ZDoom ACS Cheat Detection

[Dragonfly]

I would like to add some cheat detection into my mod that does NOT prevent the player from cheating. All I want is to know if a player cheated while on a level, so I can log the fact they cheated and store a little note next to their high score that says "used cheats" or something. This would prevent anybody from abusing trust / not requiring a video ro demo during a competition if one was to be held.

 

I know that the authors of ZDoom have in the past said they will never implement any such features, and if that is the case, that's totally fine. If there is a way to make it work though, I'd love to know!

 

My current train of thought is to simply set SV_Cheats to 0 on all difficulties, but that prevents the player from using cheats, which is not my intent.

[Arctangent]

You could just disable cheats on all difficulties through MAPINFO and check if sv_cheats is 1. sv_cheats will override a difficulty's setting in allowing cheats ( in fact, the entire purpose of it is to enable cheats in situations where they're disabled ) so you don't have to worry about disabling cheating entirely.

[Graf Zahl]

With ACS you cannot do it. Most of the cheat related flags are not accessible and some actions do not even set anything checkable.

But even with ZScript you'll only be able to detect some cheats, not all of them. A universal approach is definitely not possible.

 

[Dragonfly]

4 hours ago, Arctangent said:

You could just disable cheats on all difficulties through MAPINFO and check if sv_cheats is 1. sv_cheats will override a difficulty's setting in allowing cheats ( in fact, the entire purpose of it is to enable cheats in situations where they're disabled ) so you don't have to worry about disabling cheating entirely.

I feared this would be the only solution. Okay, thank you very much @Arctangent and @Graf Zahl. :)

[Nevander]

But how would you detect the classic cheats like IDDQD and IDFA? Because they don't require sv_cheats as far as I know.

[Dragonfly]

I'm almost certain they do get prevented with sv_cheats 0. I've yet to test fully but if I go into nightmare difficulty, where sv_cheats is 0, I can't use those cheats.

 

[Nevander]

I meant any difficulty where sv_cheats does not have to be 1, like ITYTD, then use the codes.

[Dragonfly]

Create cusrtom difficulties (that replicate the original!)

 

https://zdoom.org/wiki/MAPINFO/Skill_definition