It's a complicated story Michael. If you have read all my concerns on both
this newsgroup and T.g.s.n./N3 newsgroup (and even in my converter FAQ), the
main reason why I was trying to make people change the names of identical
tracks in N2 (like N2 C***te) is because of the possibility of innocent
cheating --> leading to real cheating. The tools are here to modify the
TRK, yet the current anti-cheat checksum code isn't really good at that.
It's correct, not perfect.
Yes you can add a couple of degrees of banking and be able to race online.
It's at your risks, the Papyrus game engine is very unstable with those
modifications (when I was testing on preTEN using NR99 tracks for N2 I had
often complete PC reboots). I figure nobody with any Sportsmanship would do
that, but it's something we have to accept as a fact, there will be people
(and there is already) people cheating. The server could transfer the
track.dat to every client before each race, but heck they are several megs
in size. I had somehow thought about an alternative (only the TRK and 3DO
file), those are very small compared to the .dat and could eliminate
cheating, I mean on the server side.
The thing is that there is still way too many stuff on the client side. All
the physics and the output data goes in concordance (sp?) with YOUR .dat
file, not the server one. WIth the help of TSR, it's even worse. The best
multiplayer coding would have only your Wheel output on the client, but heck
I don't think we will see this until years. And even there you can create a
BOT for that.
If you are really concerned, try to call Papyrus, or send an email to
Charlie Heath. He is always interested in comments about new ways to cheat
and so.. is it those kind of constructive help that will make online racing
a more safe environment.
But the main point is and this is very important :
"It's the price to pay for an open-architecture racing sim."
--
-- Fran?ois Mnard <ymenard>
-- May the Downforce be with you...
"People think it must be fun to be a super genius, but they don't realise
how hard it is to put up with all the idiots in the world."
