Cheating hacks ruin the game
It looks like the most popular online flight sim, Pacific Fighters, has fallen foul of the most odious of gamer, the cheat.
It appears that since the latest patch came out a flaw in the code has opened the door for cheats with the game’s open source nature being exploited in multiplayer. Before, the game’s built in anti-cheat mechanism dealt with those running speed hacks and aim-bots.
But if you have a look at this video you’ll see what can be done with a bit of hacking. For those of you who know bugger all about flight sims, this is an LA5 taking off and going vertical, then climbing in a way that was way beyond the abilities of aircraft of the time.
Note that speed display in the lower left hand corner; with the aircraft vertical, no matter how much throttle is applied, that speed should drop off and the aircraft should stall, dropping back to earth. But it doesn’t.
What this means is that players in the vastly popular online wars that the IL2 series has made possible are now facing aircraft they can never hope to match in a dogfight.
Part of the attraction of the IL2 series for many players was flying the various aircraft types with flight characteristics that had been faithfully modelled on the real thing. You flew according to your ‘plane’s strengths and weaknesses, hoping to exploit your opponents weaknesses and win the battle.
Previous efforts at cheating focused around exploiting the game engine, such as turning the ‘record’ feature on and off rapidly which induced lag and would cause client’s machines to momentarily pause. Taking multiple screenshots was another way of achieving the same effect. Cheats not involving exploiting the game engine included quitting the game just before dying or modifying the text files generated at the end of a match to show a result in the cheater’s favour. These methods of cheating have been controlled through patches and modifications to the engines that collate the data for the various online wars.
With these apparent hacks that the game engine is failing to pick up, it’s now almost impossible to win, even if you happen to be in a technically superior aircraft. The source of the hacks and the ability for the game to detect them has to be fixed quickly or Pacific Fighters and its huge online following could find itself losing players very rapidly.
