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I've been involved in the gamehacking scene for longer than I'd like to admit; it's a tremendous amount of fun and feels rewarding but it's a very hollow reward

by nerdy 11y ago

I've been involved in the gamehacking scene for longer than I'd like to admit; it's a tremendous amount of fun and feels rewarding but it's a very hollow reward. Sure, you can build programs to manipulate game clients to do all of those things. The problem is that there's most often no legitimate way to openly bring the fruit of that labor to market as a result of the MDY vs Blizzard case regarding wowglider[1] and more specifically with the DMCA. I wasn't sued but paid for intellectual property counsel to examine how the Ninth Circuit ruling would translate across the US and they didn't exactly tell me to go ahead. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to extend games, which is why WoW had LUA and many other games are at very least hooked into for parsing capabilities. These kinds of 3rd party parsers are in many cases not legal, so not openly marketable. So for anyone considering a future for-profit project, hire a lawyer and review all those nasty agreements and see how the DMCA might come back to haunt you before you're too invested in it. For anyone who's considering it for fun: Just understand that the time you spend on gamehacking probably won't result in a revenue-producing project. If you're looking to learn, gamehacking can teach you a lot about a variety of things like memory (address space/pointers/offsets), rendering, assembly code, geometric and pathfinding algorithms (Dijkstra/A*), pattern matching/signature scanning. Many of those things have real-world applications such as signature scanning for virus definitions. You'll get plenty of hexadecimal math practice. You can learn about DirectX or network traffic. You can have really enjoyable learning experiences working with games at a lower-than-intended level, but keep in mind that any time not learning is only about as well-spent as time playing video games... it's fun but incredibly addictive and they're already at "Pwn Adventure 3" so there's no end in sight! [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=MDY_Industries,_LLC_v._Blizzard_Entertainment,_Inc.&oldid=646787903 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=MDY_Industries,_LL...

dikaiosune 11y ago
FYI, HN seems to bork that link. Tried replying with the "correct" link and something was reformatted to make it no longer work.
- nerdy 11y ago
  Weird... tried everything I could think of to get it to work and also could not fix it.
- BenTheElder 11y ago
  It's stripping the period from the end of the url. Perhaps the permalink to the current version will work: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=MDY_Industries,_LLC_v._Blizzard_Entertainment,_Inc.&oldid=646787903 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=MDY_Industries,_LL... Edit: yep works. Wikipedia will also accept without any parameters so just adding an ampersand to the end should work: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=MDY_Industries,_LLC_v._Blizzard_Entertainment,_Inc.& http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=MDY_Industries,_LL...
  - nerdy 11y ago
    It works! Good job, thanks for the info. Updated the parent comment.
spyder 11y ago
You are thinking about only one side of the thing, and not about the more ethical/legal side. For example you could sell your knowledge by helping developers to prevent hacks. Like the Anti-Cheat Toolkit for Unity: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/10395 https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/10395 Sure it doesn't prevent motivated cheaters but it's still has value for the developers. Another useful thing could be to sell online curses about your knowledge.
- wolfgke 11y ago
  > You are thinking about only one side of the thing, and not about the more ethical/legal side. For example you could sell your knowledge by helping developers to prevent hacks. Like the Anti-Cheat Toolkit for Unity: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/10395 https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/10395 Sure it doesn't prevent motivated cheaters but it's still has value for the developers. So in other words I (or the OP) shall sell snake oil to developers? :-( > Another useful thing could be to sell online c[o]urses about your knowledge. Even providing real-life examples would probably be of very dubious legality. And building artificial examples would involve building, say, at least half of a game engine - lots of work for artificial, contrived examples. :-(
  - derefr 11y ago
    (Not that I know this particular product, but) it's not necessarily snake-oil, any more than a steering-wheel lock is. Disincentivizing hacking has actual dollars-and-cents ROI for a game company even if hacking isn't completely eliminated. The fewer players left who are interested in spending serious time to break the game, the more resources can be dedicated to finding/stopping each individual one. > And building artificial examples would involve building, say, at least half of a game engine You could take an existing FOSS game engine, and alter it to have a particular vulnerability, so as to explain how such a vulnerability would then be found and exploited in the resulting product.

by nerdy 11y ago

dikaiosune 11y ago

FYI, HN seems to bork that link. Tried replying with the "correct" link and something was reformatted to make it no longer work.

nerdy 11y ago
Weird... tried everything I could think of to get it to work and also could not fix it.
BenTheElder 11y ago
It's stripping the period from the end of the url. Perhaps the permalink to the current version will work: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=MDY_Industries,_LLC_v._Blizzard_Entertainment,_Inc.&oldid=646787903 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=MDY_Industries,_LL... Edit: yep works. Wikipedia will also accept without any parameters so just adding an ampersand to the end should work: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=MDY_Industries,_LLC_v._Blizzard_Entertainment,_Inc.& http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=MDY_Industries,_LL...
- nerdy 11y ago
  It works! Good job, thanks for the info. Updated the parent comment.

spyder 11y ago

You are thinking about only one side of the thing, and not about the more ethical/legal side. For example you could sell your knowledge by helping developers to prevent hacks. Like the Anti-Cheat Toolkit for Unity: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/10395 https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/10395 Sure it doesn't prevent motivated cheaters but it's still has value for the developers. Another useful thing could be to sell online curses about your knowledge.

wolfgke 11y ago
> You are thinking about only one side of the thing, and not about the more ethical/legal side. For example you could sell your knowledge by helping developers to prevent hacks. Like the Anti-Cheat Toolkit for Unity: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/10395 https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/10395 Sure it doesn't prevent motivated cheaters but it's still has value for the developers. So in other words I (or the OP) shall sell snake oil to developers? :-( > Another useful thing could be to sell online c[o]urses about your knowledge. Even providing real-life examples would probably be of very dubious legality. And building artificial examples would involve building, say, at least half of a game engine - lots of work for artificial, contrived examples. :-(
- derefr 11y ago
  (Not that I know this particular product, but) it's not necessarily snake-oil, any more than a steering-wheel lock is. Disincentivizing hacking has actual dollars-and-cents ROI for a game company even if hacking isn't completely eliminated. The fewer players left who are interested in spending serious time to break the game, the more resources can be dedicated to finding/stopping each individual one. > And building artificial examples would involve building, say, at least half of a game engine You could take an existing FOSS game engine, and alter it to have a particular vulnerability, so as to explain how such a vulnerability would then be found and exploited in the resulting product.