Anyone who's played JK multiplayer has encountered cheating. Someone has custom cogs which let them do usually terribly unbalanced things. I studied how these cogs passed the checksum (JK's crummy, but interesting anti-cheating stuff) and taught myself how to do the same. I started with a heavy modding background, so I wanted to add grappling hooks and jetpacks that passed the checksum, not super-rapid-fire-death gun that shoots destruction.

This was, oh, 4 or so years ago. Not something I ever really released to the public. I figure, what, 7 years after the game came out, it'd be safe to release my work.

I'm setting up a little webpage so you guys can download it, on some tripod webspace I rarely use. It's a complete mod, changing every force power, weapon and item, but it has one special attribute: it passes the checksum. This means you can use this mod, and other people don't have to have it to play together. I did try and balance these powers and weapons against the default ones, so that gameplay will be semi-balanced, but that doesn't mean it's ok to use these when playing with people who don't know you will be. If nothing else, the element of surprise will give you an unfair advantage.

If anyone thinks this is outrageous, and I'm a horrible cheater, say so before I set up a page and link to it for you guys. I'm mostly providing it so you can see a neat use of bypassing the checksum, and maybe get another perspective on cogging.

Quib Mask

P.S. - I check Massassi maybe once a year to see if anything neat has happened. This past year I found the JK Chess levels and Rolling Revolution. They're pretty spiffy. =D

Facinating... I'd like to see how that is done, and at the same time, I really think that Mods should be on both computers. But, of course, there might be some things like... No, wait... Never mind... Anyway, if a cheating mod is going to be made, then a cheating mod is to be made so both players can use it. OK, I know you're not making a cheating mod, but any mod should not have this thing about passing the checksum. It could easely crash the game.

/Edward
PS, I might have said something wrong or out of context... Please exuse me 'cause it is 1:45 AM.

How much have you tested these? Id be interested to see how stable these are...

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Dear lady, can you hear the wind blow, and did you know
Your stairway lies on the whispering wind.
:wq

As far as stability goes, they're 100%. In fact my "hack" coding is less buggy than most people's "mod" coding. Make sure you check out the grappling hook (replaces force blind): it has a rope and when it hits the sky you don't crash or go flying toward location 0,0,0. Most mod grappling hooks aren't that good. Like I said, I started out as a modder THEN moved to the "darker" side of COGging. So my coding is very precise, and I just had to get more efficient and creative to pass the checksum.

I guess 2 people semi-interested is enough. Let me get it zipped up and a simple little html download page made.

I'll post again when the download page is ready.

Quib Mask

Consider me interested.

k, here's the link:

http://everbot.tripod.com/toolbox.htm

It's gobbed, because it IS set up like a mod; just not everyone has to have it to play together.

It modifies:
9 BMs
64 COGs
2 DATs
1 JKL
1 PUP
10 KEYs
3 SFTs
for a total of 90 files changed.

There's a readme in the zip detailing changes to weapons, force powers and items.

Quib Mask

Hmmm.... I'd like to see this stuff; this is an interesting subject... especially since I'm still trying to grasp Lunatik's semi-tutor about passing checksum; I guess I just need some examples, and they're right here.

*laughs meniachally* [j/k]

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nytfyre m0d || f33l t3h p0w3r || t3h l0st c0gz || OMF > *

This is something I'm sure will be more accepted now than back when JK was still active. I remember trying to explain to people how hacking is just a way of exploring cog with an extra set of rules to follow, but alot of people wouldn't even hear it back then. I know that there's several people on this board who know more cog than anyone else, but have never really experimented much with the checksum rules. IMO it was the best part of writing hack-cogs. It was truly a great feeling getting a complex, useful cog to pass checksum.

There really was an entire JK sub-culture that was extremely devoted to this part of cog, and I'm glad that I was part of it (anyone remember a Maggot around the zone?).

