Well uhh, there's a good chance that there's enough of stellarforge in the client to do that..
Cheating
- Thread starter Rich32uk
- Start date
Ah so you're saying you don't care about players with less experience? Again, just wasting time.
That's not how the stellar forge works, there's nothing of the stellar forge in the game client or in fact anywhere in the game at all, all the stellar forge does is generate the galaxy data, it's a completely separate program to the game and all the system data it uses. It generated the galaxy, that's all, it's not actually part of the game!
I know people be crazy and all that but I really can't fathom cheating to find barren icy bodies out in the useless wasteland that the elite galaxy is. Bragging right? Nobody except the insane care where you have flown. Exploring is a solitary activity. I'm sure it's possible and has probably occurred a couple times but seriously, what difference does it make? I've actually done combat with a cheater once and beat him despite his hacks, so believe me I know it's possible to cheat but Exploring isn't a competition. Cheater types want to win and get a power trip. Explorers watch Netflix and press J hundreds of times. How many useless, barren, generic systems is a cheater going to visit before getting bored?
Fun fact - one of the reports Orvidius maintains is the newly discovered system closest to Sol that is reported each day. Most days that distance is still under 400 LY.
Okay so you don't care, and you don't have to. But some of us care to put our names on distant worlds, and some cheaters seek to do the same in an unfair way. Can we just respect that we hate cheaters for different reason and unite on fighting them together?
Gees it's like a snapshot of American politics right here, where people don't care about eachother's problems so so problems get fixed.
Well yes we do, when they actually exist, you seem to have latched on to a 3 year old list of claims and have accepted it unquestioningly, that's not the way to do things, at least that's not the way I do things.
Where's your evidence?
"Oh you need evidence, oh this is not evidence, oh this evidence is too old, boo hoo" I rest my case your honor.
Again, literally a snapshot of American politics, where people think other people's problems don't exist.
Literally no evidence provided.
Okay, here's the thing. I have no particular reason to doubt that tools exist to hack the client and cheat things like jump range etc. Even so, I can virtually guarantee that it is rare enough not to make any impact whatsoever on exploration in the main. Why? Because unlike PvP that is mostly peer-to-peer activity, exploration consists entirely of things you broadcast back to Frontier's servers - your ship's location, your discovery tags, your codex entries. If your game client fraudulently tells the transaction server "so hey, I made a jump and now I'm 30,000 LY from my previous position" that's the most blatant "look at me I'm cheating" flag imaginable. And if you don't hack your ship's jump range, the other cheats people have mentioned add up to saving, what, a couple of minutes per system explored?
So yeah, I can well imagine that cheaters hacking the client could cause all kinds of mayhem in PvP combat, maybe even in some types of BGS activity - although that's more the domain of automation bots. But just mathematically, it's hard to see how it could possibly make a big difference to exploration as a whole.
There is, in a sense, but it wouldn't be very practical.
Stellarforge is the code that generates the galaxy, so the whole thing is embedded in the client, yes. That's how the client can procgen your galaxy without loading stuff off Frontier servers for each system, much less loading millions of systems if you zoom out the galaxy map. The way the original ED devs arranged SF, it's a two-stage process. Running through galaxy sector masscode boxels to generate the positions and basic properties of star systems is meant to be a quick and cheap process, so you can zoom to a new area of the galaxy map and quickly see what's there. If you run ED on an older computer and zoom well out, you might be able to catch it generating new boxes of stars as you pan around.
The second stage runs when you need to get the detailed contents of a system - all the planets and moons and rings and such. That normally happens when you jump to the system, thus the frequent refrain about hyperspace being a "loading screen". It seems to typically take 10-20 seconds to create a system, which sets a lower limit on how long the hyperjump sequence can take. So let's say you wanted to take a peek inside every system this side of the core - remember, you can't "discover" them since that would be broadcasting what you're doing directly to Frontier HQ, but you could make a private database I guess. Round numbers, you're looking at 10 seconds X 100 billion systems or about 31,700 years runtime on gaming-grade hardware.
You are literally saying what I care about is trivial and doesn't matter. It's not a very smart thing to say to someone who's fighting on your side. Consider the two alternatives: either I am convince by you and quit the fight, or I think what you said is stupid and take offense, thereby generating infighting. What good comes out of such arguments?
And yes, I am a bit offended by your trivializing what I care about. You simply don't understand the sentiment, which is fine, and this is exactly where one needs to exercise respect. Respect other people's plights and problems, even if you might not understand.
Yes, but the part that normally is contacted over the network to retrieve the system data from a systemaddress might exist unused in the client due to sloppy programming. Based on other information, I think the odds of that aren't terrible.
I doubt the generation takes any significant amount of time.
Perhaps we misunderstand each other. Your earlier posts suggested that you would like to go out exploring, but are held back by fear that cheaters will have been everywhere before you. I am saying that you should boldly go forth unimpeded by such concerns, because whatever impact cheaters may have had is trivial next to the scale of the galaxy. The Black awaits, and if you answer the call you will literally never run out of untouched worlds to discover for yourself.
