It seems like map hacks are still around. I hate complaints about people who uses hacks, because most of the time the complainer just suck at the game and doesn't want to admit it. But sometimes you do encounter someone using a hack and I did that yesterday.
I started as Zerg at the 12 o'clock position on Lost Temple and found my Terran opponent at the 6 o'clock position. I think Zerg has to fast expand in this setup, but it is dangerous here as it is really hard to defend the natural expansion site of the 12 o'clock start position. I tried anyway.
I got attacked pretty early on by a few marines. No one good would have attacked with that few marines. That meant my opponent was stupid or knew in advance that I had gambled with my build order and was virtually defenseless. I watched the replay afterwards and he never send a unit out scouting, nor did he use his comsat scanner. I might have thought that he was simply stupid if I hadn't made a super fast 2nd expansion at the 9 o'clock natural expansion too, and he attacked that with SCVs only without scouting or support with marines.
His stats of 49-6-4 was another giveaway.
Here is a great example on how to getting started writing software in C# that reads the internal states of a game (in this case minesweeper).
ReplyDeletehttp://www.codeproject.com/csharp/minememoryreader.asp
It seems simple enough for somebody with a little programming skill. Cheating is bad of cause, but it could be an interesting challenge or not.
I find it quite interesting to read about people that reversed the pseudo randomizer code on early slot machines to predict the outcome. Although illegal its fascinating what some people will do to beat the game.
In fact the missing clever tinkering element on many modern devices is being accused for the drop in computer science students.