The one thing about checksum is that it doesn't have to be unstable. "Battle hacks" as they were called (the more hostile hacks) where the unstable ones. Simply making something like a jetpack or grapling hook that passes cs, though, doesn't really cross that border into "unstable"

Wow I just typed alot for no real reason. Bonus

What I meant to type through that whole thing is that passing CS is one of the few things I remember about cog (although a quick brush up on the verbs would change that), so anyone who has an interest and would like to ask specific questions can try to find me in the chat
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</sarcasm>

[This message has been edited by Compos Mentis (edited June 23, 2004).]

I think Compos Mentis summed up my opinion/feelings on cog "hacks" pretty well. You had the majority of people just laying waste to the competition, crashing games, being invulnerable, etc. and then you had a few people fishing around for more constructive changes.

"It was truly a great feeling getting a complex, useful cog to pass checksum." is right on the money. I was euphoric when I got my grappling hook passing the checksum and functioning better than any current mod grappling hook. Forcing myself to work within tighter constraints just produced better results.

Way back when, I only had dial-up, so online play sucked. Me and a few avid JK friends just played LAN games.

It was also in my best interest to go for 100% non-crashing cog code so my friends wouldn't punch me for crashing the game. It was funny how little they cared if I was "hacking" if I was losing terribly (my hacks aren't exactly over-powering =P).

Quib Mask

after reading some of these posts, i have found it funny that a lot of you people dont know much about jk hacks. Not that you guys arent very good coggers, its just that that the majority dont know certain things...

well a lot of you dont know much about checksum, it seems. Passing checksum consists of various elements. but i will explain that later.

Massassi Newbies: "Passing checksum would mean passing the jk anti hacker system!" - someone actually said that)

EAH and various other hackers: HAHAHA. HAHAHAHAHAHA!


The reality is, that the EAH clan (Evil allied Hax) and its members, who have been around for years, have produced very complicated and complex cogs that go beyond you people are usally talking about when you refer to hacks. For Example,

The Massassi Community: "Yeah, back when we played jk, we had these cogs that would change you into any thing you shot at, and we could build stuff, and sometimes when we were bad, we would fade people!

The Reality: A number of elite hacker gods, have created some pretty sweet cogs.

Fading: Once a basic cog, has been transformed in elite coding that warps the victim, changes model, god kills them, and adds various effects.

Auto Aim: haha ibet none of you even know about this. back in 2002 i created a project called Enhanced Conc that would allow you to auto aim at other players as long as you were in one of the oasis levels(merc,ji,canyon,ect) and on the top level.

Discreet Hacks: discreet hacking has come a long way, Vest timers, undectable god modes, auto aims, map hacks, invisibility and even sniper guns.

Antis: for the whole jk hacking community, anits were just as important as regular hacks. NT's, or No Targets, were cogs that made it harder for other people to cog them because the enemy wouldnt exist using various tequniques, of course none of these are foolproof.

There are many programs for jk that i bet a lot of you have never heard of, such as cog maker, or a program that assists and getting you past checksum by analyzing the character count on a cog, a CHECKSUM KILLER, a JK IP Stealer, and many other elite programs.

but EAH is a dead clan, and JK died a long time ago, it will never be what it once was. #

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eternity is the now ~ that never was



[This message has been edited by EAH_XxLuNaTiKxX (edited June 24, 2004).]

Auto aiming isnt that hard to do; One of the weapons in the GBK Tools was a weapon that auto-aimed. However, it wouldn't pass checksum.

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Dear lady, can you hear the wind blow, and did you know
Your stairway lies on the whispering wind.
:wq

I know that this may be a somewhat hard concept for the "hackers" that seem to frequenting Massassi more and more recently, but for most of the coggers here, "passing the checksum" was (and has never been until now) an issue that's concerned us mainly because of one reason: we play it fair (...well - I speak for myself here ).

I've never been concerned about "passing checksum" because of 2 reasons:

1) I've never known about how to get around the checksum issue (incidentally, thanks to Lunatik's postings the other day for the most detailed info I've seen to date ), because...

