6 ms·

I'd love to see a game where cheating and scripting is the primary means of gameplay. By default the game would present a very simple UI but players would be en

I'd love to see a game where cheating and scripting is the primary means of gameplay. By default the game would present a very simple UI but players would be encouraged to write and share scripts enabling varying levels and types of functionality. As a game developer your job then would be to write interesting enough systems for players to exploit to come up with interesting gameplay. I can imagine a scenario where different Overwatch-style "classes" emerge all built from the same basic game elements.

atesti 8y ago
Although a single player game and a game that must be hacked instead of extended with new functionality, maybe you like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hack_%27n%27_Slash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hack_%27n%27_Slash
jbob2000 8y ago
Not sure if this will scratch your itch, and I haven't really looked into it, but checkout https://screeps.com/ https://screeps.com/ "The world's first MMO sandbox game for programmers"
swolchok 8y ago
Seems like this would devolve into a market for add-ons for your game. Let's assume that this game becomes popular. I'd claim that then most players would passively consume the leading open source solution(s), which are likely to outperform whatever any one person can do working in secret (or just tweaking the leading open source solutions). Software is copyable -- I don't think you can give a mechanical advantage to being the author of the software instead of a script kiddie.
- dronescanfly 8y ago
  As with any tool, it depends on the person using the tool. Just because someone gave you a sword doesn't make you a swordmaster. You might kill somebody, but a real master of the tool, maybe even the inventor, is much more capable. Someone who knows some piece of software knows when, where and under what circumstances it aids the most.
- arminiusreturns 8y ago
  Which is why I pitched a modular Foss launcher/market to the Depart of Education for a 3d virtual training simulation grant. I never heard back from them...
snackbugs 8y ago
Check out HackMUD.
Assossa 8y ago
Check out http://www.pwnadventure.com/ http://www.pwnadventure.com/ "Pwn Adventure 3: Pwnie Island is a limited-release, first-person, true open-world MMORPG set on a beautiful island where anything could happen. That's because this game is intentionally vulnerable to all kinds of silly hacks! Flying, endless cash, and more are all one client change or network proxy away. Are you ready for the mayhem?!" "Pwn Adventure 3 was originally during Shmoocon 2015, from January 16-18, 2015. While the CTF is now over, we are still running the servers in a limited capacity so others can try it."
- rubicon33 8y ago
  Recently (last week or so), there has been a hacker in PUBG who is using a flying car. I had never seen this cheat before, EXCEPT in "LiveOverflow" 's YouTube videos of pwnadventure! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzM4o6qxssk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzM4o6qxssk In this series he managed to get his player to be able to fly. I can't help but wonder if whoever that hacker is that developed the recent PUBG cheat, got his inspiration from pwnadventure and this series :)
  - mrguyorama 8y ago
    I had a cheat back in Halo 2 for Vista that could make the Warthog fly. A flying car in a game is really not new
- hello_asdf 8y ago
  I got this all setup the other day, but on OSX I only get a pure white screen unfortunately. Here's a great playlist I found of it though: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhixgUqwRTjzzBeFSHXrw9DnQtssdAwgG https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhixgUqwRTjzzBeFSHXrw...
xenophonf 8y ago
You might enjoy old school TradeWars 2002, which you play over TELNET nowadays. There are all kinds of helpers (e.g., TWXProxy, SWATH), and there are some pretty sophisticated scripts you can run (e.g., MomBot for TWXProxy). Ice9 is probably my favorite server (http://www.oregonsouth.com/ice9/ http://www.oregonsouth.com/ice9/), and there are others out there.
foepys 8y ago
Screeps is a game where you need to program each move: https://screeps.com/ https://screeps.com/
- NightlyDev 8y ago
  It's a fun game! :)
madjam002 8y ago
Reminds me of my childhood playing ROBLOX on various Script Builder games where users on the server could script with Lua. It was basically a race to who could script admin commands and completely own the server.
- ShaneWilton 8y ago
  I got my start with computers hacking ROBLOX as a kid! We probably met each other. I went by Shanethe13 / Aeacus back then. If that rings a bell, you should hit me up :) I actually work in cybersecurity now, directly as a result of ROBLOX. Shedletsky came across some of my work a few months ago, and we reconnected over dinner. It's a crazy small world sometimes.
  - madjam002 8y ago
    That’s awesome! Name rings a bell actually, did you have any places? I made one of the build a raft games back in the day [0], was great fun to build games on there. I remember sometimes waiting around to get on Sword Fights on the Heights to get in the same server as Shedletsky hahah! [0] https://www.roblox.com/games/7729765/BUILD-A-RAFT-AND-SURVIVE-TO-BE-VIP-100K https://www.roblox.com/games/7729765/BUILD-A-RAFT-AND-SURVIV...
w-m 8y ago
There was some excitement for Notch's 0x10c for a while, an open universe space game where you would have been able to program your ship's computer. But according to wiki: > The game was eventually indefinitely postponed because Persson found several creative blocks, citing the main problem as "it not being very fun to play".
gnarcoregrizz 8y ago
