Thanks for following through on this.   

Just in case you didn't know, you can resubmit a metaverse game once. AFAIK there's no time limit to do this. So just in case you ever feel like it, you could play the game out to victory and submit it again. Of course this assumes that you have a save game prior to resigning.

You are on the right track.

"The score is massive, but now that we can have 900+ planets scores of 800,000+ will be easy to get."

900+ planets?! Im currently in the middle of a gigantic map, adundant stars, abundant habitable planets, ect, and I control half the map, yet I only have like 160 planets!

Hmm...well if it's not doing it at the very beginning, that suggests that it's not something wrong with your data. 

Did you have an error message about an invalid race config before you started your game that you went back and fixed and then started the flagged game without restarting GalCiv2?  If that happened, it wouldn't have cleared the cheat flag from the first game.

If that's not the case, can you please zip your end game save from the cheater flagged game and any previous saves you have from that game and e-mail them to me at [email protected] so that I can see if I can find where the cheater flag was introduced?

 

 

It sounds like your still playing DL (as am I at the moment). Apparently 900+ planets are not uncommon on DA, although I'm sure they're still dependent on your explicit settings.

From my experience on DL you get 450~500 planets on a gigantic galaxy with abundant systems, planets and habital planets as long as you also select loose clusters or scattered systems. If you select the above but also select dense clusters you only get around 250~300 planets. So it sounds like you're playing DL and selected dense clusters.

Ooops, found another place where it sets the cheater flag.  Did you somehow manage to get your planet quality ability above 40? It doesn't care about the class of a planet, but if your planet quality ability is greater than 40, that will also set the cheater flag.

I am putting in dialogs to warn you if the cheater flag is set for the next update.

I don't understand. How would you set your planet quality ability greater than 40? Isn't 20 the limit?

I didn't use a custom race, and have never used a custom race. I used the stock Torrians.

I didn't choose planet quality as something to put points into. I don't remember what I used and can't check that from work, but I know I didn't use planet quality. In DA planet quality isn't really useful because there are so many planets it simply doesn't matter about their quality, and the low level planets are so good you would never want to minimize the number of low level planets.

I will e-mail the save file when I get home from work. I don't have e-mail on my game computer, so I will have to find an easy way to do it, but that shouldn't be too hard.

Thanks for the help.

- Livonya

Thank you. This one thing would be a big help.

I think Kryo mentioned that the cheat flag being set is in some way at some point in time indicated in the debug.err file. Is this something that we can periodically check to see if anything happens during a game. If so can we check the debug.err file at anytime or does it have to be a specific point in the game (i.e. immediately after the load of a save game)? Also what string of text should we search for (I assume "cheat" would probably be a safe bet)?

It only says that when the flag is actually thrown; there's no notice on a reload.



Yep.

So that means if we don't know when the flag is thrown then there's no way to know?

I'm not concerned about an automatic cheat generated by invalid racial bonuses that would be known at the start of the game, but a cheat that occurs randomly in the game due to the unanticipated overflow of God knows what. I'm talking about things like having 100,000 ships or an income in excess of 5,000,000 bc's per turn or research rates of 1,000,000 RP's a turn, or as Mag suggested 8 (or more) Hyperion Shrinkers. Things that are way beyond normal expectations and so there's no clue how (or when) the game will respond.

More that if you're concerned about getting a cheat flag, you'll need to check your debug before starting a new session since it will only note the flag one time. If you have multiple monitors or run in a window, you could have the debug open alongside the game and periodically reload it to keep tabs.

This cannot happen.  We check for very specific things; we don't even check to see if the money in your treasury rises above a certain level as we did in GalCiv1/AP.  And the 8+ Hyperion Shrinkers are not an issue.  As I said previously, the only value we check to see if it's greater than a specific value is the PQ ability.

 

No, I have Gold Edition. I use these settings: Abundant Habital Planets, Abundant Planets, Abundant Stars, and Tight Clusters.

Change to scattered star systems. The planet count will go way up.

Im gonna do just that. Thanks.

Kryo/CariELF -

I wasn't able to e-mail the save games last night, but I will get that to you over the weekend.

I will be able to send you several save files.

I have a save file from turn one before I even took a move, and then I have a save from the end of each year.

I like to document my games so I can go back to reference what I did and how it played out.

