No games for two months
Actually that's no games for 14 months and then suddenly 3 games on the latest DA version all with unbelievable scores. Well perhaps the 1 year 94K tech win in a small galaxy is just this side of believable.
Also if you check out his forum presence the last reply he made to any post was in November of '06.
As far as hex editing I was under the impression that SD had hash code in place to prevent this. I'm going way back but games like the Ultima series had line checksums that were fairly obvious and easy to calculate for yourself. Typically the last byte in a 32 byte line was the line checksum and if you changed any byte within that line then all you had to do was to change the line checksum to compensate. This could be used to duplicate magical items for all members of a party or even to scan through the list of all possible items and thereby be able to give yourself any item in the game without having found it. Hash code conceptually should be far harder to break for one reason the location of it's storage is not made so obvious and what bits actually contribute to the code as well as how these bits are mapped to the code should be non obvious as well.
I think this is what Cari was refering to with her response in that thread.
I did follow the link to the thread and it does seem like old fashioned Hex editing without even the subtlety of a line data checksum. I really do find this difficult to believe. However I really don't believe that giving oneself a precusor mine or a precursor library on every tile of every planet in a small galaxy is going to get you close to two million points. The only way to get 2 million points in a small 2 year game would be to directly edit the score itself. I don't care what kind of in-game racial bonuses you give yourself except for perhaps a 1 million percent economic bonus, nothing could make such a difference in the score.
The fact that SD even allowed that thread to stay around implies to me that they were not particularly worried that games edited in this manner wouldn't trip the cheater flag. SD has historically been quick to shut down and even delete material that exposed exploits let alone the outright cheating that this is.
Those of you that have been around awhile should remember the issue of editing racial bonuses to extreme levels that was used in the v1.2 timeframe. However this was quickly exposed and dealt with. In that case I think it involved editing the prefs.ini file.
However in that case the results were scores that the person would probably not otherwise be able to achieve but nothing that could even get close to 2 million points in a small galaxy.
Again all this points to the ability to simply rewrite the score which most definitely implies the cracking of the hash location and mapping. However even in that case this should be detectable I would think. I would expect that when you uploaded a game to the MV the essential data that contributed to the score would be uploaded as well. By this I mean the income, population, military and research curves from the timeline that are displayed in the endgame sequence. These graphs wouldn't directly correlate to a score but it should be clear from these curves the game score could never have approached the 2 million mark. From the endgame.sav file you can see the entire games development and any direct score editing should be easily apparent.