If your objective is instead some forum fight that you may or may not quit, that is really of no concern to me one way or the other.
Back in 2019 I was really into pvp and became very upset with the cheaters as well. So I tracked down their source (wasn’t hard to find), and there were so many users reporting they were getting soft bans (restricted to solo mode) and then permabans for repeated offences.
These idiots were using cheat engine to manipulate values in memory (shield, hull, etc) and FDev apparently do have manipulation checks in place. Only one hacker knew how to get around them, but he left Elite in late 2019 (probably banned). Anyone using that cheat now gets banned pretty quickly based on the comments (though I haven’t looked at them for a few months).
Then last year someone came out with a rail gun hack that reduces the ‘warm up’ time to 0 (Insta-fire). But whomever made the hack didn’t have much clue either, and I heard several reports of pvp’ers being banned. So FDev aren’t just ignoring cheaters, they do have some checks in place and do ban people who try to manipulate game mechanics.
However, I don’t think they’re banning bot accounts without visual reports, since they’re not manipulating game code values. I mean, it wouldn’t be too hard to flag accounts that are running the same loops 24/7, and then have a closer look at what they’re doing. But maybe it’s a matter of limited human resources for those investigations.
Anyway, tl;dr, FDev don’t just ignore cheaters, and I’m happy about that.
These idiots were using cheat engine to manipulate values in memory (shield, hull, etc) and FDev apparently do have manipulation checks in place. Only one hacker knew how to get around them, but he left Elite in late 2019 (probably banned). Anyone using that cheat now gets banned pretty quickly based on the comments (though I haven’t looked at them for a few months).
Then last year someone came out with a rail gun hack that reduces the ‘warm up’ time to 0 (Insta-fire). But whomever made the hack didn’t have much clue either, and I heard several reports of pvp’ers being banned. So FDev aren’t just ignoring cheaters, they do have some checks in place and do ban people who try to manipulate game mechanics.
However, I don’t think they’re banning bot accounts without visual reports, since they’re not manipulating game code values. I mean, it wouldn’t be too hard to flag accounts that are running the same loops 24/7, and then have a closer look at what they’re doing. But maybe it’s a matter of limited human resources for those investigations.
Anyway, tl;dr, FDev don’t just ignore cheaters, and I’m happy about that.
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... and so would the cheaters ... Anti-cheating methods need to be kept out of the public because if fdev tell you what they do to try to catch cheaters, then the cheaters will also be aware of this and figure out new ways to avoid getting caught.
That would be the FDEV tech talk where they discussed the Stellar Forge and how it works!
I think I get the gist of what your saying and beyond this thread I had heard anecdotal comments when FC where released about discovered planets beyond the jump range of a normal ship.
That said it seems if I understand you correctly you want some first discoveries. If you head to SagA you will without looking stumble on undiscovered systems, The stars are so tightly packed the close to the Galaxy’s central black hole that you can’t help but find new stuff.
About those “cheats” I mentioned earlier, like you I would like to see all those previously unreachable planets de-tagged, I also expect if that (if it exists) that the jump cheat was able to be implemented on normal ships it can now be applied to FC and so would expect anything tagged that’s beyond 500ly jump to also be cleansed of its tag so that when we are able to finally jump 1000ly then we will be guaranteed new tag rights.
That said it seems if I understand you correctly you want some first discoveries. If you head to SagA you will without looking stumble on undiscovered systems, The stars are so tightly packed the close to the Galaxy’s central black hole that you can’t help but find new stuff.
About those “cheats” I mentioned earlier, like you I would like to see all those previously unreachable planets de-tagged, I also expect if that (if it exists) that the jump cheat was able to be implemented on normal ships it can now be applied to FC and so would expect anything tagged that’s beyond 500ly jump to also be cleansed of its tag so that when we are able to finally jump 1000ly then we will be guaranteed new tag rights.
So the thread is basically about people were cheating 3-4 years ago and FDev have to do something about it now based on the fact that people will try to find ways to cheat in future?
Unless there's a vulnerability in the code somewhere that can be used for cheats, or you've found some group somewhere exploiting these vulnerabilities I'm not sure what you'd expect FDev to do.
I'd imagine the answer is going to be that they should make the game cheat proof and if you think you're the person to help do that with their code and shore up any issues you've identified that they haven't, I'm sure they'd be happy to hear what you could do for them.
Unless there's a vulnerability in the code somewhere that can be used for cheats, or you've found some group somewhere exploiting these vulnerabilities I'm not sure what you'd expect FDev to do.
I'd imagine the answer is going to be that they should make the game cheat proof and if you think you're the person to help do that with their code and shore up any issues you've identified that they haven't, I'm sure they'd be happy to hear what you could do for them.