" and boots you from the game. This is also to prevent the possibility of somebody entirely recoding your game to the network spec themselves, and programming deliberate hacks in!