[Kde-games-devel] Two questions about kbattleship

[Henry W. Miller]

On Sat, 2 Aug 2003, Albert 'TSDgeos' Astals Cid wrote:
> At 00:22 02/08/2003 +0200, you wrote:
> >Don't the programs exchange ship positions on game start?
>
> I've looked at the code and i'm almost sure they don't, each time you click
> on a map position the client sends a message asking if it has water or a
> ship and the other player answers. It is better that way, because if the
> ships positions were exchanged at game start you could use tcpdump or a
> similar utility and cheat the game.

Of course now you can write a client that won't place ships until you tell
it to, or there is now only one possible way for the ships to be placed
given the shots already taken.

Eliminating cheating isn't an easy problem.  If it was there wouldn't be
any cheating.   For that matter if it was easy I'd post the soilution
instead of pointing out one potential way to cheat.

(I'm not an expert on the code, but from a quick read I would say that
someone could write a cheat that worked this way)