Background
Dutchfix is a QMM plugin I created with Merlin1991 to counteract a few nukes and exploits in the awesome True Combat Elite (TCE) mod.
TrueCombat:Elite (TCE) is a modern world total conversion of the free, popular, stand-alone third-person shooter, Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory. That is, TCE is an entirely free game, made by gamers, for gamers.
The Challenge
I was one of the community leaders of TeamNeelix (later GoNe), and we owned a couple of game servers which were quite popular. Unfortunately, when the mod was first released, it had some exploits and nuke vulnerabilities that could be used to crash a server.
As a server owner, you're naturally going to get targeted by people who want to cause harm. With help from the community, we figured out how the exploits worked.
The Approach
Since TCE was a closed-source project, we needed a way of fixing it without access to the source code. Fortunately, the commands used to exploit the servers were all server commands, meaning we could intercept them via a hook between the engine and the mod.
We used Quake3 Multimod (QMM) to create a plugin that:
- Inspected all server commands
- Filtered and blocked exploit commands
- Optionally automatically banned nukers