Not quite the same thing, but there were a lot of cheat-only servers in counter-strike in the 2000s with anti-cheat turned off (it's optional if you run your own server). Since it was all cheats vs cheats, whoever had the best ones won. The game servers were often very scriptable and modded as well.
- kiddico 8y ago
  Those servers are still available in CSGO too. 3kliksphilip recently did a video[1] with someone who plays on one. Interesting insight into the kind of player who cheats. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gniSF1M9g_o& https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gniSF1M9g_o&
  - gnarcoregrizz 8y ago
    Neat. I used to love the hack vs hack servers. The cheats were a bit more primitive back then, so I imagine hvh isn't as fun nowadays since all cheats are very advanced... I remember when xqz2 first came out - the first opengl-based client cheat for the half-life engine. It was simply a wallhack at first, and evolved to a primitive aimbot I believe. Anyway, they started to get pretty sophisticated around cs 1.4 or 1.5. The real breakthrough was the client aimbot which hooked into the game (using function trampolines) rather than opengl, and was instantly fast, but it was still a little inaccurate because it used hardcoded constants for offsets from the center of the player model to the head. It eventually got a bit more sophisticated with hitbox aimbots I believe. The next breakthrough was "nospread" which basically allowed you to fire your gun with laser accuracy. I remember how it worked - to make accuracy random the game used a pseudo RNG which was seeded with the game's current tick, that way the spread was shared by both the client and the server. The cheat calculated the future spread by using the game's next tick (current tick + 1) for the RNG seed and setting the player's view angle to the inverse of that. If you watched the player, it looked like they had a shaky crosshair. You could be bunnyhopping around with any gun and get insta headshots with 100% accuracy. Each gun had its own spread constant so these had to be hardcoded into the cheat, and adjusted based on whether or not they were crouching or standing. The last major breakthrough was "autowall," which would only shoot through a wall if it was a guaranteed hit. After this, cheats and hvh servers got more boring with marginal improvements only. All of this got me into programming and I learned a lot, both about some game internals and operating systems. No ragrets
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
thecatspaw 8y ago
Im not sure if this really fits, but you might enjoy Speedrunning. It can included a good portion of analysis of the game, including code analysis(if available), debugging, disassembling etc.
zerker2000 8y ago
https://technomancy.itch.io/bussard https://technomancy.itch.io/bussard is a game about UI-building over low-level spaceship controls/sensors
drdaeman 8y ago
Something like this, but I wouldn't want to deter non-engineers from playing or feeling inferior to engineers. I still want to believe that fairness can be enforced and different skills and strategies can be competitive, not restricted. It is unfortunate a negative perception for cheats is so universal some countries are insane enough to make it into their laws. Call me names but I perceive computer game[1] cheating as something that surely has a positive part. A lot of games are all about exploiting their mechanics (also called "developing a strategy" or "looking for weaknesses") to... err... win (or not lose). Cheats are the engineering solution to this, sometimes dull and non-imaginative, sometimes beautifully cunning hacks. That is, unless we're talking about cheating griefers which I feel must be considered as a separate kind of people. Trying to gain advantage is natural for any player, depriving others of their fun is not[2]. If cheating makes grief (besides envy!) to other players I believe it means that it's the game mechanics that are flawed for allowing this. At least it's treated as a bug in all other kinds of software engineering. Of course I recognize network lag is the enemy and computational complexity is another, so at least for anything fast-paced developers just have to offload calculations onto endpoints, sure. But still... Oh, and I think this should be certainly possible for games where players don't compete. It's not impossible to believe a game where you can cheat yourself into gaining all the treasures of the world but that wouldn't mean anything and cheater would just deprive themselves of the fun. At the very least, the trend to try to shove anti-cheats into single-player games disgust me. _____ [1] I'm not sure about other areas of cheating. Although I think I wouldn't mind seeing Cheaters' Olympic Games, allowing humans with any aids, robots and basically anything that is physically able to participate. That would be fun and probably awe-inspiring to see. [2] Can we talk about cheaters' moral codex, haha? Do unto yourself only as you would have others do unto themselves too and stuff.
nathancahill 8y ago
Universal Paperclips: http://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html http://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html You can play it in the browser console with the JS API.
Jedd 8y ago
> I'd love to see a game where cheating and scripting is the primary means of gameplay. Come to Sydney. Play Ingress with the ENL faction.
ubernostrum 8y ago
You might enjoy this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=7&v=v0JHDr1oT0Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=7&v=v0JHDr1oT0Y It's about security training rather than gaming, but talks about using an approach where students were forced to cheat in order to pass an exam, as an exercise in getting into a mindset of finding the holes in a system and thinking like an adversary.

