General MOD MISUNDERSTANDING Created 8 years ago2016-02-12 23:26:57 UTC by 2muchvideogames

https://steamcommunity.com/app/70/discussions/0/412446890555218029/

This is a post of somebody who was scared of installing mods and want to know if they have any so they can remove them.

Heres the problem: dude thinks that half life mods work like L4D and Skyrim, where some model or sound replacement will change aspects of the default game. But we know thats not how half life mods work. Half life mods are completely separate from the default assets and are officially known as 'custom games' similar to custom maps in dota/starcraft/warcraft.

How many people do you think have this misunderstanding and causing them to stay away from hl mods? I'm guessing all the obscene mods and stuff popularized by youtoob videos may have put some ppl off to modding, perhaps.But the big problem here is that HL/HL2 mods and 'mods' of other games like skyrim mean completely different things.

poor guy's afraid to get VAC banned if he installs a HL mod

To be fair wasn't there a mod that used a custom graphics dll that vac was not cool with at all?

I think there was some freak out about the mod Paranoia back in the day, but as far as I'm aware that was mostly just rumors.

Nothing against mods, but iirc from back in the day, a couple of moders used SoHL to make maps for CS 1.6 and got a VAC ban when they played said maps. I think the ban was triggered particularly because of the modified water.
Being a newbie back then, i stood away from Sohl from that moment. Again, maybe it was just false rumors, maybe i'm just remembering wrong, i don't even know the full capabilities of Sohl.

Here are details on how VAC works :

It scans your game (code and assets) and look for anything suspicious. If it's the case and I'm going to assume you are a running a cheat, it's "signature" is compared to a database of known cheats. If it's the case, then the ban is triggered, otherwise, it is scanned and since it's a cheat, it will be added to the database and the ban is triggered.

But what about PARANOIA (and Cry of Fear) ? Why aren't we banned for using their "hacked" opengl32.dll ? It's because their "hacked" opengl32.dll is just a modified version of the original opengl32.dll, it's not something that inject code within the engine/game.

Why I put the word "hacked" in quotes ? Because it doesn't mean what everyone thinks which is some kind of malicious code. In programming world, a hack is an inelegant solution to a problem. In this sense, a hack gets the job done but in an inefficient, un-optimal or ugly way hence why we are calling "hacked" opengl32.dll.

I wouldn't know the details, but wouldn't it be possible for someone to modify the OpenGL code so that it renders differently? Making walls transparent, for example, would probably be possible to do by only changing the OpenGL DLL file. That'd definitely be a cheat. I would guess that VAC would need to scan not only the game DLLs, but also any dynamic libraries it links to.

I don't see how it would possibly be a problem in a mod, though. As far as I know VAC only runs on commercial games.

You are right Penguinboy, it requires a single line tweak in the OpenGL32.dll code to allow some kind of wall hack. But VAC has powerful scanning algorithms.

VAC has been broken for years, well at least on GS they don't really update it anymore as opposed to CS:GO's engine. Ive read some material quite a while ago on how to avoid getting detected by VAC, some really in depth stuff was there, but since im not that good of a programmer I didn't understand much. Don't know where to find that doc/site now though

"Making a mod is easy"