There is a case to be made that modding a game and hacking a game are basically the same thing, or at least have a lot of overlap. There are 3 main ways to “mod” or “hack” a game: messing with assets (sounds, textures, models, etc), messing with the binary files (EXEs and DLLs) and messing with the memory locations the game is using as its running. The third method is probably the one that is most easily called hacking. It’s actually pretty close to the way a game genie worked on old game consoles. People can use programs to look at the memory that the game is using and try to find where certain values live, like health values, camera position values, player speed values, and try to change them as the game is running (see also “trainer” programs for some single player PC games).
I think the more important distinction between hacking depends on a few factors like: whether the devs are ok with it or not, or even sanction it and provide tools for it (this would be modding) and whether or not it gives you an unfair advantage (seeing through blocks to see where ore is or having an insanely strong slingbow or invincibility during hunts). If someone is making a camera mod that does nothing more than give them a slightly better 3rd person view, and the devs are aware of it and are ok with it, while in a sense it is “hacking” because it messes with in-game memory, I don’t think it can fully be considered nefarious or hacking.
Yep, this is why a lot of games take a while to implement drastic FOV changes because of customer demand. If hand models aren’t big enough it’s a problem. It also causes more things in the world to be in the “frustum” and can affect performance or not work well with any graphical optimizations they may have in the game.
I’m going to go off the deep end here and say. If i tried that in LoL i would 100% be banned.
I know this is not even close to the type of game that LoL is, i said this to try to drive my point, my point is, I am used to this kind of stuff, even something as simple as a camera mod. being something that can be used to get a slight combat upper hand, as being something that is not allowed by most online games if the tools to do so are not already provided to you.
This can be done by modifying the camerasettings.json… but to change the camera distance via hotkeys and without having to reload the game after each change… I made an autohotkey scrip (I don’t know any other programming languages lol) I could package this as an .exe to share with others after I iron out a few bugs.
I rather you/we didn’t package EXEs and share them with people, it opens the doors for people sticking backdoors and other “fun” stuff inside. and if people get in to the habit of downloading EXEs from other people on the forums, it just feels bad on some accounts.
Sharing how to do it and/or the source code should be good enough
Thank you for clearing this part up for me.
AutoIt and Python are the only ones I know. I had a look at autoHotKey and It just wasn’t good enough for what I needed at the time. and if you want to learn programming. I feel Python is very nice to start with.
For basic assets replacements, I use batch files (.bat or .cmd) to manage my own Boundless mods.
This allow to quickly setup files operation without compiler.
Far less sexy than exe but easy to control.
i think the trick with this tho is its a all or nothing system if the devs say for instance you are allowed to change and mod sound files but not block assets there would be no way for them to detect and stop block assets changes without stopping all client side changes
i dont agree with this. if you are allowed to change some files but not others then that is easy to detect, because all the game haves to do is run SHA and check the files you are not allowed to change, and skip checking the files you are allowed to change. before loading the files.
Not sure you’ll get a clear answer on that. There’s a lot of files with a lot of settings. Not trying to get an advantage over others with what you do seems like a good yardstick for whether it’d be okay or not. Or try something you feel isn’t cheating, then ask a dev.
Yeah I think that’s a more difficult case to judge, it uses other things to possibly get an advantage. I’ve asked the same and also not had a response. To be fair though that was on the forum and may not have been seen.
I’ve played games where it’s okay - one in particular had a large player base of disabled forces veterans - but it was always tolerated to the “assist someone to be able to do what an able-bodied person does” level rather than, e.g. writing AHK scripts to read screen contents and auto-click for XP based on conditions.
I think the devs opinion is likely something like: it’s not ok if you’re gaining an unsized advantage over other players, or if you’re abusing game systems or impacting other players’ experience.
It’s also unfortunately going to be pretty subjective, but people here generally have a decent sense of where those lines are.
Tweaking camera settings: definitely fine
X-ray type edits: definitely not fine
Auto-clicking: probably fine if you’re present & not automating an entire play style. Probably not fine if you’re using it to “bot” xp, resource, coin gains
I honestly thought this wasn’t fine due to the combat advantage it can give in some situations. but I seems I am wrong about that for this game, and that is good to know.
Don’t forget that Wonderstruck is a tiny dev studio. They can’t afford to invest heavily in cheat detection and prevention. Hell, larger games have teams of propel the size of Wonderstruck, or larger, dedicated to just this
A lot of it falls on us players to be reasonable here with how we tweak game files, so they can continue focusing on core gameplay systems
Also, this is a game where combat advantage doesn’t really give you much/any edge over other players. There’s no pvp, and you’re likely to be able to farm critters at a greatly increased rate.
But, I’m also not a dev, and they are also free to change their mind if it does begin to look like abuse
maybe not at this moment in time since combat is very limited at this time. but I assumed they might add more combat content down the road, or even add leader-boards for dungeon clear times if they ever add in dungeons.
More like the situational awareness that is needed to not sustain 8000 damage from the elite wild stock. Yes I still see many people dying from this.
As for the “never getting hit” by grappling from a tower part. You can still get hit by the flying ones. Bonus points if someone throws a regen bomb and removes the tower by “mistake”.