2.)... I've always played JK fair and by the book, and I'd hope (but not expect) every other JK player to do the same. Whilst I've never seen the attraction in making a game entirely miserable or even downright unplayable (due to crashes, courtesy of hacks), I dare say that to be able to "bend the rules" is quite impressive in its own right

Since I was given my first public cogging lesson by SaberMaster (one of the greats, in my humble opinion ), I've dilligently tried to write the most efficient cogs for people. This in turn, has only led me to learn and obide by the COG language and not to think "out of the box" so to speak. Whilst I don't condone nor approve of cog hacks (maybe it's my ignorance, or alternatively, sense of honour... ) I (begrudgingly) have to admit that seeing these pieces of "academia" (7 years on, with JK's popularity outside Massassi/TACC waning) would probably do next to no harm now...

This is why I wish COG had been OO with a proper script compiler, that wouldn't allow scripts to be compiled unless they were of the correct syntax - as it is, COG is far too lenient a language and it is entirely possible to get away with murder for some things. As we are now seeing though, some coggers/modders/hackers have been doing this for years though...

Anyways - in conclusion, bring on the code...

-Jackpot

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"lucky_jackpot is the smily god..." - gothicX
"jackpot is an evil evil man... so evil, in fact, that he's awesome." - Seb

"Life is mostly froth and bubble, but two things stand in stone,
Kindness in another's trouble, courage in your own"
("Ye Wearie Wayfarer" - by Adam Lindsay Gordon)

hey GBK im going to post my auto aim code here sometime, it passes c/s, and is an art in itself.....

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eternity is the now ~ that never was

[This message has been edited by EAH_XxLuNaTiKxX (edited June 24, 2004).]

Sweet.

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Dear lady, can you hear the wind blow, and did you know
Your stairway lies on the whispering wind.
:wq

The dark side meets the light!

Uh, yeah, we're not stupid, EAH_XxLuNaTiKxX. We, or at least I and I know quite a few others, are well aware of everything you said. I'm kind of offended that you came in here acting like we're a bunch of idiots. And it appears YOU don't even know what checksum is. It's not a character count, it's more of an argument and parameter count. If it were as simple as characters, all it would take is adding or removing characters from variable names to make it pass.

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Bassoon, n. A brazen instrument into which a fool blows out his brains.

[This message has been edited by Emon (edited June 24, 2004).]

It is something mildly interesting. And something which might be useful to me, lol. I've come across an interesting case where a level cog seems to cause a checksum error. I'm not exactly sure how that works, when all players have the same level, but it does, interestingly enough. (It might've been from Massassi, actually, a sector anti-grav cog (flying...)).

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_ _ _____________ _ _
Wolf Moon
Cast Your Spell On Me
Beware
The Woods At Night
The Wolf Has Come

I don't think he's referring to that kind of character count. What he's referring to is, in many ways, not an actual "character" count, and is indeed a param count; when he says "character" he means "type of param/argument/syntax operator/etc" (4 types total -- i.e. flags, parenthases,...).
Like I said before, I'm still trying to get this stuff straight, so I might have misworded something or the like.

Anyway, a question about the hacking: in some/most/all (dunno which) of QM's cogs, he has some interesting comments, like a symbol that was commented out or something (like "// 10", "// sound deadlySound2=-1 local // ForceDSight02.WAV", "+grenade_exp"). Does JK read the comments as part of the "character count" as well?

And assuming that's the case, would they be of type symbol, verb, etc ("//setpulse(0);" = verb, "//()" = operator, etc) even though commented out? Sorry If I'm confusing you I'm just really interested

Oh also, when hacking, are you ialways replacing a cog that everyone else is using (like in regular JK, you'd replace a regular jk cog, and in, say, the KWP mod, you'd replace a KWP cog or a regular JK cog that wasn't changed by KWP)?

