Two hours after we heard that Punkbuster will change to commercially
product we decided to start our own fully free cheat protection project.
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HERE A COPY OF OUR FIRST STATEMENT ON OUR PROVISIONAL HOMEPAGE
====================================================================Welcome
to the provisional homepage of GameGuard.
Have you ever thought about fair-play?
Have you ever been stark-staring mad about other players kicking your
ass because they were cheating?
Wouldn`t it be cool if there was a FREE tool to stop those cheats from
ruining your favorite game? A FREE tool that will be always be FREE, now and
in the future?
Well, join the club ;). Forming a united capable and dedicated team,
we have started a project to change this poor situation.
The result of our project should be a simple-to-use-tool for gamers
protecting them from cheaters, rewarding their honest attitude toward
gaming.
A tool to find and eliminate cheaters from our game servers!
For further information, revisit gameguard.clanhosting.de soon. Soon
we will also have information about our new international "home". We are
working on it, right now.
Experienced and interested C/C++-Coders are kindly asked to send an
email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
You will hear from us. Soon. That's for sure!
September, 27th, 2001
The Crew
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TECHNICAL DESCRIPTION
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The GameGuard Project will be a client-server-based tool that will be able
to detect cheats in online games.
We have done some brainstorming about how to keep such an project uptodate,
enabling it to detect all used and working cheat at any time it is used.
We have come to the conclusion, that an open source approach towards this
proble would result in the shortest and fastest development stages - that
would, however, also mean that the main concept of the system would have to
be absolutely safe.
To our minds, such a safe concept cannot be achieved in the first steps of
development - we will however in the process of development try to reach the
needed level of security and will hopefully (if possible, using such an open
system like Windows) reach it.
The complete release of the source code in this early stage of development
would give the cheat developer the possibility to easily program fake
clients - and it would also mean giving away lots of our internal knowledge
to the cheat developers.
With that in mind we have decided to choose another solution.
The Game Guard system will, after its completion, include a plugin-system.
that will most likely be realized via some sort of script language.
Thus it will be guaranteed, that an unlimited number of external developers
can contribute to cheat detection, WITHOUT the source code of the project
being released. They can easily contribute by coding cheat detection scripts
for cheats they know and send them to us.
The GameGuard system will consist of 3 different components:
1.) Game Guard client
The gameguard client will be installed on the PC which also has the game to
monitor installed.
The client will work similar to a virus scanning software, detecting the
means and goals of certain programs or files on the hard disc or RAM,
reacting to certain actions triggered by cheats or certifying the
authenticity of certain game files.
The client can also perform complex actions that it receives via scripts of
the servers.
After completing the script the client will send back a result to the
server.
The scripts received by gameservers will only be accepted by the client if
they include a digital signature of the GameGuard team.
By that we will make sure that noone can open up a server, binding own
scripts to the client and by that can spy on players on the server.
2.) GameGuard-Server
The GameGuard Server monitors one or more game servers and waits for
connections of clients.
If a new connection is noticed, the server will send various scan scripts to
the client and will check the results. The server also receives all bits of
information on events reported by the client itself. The client itself will
never make the decision, if a cheat has been found or not, on its own. It
simply reports everything to the server, which makes the decision.
In reply the server might send further scripts to the client to check
certain things it may consider necessary and relevant.
The GameGuard server will normally run on the same system also running the
game server.
3.) GameGuard Base
The base is the "headquarter", the central for all server. There will only
be a few bases; all Servers will login to the bases to check the
availability of new updates for the detection of new cheats.
Normal GameGuad clients will only once login to the base after they have
connected to a gameserver, to check back that this GameGuard-Server is
authenticated, running the latest version - eliminating the risk of playing
on a h"hacked" server.
Developers who want to help write detection scripts for certain cheats, are
asked to send these to us, after we have published the script language.
We will then check the script and include it to our script database.
In a short period of time by that all servers can receive the new scripts
via the GameGuard-Base.
By that we achieve that cheaters can even be detected ingame, after they
already feel safe. There will also be the possibility of updating the client
ingame automatically.
We will always be openminded towards new ideas and technologies; however,m
we can only offer people who want to help to send in their source codes or
pieces of it, so that we can integrate them into GameGuard.
If we gave away our source code to everybody pretending he wants to help, it
would be available on some cheating page in a very short time - that's
exactly what we don't want ot happen!
We hope we haven't deterred anybody, who really wants to help, by our strict
rules.
Whenever we feel our concept is so stable and secure, that even publishing
the source code wouldn't enable cheaters to write fake clients or hacks, we
will not hesitate to turn the freeware GameGuard into an OpenSource-Project
Visit our Homepage http://gameguard.clanhosting.de/