atesti 8y ago

Although a single player game and a game that must be hacked instead of extended with new functionality, maybe you like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hack_%27n%27_Slash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hack_%27n%27_Slash

jbob2000 8y ago

Not sure if this will scratch your itch, and I haven't really looked into it, but checkout https://screeps.com/ https://screeps.com/ "The world's first MMO sandbox game for programmers"

swolchok 8y ago

Seems like this would devolve into a market for add-ons for your game. Let's assume that this game becomes popular. I'd claim that then most players would passively consume the leading open source solution(s), which are likely to outperform whatever any one person can do working in secret (or just tweaking the leading open source solutions). Software is copyable -- I don't think you can give a mechanical advantage to being the author of the software instead of a script kiddie.

dronescanfly 8y ago
As with any tool, it depends on the person using the tool. Just because someone gave you a sword doesn't make you a swordmaster. You might kill somebody, but a real master of the tool, maybe even the inventor, is much more capable. Someone who knows some piece of software knows when, where and under what circumstances it aids the most.
arminiusreturns 8y ago
Which is why I pitched a modular Foss launcher/market to the Depart of Education for a 3d virtual training simulation grant. I never heard back from them...

snackbugs 8y ago

Check out HackMUD.

Assossa 8y ago

Check out http://www.pwnadventure.com/ http://www.pwnadventure.com/ "Pwn Adventure 3: Pwnie Island is a limited-release, first-person, true open-world MMORPG set on a beautiful island where anything could happen. That's because this game is intentionally vulnerable to all kinds of silly hacks! Flying, endless cash, and more are all one client change or network proxy away. Are you ready for the mayhem?!" "Pwn Adventure 3 was originally during Shmoocon 2015, from January 16-18, 2015. While the CTF is now over, we are still running the servers in a limited capacity so others can try it."

rubicon33 8y ago
Recently (last week or so), there has been a hacker in PUBG who is using a flying car. I had never seen this cheat before, EXCEPT in "LiveOverflow" 's YouTube videos of pwnadventure! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzM4o6qxssk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzM4o6qxssk In this series he managed to get his player to be able to fly. I can't help but wonder if whoever that hacker is that developed the recent PUBG cheat, got his inspiration from pwnadventure and this series :)
- mrguyorama 8y ago
  I had a cheat back in Halo 2 for Vista that could make the Warthog fly. A flying car in a game is really not new
hello_asdf 8y ago
I got this all setup the other day, but on OSX I only get a pure white screen unfortunately. Here's a great playlist I found of it though: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhixgUqwRTjzzBeFSHXrw9DnQtssdAwgG https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhixgUqwRTjzzBeFSHXrw...

xenophonf 8y ago

You might enjoy old school TradeWars 2002, which you play over TELNET nowadays. There are all kinds of helpers (e.g., TWXProxy, SWATH), and there are some pretty sophisticated scripts you can run (e.g., MomBot for TWXProxy). Ice9 is probably my favorite server (http://www.oregonsouth.com/ice9/ http://www.oregonsouth.com/ice9/), and there are others out there.

foepys 8y ago

Screeps is a game where you need to program each move: https://screeps.com/ https://screeps.com/

NightlyDev 8y ago
It's a fun game! :)

madjam002 8y ago

Reminds me of my childhood playing ROBLOX on various Script Builder games where users on the server could script with Lua. It was basically a race to who could script admin commands and completely own the server.

ShaneWilton 8y ago
I got my start with computers hacking ROBLOX as a kid! We probably met each other. I went by Shanethe13 / Aeacus back then. If that rings a bell, you should hit me up :) I actually work in cybersecurity now, directly as a result of ROBLOX. Shedletsky came across some of my work a few months ago, and we reconnected over dinner. It's a crazy small world sometimes.
- madjam002 8y ago
  That’s awesome! Name rings a bell actually, did you have any places? I made one of the build a raft games back in the day [0], was great fun to build games on there. I remember sometimes waiting around to get on Sword Fights on the Heights to get in the same server as Shedletsky hahah! [0] https://www.roblox.com/games/7729765/BUILD-A-RAFT-AND-SURVIVE-TO-BE-VIP-100K https://www.roblox.com/games/7729765/BUILD-A-RAFT-AND-SURVIV...

w-m 8y ago

There was some excitement for Notch's 0x10c for a while, an open universe space game where you would have been able to program your ship's computer. But according to wiki: > The game was eventually indefinitely postponed because Persson found several creative blocks, citing the main problem as "it not being very fun to play".