So I can send you something like 5 to 7 different save games that cover everything from turn 1 to the final turn.

You will have those by Monday morning.

- Livonya

I wasn't suggesting that any of these overflow type conditions are something that was checked for and then explicitly and intentionally flagged as a cheat. What I'm suggesting is that strange things happen when various conditions occur that exceed normal in game parameters. You certainly know far more about what could possibly happen inside the game then I could ever hope to know, but does anyone know what happens to the save game or end game file when for example there are 1,000,000 ships simultaneously moving on autopilot? And if 1 million ships on autopilot is not an issue then how about 5 billion? At some point things happen that cannot be anticipated and when that occurs how this is treated by in-game or error checking software can’t be known either. I have no clue as to where these potential overflow conditions exist, certainly the boundaries of 32 bit variables are the most likely place. In any case, any time someone does anything in the game that has never been done before, the possibility of uncovering such an overflow condition exists.

In Livonya’s case he was concerned about the crashes and slowdowns in his system that he felt were related to the total number of ships that he had in the game. Whether or not this is the case is hopefully something you may be able to shed some light on. Anyway, as far as I’m concerned putting in dialogs to warn of the cheater flag being set is about as good as I could ask for. The only point I’m trying to make is that there’s some finite possibility that the cheater flag could get set by some mangling of the game data due to some other unanticipated error condition occurring in the game.

Tight clusters (in DL) will limit you to the 250~300 planet range. If you want more than that select loose clusters or scattered systems.

Kryo / CariElf -

Okay, I just sent the save games.

I included 7 save games.

1) Turn 1
2) 1 and 1/2 years into game
3) a few days before year 2
4) Dec 2229
5) Dec 2230
6) Dec 2231
7) End Game save

Hopefully, you can figure out what tripped the cheat flag.

- Livonya

I'm just wondering but why would this make a difference? I colonized a class 28 planet but through an event and terriforing I made the planet a class 41. The event incresed the planet's class by 45%. I didn't use any cheats whatso ever yet I managed to make a planet above a class 40.

I'm pretty sure she was talking about a PQ racial ability above 40% as listed in the Stats & Graphs section of the civilization Manager. This is a PQ increase that's applied to *all* of your planets. This has nothing to do with getting any single planets PQ above 40.

your right mumble, appearantly its not possible except from cheating to raise that PQ racial ability above 40%....

I have a game that I've been playing for awhile on normal difficulty, that is a metaverse game, it has 900+ planets. Its a real pain to play, and its going to take forever to complete it still.....I actually was looking for a way to end it faster, like thru an alliance win or influence win....

I really hope I don't after all this time get a cheat flag when I try to post the score....I'm still in the middle of playing it....

Does anyone know if there was any resolution to the problem reported by Livonya? I know that new code has been added to let folks know when a game gets flagged as a cheat. This is an excellent addition. But folks can spend quite a long time on some of these games and the idea that a game could inadvertantly be flagged as a cheat due to crashes or other unexplained behavior is still a concern.

I'm not trying to rush anyone here but I would like to hear about any resolution of this, whenever it may occur.

Thanks.   

Livonya e-mailed me some save game files and I looked at them, but I coudln't find a definite cause.  All of the game values looked normal, and the game started clean and was clean for a few game years.

Livonya was going to try and reproduce the cheat flag from one of the earlier saves, but I have not heard anything further from Livonya. 

It's possible that the save game file itself was corrupted, which would cause the cheater flag to be set because it would think that it had been modified for cheating purposes.  This would be possible if the folder was being scanned by an anti-virus or security program, etc, during saving.   

Or maybe a crash...

Thanks for the update, I'm sorry that I didn't notice it at the time you made it.

I did a quick search of posts and replies from him and haven't found anything more recent than his reply in this thread close to a month ago.

It's sad to lose a player to something like this but I don't know what really could or should be done to avoid it. The change that you've added to warn of the cheat flag being set is about the best thing that I can think of. It makes sense to not dwell on this specific case but to know that something was done to help alleviate this concern for the future.

I do think it's very important for the integrity of the metaverse that these kinds of protections be in place. In this case it's clear that he had no difficulty submitting large but non-cheating scores so it was very doubtful to me that he had actually cheated. However, I know of others in similar situations that have clearly received an undeserved cheat flag and they've been able to shrug it off and simply get back to posting monster scores.