Hacker

[The Spanish Inquisition]

The name change thing is specific to source. The other stuff is standard hacks since the days of 0gc. Years ago I found out how they do the name change, the evidence was in the server logs. Normally when you have a dupe name, you get a (1) after your name. So the only way to have the same name is if the names are actually different but they DISPLAY the same. And when I say 'display the same' I mean in game and in the console when you type 'status.'

So how do you have two people with different names but when they are in game, their names appear the same? The character set that everyone uses is called UNICODE and basically it is a universal namespace for all character sets, past, present and future. UTF-8 encoding is a method of encoding what are called 'code points' in the unicode namespace. A valid UTF-8 encoded code point can take one or more bytes to describe.

What if one of those bytes is left out? Undefined Behavior. But in the source client, that character with the missing byte is ignored and so you get the same names displayed. And you can't use a text editor to check the log files either because you don't know what the default behavior of any text editor is going to be when it hits malformed utf-8 data. Maybe it silently erases it. In my case, I was using one that had changed it to a cyrillic character as it's default and was able to see it. The only way to find out the actual byte value being used to append their name is with a hex editor though.

Without the name changing hack, the hacker is pretty easy to spot and dispatch. If the evidence is still being shown in the logs then a small script can be made to monitor log lines for malformed utf-8 in names and initiate the ban. Risk of accidental ban isn't possible.