gnarcoregrizz 8y ago

Not quite the same thing, but there were a lot of cheat-only servers in counter-strike in the 2000s with anti-cheat turned off (it's optional if you run your own server). Since it was all cheats vs cheats, whoever had the best ones won. The game servers were often very scriptable and modded as well.

kiddico 8y ago
Those servers are still available in CSGO too. 3kliksphilip recently did a video[1] with someone who plays on one. Interesting insight into the kind of player who cheats. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gniSF1M9g_o& https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gniSF1M9g_o&
- gnarcoregrizz 8y ago
  Neat. I used to love the hack vs hack servers. The cheats were a bit more primitive back then, so I imagine hvh isn't as fun nowadays since all cheats are very advanced... I remember when xqz2 first came out - the first opengl-based client cheat for the half-life engine. It was simply a wallhack at first, and evolved to a primitive aimbot I believe. Anyway, they started to get pretty sophisticated around cs 1.4 or 1.5. The real breakthrough was the client aimbot which hooked into the game (using function trampolines) rather than opengl, and was instantly fast, but it was still a little inaccurate because it used hardcoded constants for offsets from the center of the player model to the head. It eventually got a bit more sophisticated with hitbox aimbots I believe. The next breakthrough was "nospread" which basically allowed you to fire your gun with laser accuracy. I remember how it worked - to make accuracy random the game used a pseudo RNG which was seeded with the game's current tick, that way the spread was shared by both the client and the server. The cheat calculated the future spread by using the game's next tick (current tick + 1) for the RNG seed and setting the player's view angle to the inverse of that. If you watched the player, it looked like they had a shaky crosshair. You could be bunnyhopping around with any gun and get insta headshots with 100% accuracy. Each gun had its own spread constant so these had to be hardcoded into the cheat, and adjusted based on whether or not they were crouching or standing. The last major breakthrough was "autowall," which would only shoot through a wall if it was a guaranteed hit. After this, cheats and hvh servers got more boring with marginal improvements only. All of this got me into programming and I learned a lot, both about some game internals and operating systems. No ragrets

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

thecatspaw 8y ago

Im not sure if this really fits, but you might enjoy Speedrunning. It can included a good portion of analysis of the game, including code analysis(if available), debugging, disassembling etc.

zerker2000 8y ago

https://technomancy.itch.io/bussard https://technomancy.itch.io/bussard is a game about UI-building over low-level spaceship controls/sensors

drdaeman 8y ago

Something like this, but I wouldn't want to deter non-engineers from playing or feeling inferior to engineers. I still want to believe that fairness can be enforced and different skills and strategies can be competitive, not restricted. It is unfortunate a negative perception for cheats is so universal some countries are insane enough to make it into their laws. Call me names but I perceive computer game[1] cheating as something that surely has a positive part. A lot of games are all about exploiting their mechanics (also called "developing a strategy" or "looking for weaknesses") to... err... win (or not lose). Cheats are the engineering solution to this, sometimes dull and non-imaginative, sometimes beautifully cunning hacks. That is, unless we're talking about cheating griefers which I feel must be considered as a separate kind of people. Trying to gain advantage is natural for any player, depriving others of their fun is not[2]. If cheating makes grief (besides envy!) to other players I believe it means that it's the game mechanics that are flawed for allowing this. At least it's treated as a bug in all other kinds of software engineering. Of course I recognize network lag is the enemy and computational complexity is another, so at least for anything fast-paced developers just have to offload calculations onto endpoints, sure. But still... Oh, and I think this should be certainly possible for games where players don't compete. It's not impossible to believe a game where you can cheat yourself into gaining all the treasures of the world but that wouldn't mean anything and cheater would just deprive themselves of the fun. At the very least, the trend to try to shove anti-cheats into single-player games disgust me. _____ [1] I'm not sure about other areas of cheating. Although I think I wouldn't mind seeing Cheaters' Olympic Games, allowing humans with any aids, robots and basically anything that is physically able to participate. That would be fun and probably awe-inspiring to see. [2] Can we talk about cheaters' moral codex, haha? Do unto yourself only as you would have others do unto themselves too and stuff.

nathancahill 8y ago

Universal Paperclips: http://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html http://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html You can play it in the browser console with the JS API.

Jedd 8y ago

> I'd love to see a game where cheating and scripting is the primary means of gameplay. Come to Sydney. Play Ingress with the ENL faction.

ubernostrum 8y ago

You might enjoy this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=7&v=v0JHDr1oT0Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=7&v=v0JHDr1oT0Y It's about security training rather than gaming, but talks about using an approach where students were forced to cheat in order to pass an exam, as an exercise in getting into a mindset of finding the holes in a system and thinking like an adversary.