Op donderdag 10 januari 2002 14:00 schreef arko19 het volgende:
PunkBuster Interview
We caught up with Tony Ray from Even Balance Inc regarding PunkBuster for Return To Castle Wolfenstein. For those who don't know, PunkBuster is an anti-cheat software that is used to prevent multiplayer cheating. The Interview covers alot of interesting aspects regarding the present and the futur of Punk Buster. Have fun reading!
Q: What is it like working with Nerve/ID so far?
A: I cannot say enough good things about those guys. I went to id's HQ in Mesquite (which is just a couple of blocks away from where I went to school up through grade 7 before my family moved away) for a couple of short visits awhile back and I met with the Nerve guys in id's office as well. I will definitely confirm what is on their website about it being the coolest game shop in the world. I have really grown to respect both teams.
They have similar work habits to mine: work as long as you can, then take a short break, then go right back to work - often into the wee hours of the morning and sometimes you wake up in the morning at your desk (or on the floor). One day, I went out to lunch with a group of them (Taco Bell) and afterward we all sat down in the conference room for a few minutes to "help" play a newly released single-player game - I sorta felt sorry for the guy with the controller ... I'm not sure he wanted all the help he was getting. They know how to keep the fun in while getting lots of work done which is something I hear a lot of companies talk about but is usually just talk. It is very clear that they all enjoy one another's company and what they do for a living. It was very common to hear all sorts of outbursts ringing down the hallways at all hours.
On a business level, they have been extremely professional which is refreshing. As far as the actual development work goes, id asked me to write the integration code for PunkBuster and I've been working on that now in my office for several weeks - I'm extremely pleased with the whole arrangement thus far.
Q: How many team members are working on PunkBuster for Return To Castle Wolfenstein?
A: Up until a few days ago, I was the only one as most of the PB staff is still supporting the old HL version of PunkBuster (we didn't stop supporting it, we just suspended development). As things ramp up for RTCW in the next couple of weeks, I expect that about 15 of the Staff members will be helping out in one capacity or another with our RTCW products and services - we have big plans for expanding what PunkBuster is all about. My team is a great group also - I have been amazed over and over at how much effort and dedication they have put into the PunkBuster project over the past year and a half as volunteers. I hope to some day be able to reward each of them as they deserve.
All of them have contributed significant resources (including personal funds, in some cases) strictly for love of the online gaming communities of which they are a part despite some pretty nasty and uncalled for emails and forum posts about each of us personally. I'm proud to call them my friends.
Q: What will PunkBuster for RTCW have that Counter-Strike didn't? Maybe new features, new cheat prevention system...?
A: There are so many things we wanted to do with the first PunkBuster that just couldn't be implemented properly without having full integration with the game. I think just about everyone (except the cheating punks) will be very pleasantly surprised with how much better PB is in the RTCW edition. There is no separate user interface. All interaction is now done directly inside the game itself. No more having to remember to start PB as a separate program before launching the game. Once you enable PB, it just always works whenever you are in a multiplayer game because the PB Server and Client send and receive packets on the same network socket as do the game packets themselves.
Players and admins can now put PB commands into regular game config scripts, key bindings, aliases and also type them straight into the game console if they want to. We have plans to roll out several new services and products for both players and admins over the coming months to enhance their enjoyment of the game and keep everyone on a PB Server accountable to each other. Mutual accountability is at the core of what PB has been about since the beginning. One of the new extras is a command to regulate how much PB sleeps between each processing cycle - this will allow players to customize the way PB runs based on the speed of their computer and their connection. There are no more connection problems or any of the other unusual issues that would pop up from time to time for some users of the old edition.
If you can play the game, you can use PunkBuster and you won't even know it's there unless you want to use some of the extras - id software is even sponsoring a couple of master servers so that your PB will get the info it needs at the same time the game is authenticating for online play. I'm very happy to be able to redesign parts of PB so that they work the way they were always meant to work.
The Cvar checking has been totally revamped. There is now 2-way variable checking so that players can verify that server settings stay where they are supposed to be all throughout a match. No more "home team" advantage by screwing with the server variables in the middle of an important match and then editing the logs afterward (we plan to offer a remote log signature hosting service as well for leagues and admins who want that type of thing). Plus when a player first connects, his or her PB client will download the whole list of cvar parameters in effect for that server and alert the player immediately to any that are currently set outside the allowed ranges. This gives every player the opportunity to fix any cvars that are out of line right at connect time.
The Screenshot Capture Facility is very much improved as well. All screenshots are stored directly in PNG format which is viewable with just about every web browser out there. Players can now use PB to take their own full or partial screenshots of their own screen if they want to and they also have the option of having all server requested shots saved to their local hard drive automatically. To help protect players from faked screenshots, PB creates and keeps a personal log of all screenshot activity for each player in the form of a locally stored web page. Also, players who want to run the game in a window as opposed to full-screen don't have to worry about getting part of their desktop captured since PB can now limit the capture area to just the game window (a big benefit of direct integration). On the server side, admins can now easily set up parameters so that PB automatically takes screenshots every few minutes for each player and the PB server has enhanced abilities for automatic and seamless real-time publishing of screenshots to a web site.
There are many other new things coming as well, but I hate to spill all the beans. As always, we'll listen to our users and keep adding to and improving the system over time.
Q: Some concerns from dialup users regarding the size of the patch that will include PB in it. Any idea on its weight?