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nytfyre m0d || f33l t3h p0w3r || t3h l0st c0gz || OMF > *

[This message has been edited by Darth Slaw (edited June 24, 2004).]

I actually said this, but not because I am afraid of or offended by you evil hacker boys, no. I just said it to sum up your ultra-long and uber-1337 explanation of checksum in one sentence for the lazy and/or technically not so interested guys who were following this thread.

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"Häb Pfrässe, süsch chlepfts!" - The coolest language in the world (besides Cherokee)

Heh, hacks could really open up opportunities in some ways. For example, you have one master mod with all the resources and templates, then all the hacks for the players, so you can load more freely which weapons and force powers, etc you want.

This could also be done through really complex coding, but the hacks can be released whenever without updating the master mod (unless you needed to for a new template or something), whereas the non-hack mod would have to be updated and rereleased.

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nytfyre m0d || f33l t3h p0w3r || t3h l0st c0gz || OMF > *

Quite possibly, but I would assume that JK does a preprocess on all COGs when they're loaded, removing comments, whitespace, etc. But you never know, it is JK.

If you really wanted to know, ask Jon`C. He's about the only remaining memeber of the community that has had contact and detailed discussions with any of the JK development team.

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Bassoon, n. A brazen instrument into which a fool blows out his brains.

[This message has been edited by Emon (edited June 24, 2004).]

I still have one of the earlier versions of the auto-aim hack somewhere around here. I also have just about every other cog that's ever made it to my HD backed up onto a cd rom I keep with my other "valuables"

BTW, Luny, did you ever get that nt killer stable?
-Mag

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</sarcasm>

Youd be more likely to get the clap from Jon`C than any useful information.

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Dear lady, can you hear the wind blow, and did you know
Your stairway lies on the whispering wind.
:wq

"Heh, hacks could really open up opportunities in some ways. For example, you have one master mod with all the resources and templates, then all the hacks for the players, so you can load more freely which weapons and force powers, etc you want." This was more or less what I had wanted to accomplish 4 years back but never got around to really working at it.

"JK read the comments as part of the "character count" as well?" No it doesn't. Sorry for the commented out mess, that was just part of me converting the original code to the modified code; sorta notes as I was converting. You could delete all commented out code and they'd still pass checksum.

The replacement for force persuasion didn't work as well as I'd hoped, I had wanted it to circle things no matter where they are in the level. I know how I could do that now, but it'd take a complete overhaul of the cog.

Also, passing the checksum isn't simply meeting the count; there are some sections of cog that will fail checksum if they're modified in any way whatsoever. I can't quote any examples by memory, there might be one "do not edit" section commented in one of my cogs, but no guarantees. I'll go back through them later and see if I can find an example. It's weird, it's like JK had a more strict ruuleset for just certain parts of certain cogs. If I changed even one value (a 0 to a 1 for example) within a "do not edit" area, it'd fail checksum.

Quib Mask

[This message has been edited by Quib Mask (edited June 24, 2004).]

That's one of the things I enjoyed about hacking. Each cog had it's own "personality" when it came to how editable it was. Using this as a strategy in picking what cogs to edit and how to edit them was good times. I remember when someone had the bright idea to use sendmessage() to make more advanced hacks, as well.

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</sarcasm>

whoo hooo;

EMON: Uh, yeah, we're not stupid, EAH_XxLuNaTiKxX.

I ment that a large part of the massassi editing community is unware of a lot of things.

EMON: We, or at least I and I know quite a few others, are well aware of everything you said. I'm kind of offended that you came in here acting like we're a bunch of idiots.

ummm stfu.

EMON: And it appears YOU don't even know what checksum is. It's not a character count, it's more of an argument and parameter count. If it were as simple as characters, all it would take is adding or removing characters from variable names to make it pass.

um ok.

ok well i have come to the conclusion that a lot of you are idiots (EMON), but most of you are cool. #

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eternity is the now ~ that never was

[This message has been edited by EAH_XxLuNaTiKxX (edited June 24, 2004).]

