This is one of the things that has bothered me since I released the first version of project Cataclysm. It is as well one of the things known for most server crashes in the past and can still be seen today. It is mostly done by newbies who learned it a moment ago and want to show their new 1337 cheating skills online by lasering servers and/or crashing them on purpose. It has just recently happened to me while I was hosting an idle server. Fortunately I was watching at the screen when some foo joined my empty server, looked if anyone was in it and then started to laser it. I quickly typed ban and reached for enter... BOOM! My server crashed just a moment before I pressed enter. It's just sick if there's no way to prevent this. No wonder all dedicated servers are gone. Hopefully there will be more servers if someone puts a stop to this crashing once and for all!
I know. I should have used anticrash but according to my knowledge that doesn't fully help. The thing is to detect the laser user and ban him immediately before causing any damage.

So does anyone in any way know or have any ideas how to detect if a user is using laser shield? For normal shields I would simply look at the shield memory address and see if it is non-zero:
Fire shield = 1
Water shield = 2
Plasma shield = 3
The problem is that when a client uses laser shield the server would simply not see it as the shield memory address remains at 0 instead of changing to 4. Cataclysm was programmed to detect the laser shield this way but this is the reason it doesn't work.

According to my currend knowledge detecting laser shield is possible (I said it's possible but we don't yet know how) via memory editing. There must be an address that changes when a laser is fired. Yes. There must be at least one or server and all other players would not see laser at all. But finding this address is the tricky part as I would have to freeze the entire jj2 exactly when I see a laser shot so the address doesn't change and can be picked by a memory searcher. I have no luck so far. The second way of detecting it would be looking onto the packets from each player and finding the "laser" packets. This is again challenging as there are countless packets to analyze.

These are my ideas but there may be more ways than just this. Has anyone ever succeeded in detecting laser shield (I mean by using a program, not just looking at jj2 display, doh)? I would like to upgrade Cataclysm to detect laser shields but I need a way "how to" first. Yes. I'm asking for a bit of help. Is anyone willing to do any research on this?

If the memory editing way fails, the packet editind would have to do. I would prefer the packet editing way as it can be upgraded to filter out other evil and dangerous packets.

I should've posted this topic long time ago.
Well?