Accusation of hacking/cheating

[Jediluke]

roncli, I'm not posting this to necessarily prove my innocence but I believe that there is some sort of issue that most of us code commoners do not understand.

I just learned about this random homer tracking response thingy and I don't like the sound of it.

My first thought is to make the response time uniform across both players....perhaps the same ms response time every time. A homer will always track an opponent at 5ms or 30 ms or whatever we determine. OR at least make the random selection the same on both sides so that if my homer decided to begin tracking at 50ms on my screen...it will begin tracking at 50ms on your screen as well!

[Jediluke]

drakona/roncli:

Do smart blobs track the same way/same time on both players screens? (pretending lag doesn't exist of course)

[Drakona]

Yeah. You've basically got it right. And it's that way because it's always been that way in D1 and we don't change things.

All of the homing objects work the same way in this sense. However, it's much more noticeable with homers as they come out at full velocity, so can go a couple shiplengths before they start to home. Smart blobs start still and accelerate, so the delay matters less. Interestingly, smart blobs also launch in random directions from the impact point, but this *is* synced between the players, so both should see the same thing there.

[Jediluke]

wow, this is very interesting. My gut feeling tells me that the random homer behavior thing should be synced or eliminated.

[birdseye]

OK, I have talked with all parties involved. 3 issues exist. #1 the cheating accusation was more of trolling/something not to be believed by the unnamed party, and you have called them a hacker in the past during battle. There is no actual cheating accusation being lobbed so let's put that to bed now. Nobody is accusing you of cheating for real. I don't agree with the behavior by either of you in either instance.

#2 You were asked for all EXEs, this was because there has been a 'secret' exe that only some people have -- that includes Myself, Mark392, Jediluke, and of course Drakona coded it. Dunno if Lothar runs it. This 1.45B was made because Mark392 hated seeing the red "Demo Recording" text while playing, and I got sick of it too. I asked Jedi and he gave me a copy. The intention of this is obviously 100% innocent. However, on further reflection and discussion I feel that special exes should not be handed out. Now, I trust Drakona as someone who believes game integrity is #1 above all, and know she wants a fair game for all. However, I used to work for a software company when I got out of college. Before being promoted, I was a lowly tester. Sometimes the programmers would swear that they ONLY changed X, but in reality they accidentally also changed Y. This can happen for a variety of reasons which I don't think need to be explained.

Point is, I think in the future nobody should have an EXE that others don't have, except for Drakona/Lothar and if they need someone else to test things, and they should only be used for those tests and not in other games. I think this is the best way to ensure a fair game for all, and I would be 100% adamant that ladder matches should only be played with identical versions. There is no reason not to be careful on the subject of fairness -- we all trust Drak to be putting a fair game out, but everybody is human. I'm not trying to insult her, and I certainly have found NO difference in the "B" exe except for the red text being gone. None.


I will get to #3 which is a bit longer but I need to do work stuff soon. Just wanted to clear up that the 'cheating' stuff really is a non-story, but the homer/smart tracking *is* a story...more on that later after I do some more work.

[PFunk]

I'm pretty sure every homer I shoot at Morfod has special code. Proof: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDv1ffCWMW8

[Jediluke]

My 'hacker' statement regarding this individual in a game occurred multiple years ago.
The multiple hacking references and statements this guy is making towards me is very current. Just sayin'. I already said I'm not particularly bothered or offended by it. I'm just pointing that out for you.

It was only after multiple written & spoken comments regarding the theme of Jedi/Hacking did I confront the individual to find out if there was any particular reason for the sudden and consistent tone.

"your homers seemingly do more damage than others"

Last I checked... 1 + 1 = 2 and I had no reason to suspect that the sum of that equation should be anything other than what it was....and what it was.....was an accusation of cheating.

I agree, the story isn't about being accused of hacking...but that accusation is what has lead to the meat of the story going forward which is the homer/smart missile tracking code.

I didn't name the accuser because that isn't even the story for me. All I wanted was to dig deeper to see if it was even possible for my homers to be different from someone else's. Apparently ALL of our homers are different from everyone else's with each press of the 2ndary firing button!....but yet that is original code.

[LotharBot]

[roncli]

I actually don't know much about the homer/smart tracking code, but I'm investigating an issue with D2 non-missile homing objects (ie: smart blobs, mine blobs, shaker bomblets) turning at framerate-dependent rates.

I do know enough about the code to know that it's 125ms and not 150 (1 divided by 8 = 0.125), and that a potential fix would be to track the time the missile was fired, delay its tracking by a fixed amount of time (maybe 0, maybe 125ms, probably would need tuning), and sync its tracking every 125ms from that moment instead of every 125ms of game time. However, this would be more of a political discussion rather than a "oh hey this is broke, let's fix it". I will add this to the Retro GitHub tracker so that we're at least aware of it.

[roncli]

Unrelated, I've leveled up my GitHub-fu and have started adding "Discussion Required" labels to all the bugs and enhancements that are reported that would change the competitive game. This includes:

* This issue
* Rooster's Autoselect profiles
* My Auto X duplication option
* B*h*m*t?'s fusion shake bug
* Kiln/Jedi's D1 weapon ejecting
* Kiln's restrict joiners by ping
* Clone/Xciter's homing lock sound too quiet
* Ryusei/Kiln's restore some original D1 bugs,
* merl's quad laser/fusion hardpoint too far forward bug

I'm sure some other issues on the GitHub issue tracker could qualify for this tag, too.