A: The PB portion will most likely be less than 500KB before compression which is very small. I believe that Nerve and id have other updates coming at the same time so I have no idea how large the whole patch will be.
PunkBuster Interview - Page 2
Q: Is there any approximate date on the RTCW edition of PB for RTCW?
A: We are almost finished with the PB integration and the initial beta DLLs. However, I have no control over the actual patch release and I don't know id's timetable for other things coming in the same patch. However, once the first patch with the PB integration code has been released, then we'll be able to regularly and frequently update PunkBuster components automatically, seamlessly and securely while people are playing. That feature has been improved substantially as well. The old PB emulated a web browser to download information from websites and that caused alot of problems for people behind proxies, firewalls, etc. This time, everything is done with UDP and information is exchanged using the same socket created by the game for communicating with the game server which avoids all of the hassles that some users had with the old HL edition (yet another huge benefit of direct integration).
Q: Some server admins are worried that they would have to totally reinstall the server files for PB will that be the case?
A: No. The game patch update should be just like any other game patch update for both players and admins. Also, there will not be a need for player-side files on dedicated servers. PB doesn't depend on a "clean" copy of files at the server-side in order to detect cheats.
Q: Will the software be integrated or standalone? If it is integrated will
there be an option for server admins to turn it on or off?
A: PunkBuster always has been and always will be optional. We are not trying to force anything on anyone. We just want to give honest players and admins a choice that they did not have before. From a licensing standpoint, it is separate. All PB users are still licensing directly from us (Even Balance, Inc.). However, from a technical standpoint, the software is fully integrated once it has been enabled by a user (admin or player). It is very easy to turn it off, but it does require a restart of the game program for the disabling to take effect (i.e. it can't be just secretly disabled in the middle of a match).
Q: Is there going to be Linux support for PunkBuster in RTCW?
A: Yes, we are planning to support all users, players and admins on Linux and Mac platforms as well. Those two versions may not quite be in place and tested by the time the next game patch is released, but we're working as hard as we can to try to get all versions ready as quickly as possible. Also, now that PB runs in the same thread with the game, there won't be any "pthreads" issues that plagued a number of Linux server admins with segmentation faults and other strange problems. Most games run single-threaded but the old HL edition of PunkBuster was multi-threaded (for various reasons) and multi-threading under Linux is just not always reliable unless the program is either compiled and run on the same distribution or distributed with a large static library which wasn't possible with our auto-update mechanism - we found that out the hard way.
Q: How effective will Punk Buster be for Return To Castle Wolfenstein? As we all know, people keep finding new ways around to defeat anti-cheat software, sometimes within only a few short hours.
A: I predict the same thing I did a year and a half ago when this project was
initiated - we will be successful. Practically no one believed me then and some don't now as well - but to me, that's just part of the challenge. Most of our detractors have their own agenda but the majority of people who played in, admined for and organized competitive HL/CS matches back last summer before we suspended development of PunkBuster for HL know how much organized play was cleaned up by the use of PunkBuster alone. Several thousand public server admins and literally hundreds of thousands of players were very happy with the results as well. It's unfortunate that so many of the negative postings these days are coming from people who don't even realize that when I stopped working on PB for HL, there wasn't a single publicly available cheat that wasn't detected and it had pretty much been that way for months up to that point. The hackers didn't find any new effective ways of hiding their cheats - we just turned our attention to developers who wanted us working on their products. Since day one and up to this day, the majority of emails directed to the PB staff are very supportive, appreciative and positive. It saddens me that some of the minority of honest folks who had consistent problems with PB seem to love bashing us in the public forums after all the work that went into trying to make PB run smoothly in the absence of direct game integration - I'm certain that even that minority will be pleased with how the RTCW edition turns out.
The currently played (non-PB) version of RTCW doesn't have any way at the game server of determining a unique installation of the game so we have expanded the game by adding a "guid" for each installation. The guid is a 128-bit non-reversable hash of the cdkey (that means no one can figure out your private cdkey from the guid). So that on PB servers, every player will be held accountable by something more meaningful than an IP Address which changes from day to day for many players. PunkBuster and Admins (manually) will be able to kick and/or ban players, both temporarily and permanently based on this guid.
It doesn't matter what ways cheater punks try to find to get around our system or how fast they work, they never know when the next PunkBuster update is coming or what it will look like. We never claimed to be able to stop all cheating (which is impossible) - our main goal in that regard is to give admins the tools to be able to actually catch cheater punks red-handed in order to create a large deterrent against cheating. In the HL version, I never got to the point of encrypting packets because I was spending so much time researching and working on the connection problems and other issues that are now completely gone with direct game integration.
The RTCW edition already has 4 different levels of dynamic encryption and the keys are generated programmatically plus each update scrambles the formulas. The hacker/cheater punk network does hate us and they try to make us look bad any way they can for one reason: we proved that cheating could be attacked head-on. Before we came along and gave the power to the honest players and admins, everyone in the online communities was at the mercy of the cheating punks and many games died premature deaths because of the poison from within. Every cheater punk who tries to cheat on RTCW PB servers is going to get busted sooner or later. And to the relatively few honest players and admins who had problems with the old PB, I hope you are looking forward to joining the happy majority.
Thanks for taking the time to do the interview, we at WolfensteinX would like
to wish you great luck with this and future projects.
Thank you. We are really looking forward to being a big and positive part of the Wolfenstein community.
- End of Interview -
de interview
dan wordt het wat "eerlijker" want ik 
op cheaters
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