Tony Ray, le créateur de Punkbuster, a été interviewé par FragNation. Il ne dit pas grand chose de neuf mis à part qu’il avait proposé à id software d’intégrer gratuitement Punkbuster à RtCW et que c’est id qui lui a proposé une rémunération.
Il y a peut-être aussi des trucs intéressants dans ce paragraphe mais je n’ai pas le courage de le lire :
Q. Will the future Punk Buster programs be completely integrated into the game and would that make it harder to crack?
A. Yes. We have determined through extensive research and testing that the separate app model that was used for Half-Life cannot bring the full level of effectiveness that we are trying to achieve. The first version of PB was very useful in proving to the community that cheating can be attacked effectively so that developers can no longer legitimately claim that there is basically nothing that can be done about the problem. Many people will recall seeing multiple articles, interviews and public posts by high-level Valve programmers in the past claiming that they couldn’t do anything about the cheating other than fix bugs and release game patches (which doesn’t happen often, historically speaking) and depend on the community to police itself. Now they are working on their own Anti-Cheat technology and that is great for the community assuming they have a system that proves to be effective. We have very specific goals about where we want the PB system to go and direct integration with the game is the only way to get there. As far as being harder to crack … that is not the issue. PunkBuster wasn’t « cracked » successfully until we suspended development back in August, nor would it have been had not suspended development to pursue commercial opportunities. PB’s unique architecture itself deals with the « cracking » problem with seamless auto-updating as long as we are actively producing the updates. Having direct integration just allows us to better implement the auto-update feature. Our philosophy has always been to spend the vast majority of our development time on research and on frequent software updates that catch cheaters rather than waste time trying to make our system un-hackable which is an impossible goal. It is enough to make the hackers have to start over and re-hack every time we come out with a new update (which can be several times per week).