Okay, but it would be nice if you specified that. You generally refers to the people in the current discussion, those in this thread. We are not the majority of the Massassi editing community.


Oh, that's nice. You act like a dick, which I point out, and your rebuttle is just acting like a dick some more. Classy.


Right. I'm stupid, you JK hacker gods know EVERYTHING.


I was going to say something more, but I think you've already implied more than I could have said.

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Bassoon, n. A brazen instrument into which a fool blows out his brains.

You have five seconds to give me a good reason not to ban you.

EDIT: Time is up, YOU'RE BANNED!

[This message has been edited by kak (edited June 24, 2004).]

text.

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eternity is the now ~ that never was

Ah, I found one of my cogs with commenting detailing which parts of it are "do not edit" sections of cog ("do not edit" meaning if you change it in any way it'll fail checksum).

force_absorb.cog



Everything at "// Fails Checksum" and every line above that, when edited in any way, will fail checksum. There's many spots in many cogs like this, usually near the top of the actual code. A few have it occur more near the bottom (I think, it's been a while).

My force absorb cog makes it so when you take force damage (while absorb is active) it reduces the damage you take and returns force damage to the player that hurt you, and prints: "You are taking Feedback damage!" on their screen. To accomplish this it sends them a force deadlysight damage signal, then hides the "You are taking Deadlysight damage!" message that they'd normally see.

DamageThing(target, damage * absorption, 0x8, player); doesn't seem to actually hurt them in multiplayer, hence the reason I send a deadlysight damage signal.

The replacement to absorb I named Force Feedback. I'd imagine it'd be more or less just as cheap as it's absorb predecessor, making you more or less immune to dark jedi powers, this just returns damage rather than filling up your mana (which you could use to heal, or refresh absorb when it faded).

Quib Mask

Edited to fix some typos.

[This message has been edited by Quib Mask (edited June 24, 2004).]

If only we had the JK SrcCode, then we (well, smart people, anyway) could figure out exactly how the checksum system works, and thus fill in any holes in the knowledge of hacking.
(Not to mention we'd also be able to identify all the "unknown" flags, cog verbs, etc., but we're on the topic of hacking right now )

And you remember how the Darkside is supposed to be the "quick and easy path" of the Force? Well, it's funny how hacking (as the "Dark Side" of cog) is actually the harder, slower path

Cool stuff.

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nytfyre m0d || f33l t3h p0w3r || t3h l0st c0gz || OMF > *

Ah, the reason you can't simply damage them like that is their player is godmode on your computer. This prevents you from directly damaging the thing.

It's mentioned in this tutorial...
http://www.massassi.net/tutorials/clientserver/clientserver.html

Basically, it creates the "ghost" effect in JK. Laggier games anyways. It's why you can't hurt the player thing you see. You have to adjust for where they are on their computer. It's because the player things are made as "gods" in MP, etc for your personal one.

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_ _ _____________ _ _
Wolf Moon
Cast Your Spell On Me
Beware
The Woods At Night
The Wolf Has Come

(checks to see if account is still active) Yah, I remember playing JK back in the day, I could not host a game and get people in it because of my name . hacking for me was all about making it look like someone else was doing it, That is how I got the biggest kicks and giggles. For example, I made a Puppet cog that would change a person into a mindless zombie that floated around and shot Destructs at people, it disabled the chat ability of that person as well, so they where often kick out of the game. But making the puppet was the fun part (and yes I did make my own puppet and did not just use one of the other available).

Antis, or I should say NT's, where definatly required, but in a sence they kindof killed hacking as the Destroything NT pretty much removed the ability of a player to die . Still, hacking was fun and it definitly took some talent to do legitimate cogs that passed the JK checksum (Which could be very picky at times).

What where we talking about?

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Im Happy

Zing!

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