Tweak nexuiz for highest perfomance over VNC?

[sebastian]

Im experimenting with a new Anticheat solution (to prevent cheaters on nexuiz), and that is to run both the game server and client on the server, and then letting players connect with VNC (like tightVNC http://www.tightvnc.com)to the clients.

The reason I selected nexiuz as game, is that it is free and opensource, and probably I will need to tweak in a way to remove the whole menu and instead hard coding server, binds, name and such in the game. (And then allowing this to be changed in the VNC instead).

This removes all ability to cheat, since the ground of all cheating is that you cannot trust the client. By only allowing the client to know and change data the player is supposed to see with their own eyes, any cheats residing on client will not be able to modify any data. The only thing any cheats can do is the same as the player is able to do with their own hands and eyes.

But now to the core topic:
How do I tweak nexuiz for best perfomance over VNC?

I know that setting 640x480 will tweak a lot, same with 16bit color instead of 32bit.
Also I will be running the DSN version or the other nexuiz-remix version for netbooks, to reduce the number of colors, and thus gaining higher performance over VNC.

Just come with any tips to get best performance over VNC.
It should not really affect gameplay so much.
If the image quality gets low dosen't matter.

[Sepelio]

Eh... so... how many cheaters have you actually encountered in Nexuiz then?

[sebastian]

I really don't know, but Im think of at least attempting to make up a really secure gaming platform. That will be as secure that it could be used in real contests for money.

[Sepelio]

I'm fairly sure the game is set to have some form of cheat detection. I know it can already register the location of hits and then produce a graph to allow it to be analysed to look for aimbotters etc.

As far as I'm aware proper wallhacks are also impossible.

[sebastian]

Yes, but Im think of preventing the cheats in the first place instead of detecting them.

Now back to topic: Give me idéas of increasing performance for running nexuiz over VNC.

I know reducing colors and resolution will increase performance, since the image that needs to be sent over network is smaller in size. Also reducing number of colors in a specific area will allow better JPEG compression.
I will already running the netbook version or the nexuiz remix version.

But any tweaks that will reduce the size on the image that needs to be sent over VNC?

[[-z-]]

Check out some of the flags esteel gave me when I was running nexuiz in a virtual machine.

And check out 'effects-omg.cfg'

[lda17h]

I don't think it's practical to run nexuiz over VNC, especially if you are not connecting to the machine running the client by a FAT pipe.

I sometimes run OpenGL apps remotely using the X11 protocol and we have Gigabit ethernet here at university. I am connected to the machine running the app just by a single Gigabit switch and you can totally forget it for interactive gameplay.

And in this case the client actually sends OpenGL commands over the net to the machine showing the graphics, so it's not raw image data being transferred.

Personally i think this is an unpractical idea due to the added latency and the bandwidth constraints required for a playable game. In 10 to 20 years: maybe...

[RoyalAbidi]

well you might be able to use what you're saying for scorched earth or maybe commander keen LOL

[halogene]

I have heard that FreeNX or the NX Server from Nomachine (http://www.nomachine.com) gives you far better performance than normal VNC. Haven't tested it yet, but you might want to give this a shot. I think it does some sort of compression on the fly to limit the needed bandwidth.

But anyway I wonder how you intend to deal with the lag? A fast-paced game like Nexuiz relies on having low lag and people try to avoid even wireless LAN because of the lag it produces... with a remote desktop solution you would have even more lag.

Maybe the approach from the guys that did Quake Live might be suitable for Nexuiz (however they did that).

[sebastian]

Thank you for the replys.

I should look into these settings and see what I can do.

I should check out if there is a possibly to start nexuiz and bypass menu at the same time.
By only allowing certain keypresses to go to server (like A-Z and 0-9), and by remapping keys in the VNC client, and then having a static bind on the server side, I can prevent that nexuiz are exited, since keys like ESC and such will be ignored by VNC server.
The server must have "kiosk like" security since due to this solution

For example, if user configures, in a specific modified VNC client:
"CTRL-> a"
"SPACE -> b"
"MOUSE1 -> c"

and such. When user presses CTRL, a "a" keypress will go to the VNC server which on the static server-side bind would mean for example "Attack".

Instead the VNC server process will kill nexuiz and do a RCON kick on the user when the VNC client disconnects.

Because of this, the VNC/remote control solution needs to be fully OpenSource. So FreeNX/Nomachine _cannot_ be used, since these are closed-source freeware.


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About quake live, it uses some sort of plugin, (a game client) which runs in browser. So its basically the same thing as running a standalone client. Which have the exact same vulnerables as real clients for cheating.