Cheat Engine

[jakkdl]

Hello,
I'm jakkdl, one of the more known names in the Crypt of the Necrodancer community (you can find me in the credits). We've lately had a big problem with cheating and believe that the majority of the cheats come from these forums. While I don't mind people cheating in singleplayer games in general, a big feature in necrodancer is the leaderboards - and the developers have had to spend a lot of time purging entries as of late.
We're also keeping tabs on past cheaters, so if you would every wanna pursue high scores normally you might have trouble getting your scores to stick.

Due to that the latest update have implemented some measures to protect against memory editing on certain values, while I do not know how effective these might be, I ask that anybody that cheats or make tables in the future please also trigger the values that disable leaderboards - such as the one that triggers if you load a mod that changes the "necrodancer.xml".


As usual in a new forum/community, hope I posted in the correct subforum and not violated any [un]spoken rules, if not feel free to move it or whatever. I'd link to sources if I had permission to.

Happy cheating!
/jakkdl

[Dark Byte]

i agree, but how would you disable the leaderboard?
The general consensus here is that modifying files permanently with cheat engine is a big no-no. (just a simple restart of the game should disable the active cheats)

If there is an export in the game called "disableLeaderboard" where when the value is 1 the leaderboard is disabled, then a cheat table can use that to write a 1 there

as for protecting values it depends on how it's done. If it just silently marks you and blocks leaderboard submissions it's fine. But if it crashes the game it'll make a lot of people(800) unhappy. (most cheaters don't care about leaderboards, they just want to play without getting frustrated)
and if it's blocked, then it will attract the more skilled cheat developers as it will become a challenge and they are less inclined to add such help

i recommend ( and have no issue with) if it detects the cheatengine-i386.exe or cheatengine-x86_64 process running and if so mark the submission as invalid, or better yet, add it to a second table where the results are only visible by those marked

[jakkdl]

I haven't personally played around with values much, but I'm pretty sure there should be an export you can set to disable the leaderboards. The most common way this value is toggled is when having edited files through a mod, so the cheat engine can just pretend that it has.


Unfortunately it's not a silent mark, but a game crash, I believe only a few values are protected this way though.

The developers are quite friendly though and is very interactive with the community, so you might be able to persuade them to change it into a silent block if you pinkypromise not to submit any more scores. help [ at] braceyourselfgames [dot] com would be the recommended way to do so, or @necrodancergame on twitter. Feel free to mention you've been in contact with me.

[Dark Byte]

while i can easily promise i'd never submit cheated leaderboard stats, i really can't promise that for other people(cheat engine is open source and cheat tables are open as well.)

just stating that a crash is more likely to cause people to go on websites and request new cheats, triggering the very skilled cheaters who can bypass most protections in an hour(although i havn't seen any posts on here about it.)

from what i've seen from the tables it's mostly gold and diamonds, and an occasional inf health cheat.
If they keep working it's fine, assuming there is a separate value for score which is protected(never played the game)

[Gniarf]

Alternative solution: disable the need of 3rd party cheats by making them officially available at the option menu. And when any of those is enabled, disable leaderboard submission and ONLY that.

In the past I've seen people request cheats here just because in-game cheats would disable steam achievements so if you add any kind of penalty for using cheats, people are likely to request cheats here anyway for the sake of going around that little penalty.
We can easily shoo off people that would request cheats for the sake of getting in the leaderboards since it's an online component->forbidden here, but if it's for the sake of not getting your saves disabled, or not getting an annoying "cheater !" text mark, the request becomes valid.

Also if you decide to go that way, do not make it so that the player has to unlock/earn the cheat options, or some people are going to request a way to get them right off the bat.

[Xathan]

I think it's a good idea to ask here for a solution but what about other cheat pages? The problem should be solved within the Necrodancer.

I personally like cheating because I'm not that good in certain games but want to enjoy them. My problem then is sometimes that I personally dislike leaderboards and don't want to spoil them with my cheated sessions.

So I would just recommend two ways:
First (what Dark Byte already said) check for Cheat Engine or other debugger. But don't crash the game, just deactivate Leaderboards.
Second give the ability to deactivate it somewhere in the settings. So it's easier to cheat w/o taking the challenge from the non-cheating players. This way a cheater can also later try to play the game native and if the score is good it can be added to the leaderboards.

[Geri]

Most people are cheating in games because they don't want to suffer. Some people want to restart a level 1000 times and die at the same spot, but many people just want to run through the game without effort.

Many games don't have built-in cheats and this means that cheaters will either not play the game at all, or they will look for trainers and Cheat Engine.

Amongst those games that actually have built-in cheats, the most common problems are:

Long and boring cheat codes that you need to type in every time on every level.

Not saving game progress while making cheats.

Not having useful cheats.


If the only problem is disabled leaderboard or achievements, most people will not bother to use external cheats. And even if they pester cheat makers to make cheats, there is a much higher chance that the cheat maker will ignore the request.

If someone will contact me with the sole purpose of cheating for achievements or leaderboards, I will not even bother to look at the game itself, "no" is my default answer to all sorts of online cheating.

If you want to avoid cheated results in your leaderboard, it's also important to add a "Submit to leaderboard" option. Some players who are cheating will have the decency to not swamp the leaderboard with cheats if they have an option to skip it.

And if they want to cheat on the leaderboard, they will. You can barely find any game where players are not cheating, regardless of the efforts of the developers.

It would take extra effort for cheat makers to make sure that the cheaters are unable to submit scores to the leaderboard, not to mention that they may not have the skills to add such a protection. And even if they add such protection, it can be removed by those who want to submit cheated scores.



At the end, the best solution is to give people what they want. Add an option for the most important cheats and automatically disable any scores when cheats are enabled. Do you think it's convenient to download unknown 3rd party applications and beg for cheat makers to keep the cheats updated? It's annoying and inconvenient for everyone, people are doing it because they need those cheats, because they don't want to play the game without them.

[sellox]

I personally like the small challenge of searching for the values myself, while I don't care about leaderboards. I'd love the game not to crash when experimenting and stuff.

[STN]

Useless bump. Its obvious the OP has left two years ago and this discussion has died, even some of the people are not with us anymore, RIP (fuck you sellox for reminding me again of him and making me sad, pathetic loser)