From falling through the environment to getting stuck in weird places, there certainly is no shortage of bugs and glitches in Tom Clancy's The Division. While most players came to accept those bugs as part of the game, it is the cheats and hacks that nobody can withstand. A growing number of players are now using hacks to give themselves infinite health, infinite ammo and teleportation powers. Unfortunately, it looks like Ubisoft has little to do about it.
In a on his "Gaffer On Games" blog, Former Respawn (Titanfall) senior programmer and lead network programmer at Sony Santa Monica, Glenn Fiedler, analyzed how The Division's network code works and concluded that there is no way it can be fixed to prevent hacks without a "complete rewrite."
Fiedler noted that the game's common glitches "should have probably picked up when testing the game" and that the way its netcode works "displays a fundamental misunderstanding of how FPS games are networked."
Fiedler watched a now-removed video of a PC player hacking the game and found that he was using "a client-side cheat program that is poking memory locations and giving players infinite health, infinite ammo, and teleporting players around the level." This method only works if the game uses a trusted client network model which stores vital information such as player health and ammo on the player's PC and "trusts" it not to tamper with them.
Unfortunately, there is no way to prevent hackers from modifying any value stored in a PC's memory. "my opinion of can this be fixed is basically no. Not on PC. Not without a complete rewrite," asserted Fiedler. The situation is not as pessimistic on consoles because they use a trusted computing model which prevents unsigned code from running and have mechnisms in place to prevent hackers from modifying in-memory values.
VIA: .
