How to fix my gold hack.

[Dave]

other wise wouldn't it suck if this game did become popular and this was found out.. talk about killing how many people play the game..

There is and was nothing to be 'found out'. I'm only going to say this once, because I really don't like repeating myself, so listen carefully:

This is the story,

(1) a player can modify the amount of gold they have on their client. They can do this either by modifying the source, or by using some form of reverse-engineering, as Kelba did.
(2) although it might be possible to stop the reverse-engineering, it's not possible to stop the source modification option without close-sourcing the game. Since modifying the source is far easier for most people (apparently Kelba's approach to software isn't so normal), trying to protect against reverse-engineering is like barring the windows of your house while leaving your doors wide open in an effort to prevent intruders.
(3) if a player does modify the amount of gold on their machine, this will show up as an 'out of sync error' on the other player's machines. i.e. the other player's machines will work out that their game disagrees with yours on how much gold you have.

Note that this is exactly the same story for almost any game. For instance, you could reverse-engineer a chess client, and give yourself an extra queen. However, as soon as you try to move that queen, the other side's computer is going to give some kind of 'out of sync error'.

Note also that I have known about all this for over a year, and so have other members of the Wesnoth community.

There are cheats available for Wesnoth, and some of them are intractable, and some are on our 'to do' list. But there's really nothing to see here. Move along...

David

[quartex]

Kelba has left and any further discussion of his actions seems unnecessary to me. Let the matter rest in peace. I'm locking this thread.

Thanks for helping to clear up the info on hacking open-source games Dave. If anyone wants to continue to discuss cheating/hacking open source games they can make a new thread, but I don't want to keep unearthing the arguments over kelba.