Suggested name: Scrambler Suggestion: A plugin which will create a dozen fake players moving randomly in different patterns and speeds underneath bedrock so that whoever uses a minimap which displays player locations, will see a bunch of fake players moving around, hindering their ability to spot real players. The plugin will work by first calculating a bunch of fake players moving randomly on the server side, then sending these fake players relevant to the client's location in the world. Therefore each client will only have the scrambler effect on themselves client side. All fake players are also in the crouching position to disable name tags appearing. This plugin would be a must for any PvP server which disallows such client mods. Ideas for permissions: scrambler.disable #disables the scrambler effect for the player -- recommended for admin use only
Lol, someone who wants to make this might want to make invisible NPCs at bedrock that walk around (don't know if you can make them walk through blocks, though...).
Abnormal Zombie there is/was a much better solution to this issue. Since we are on the server we can control if we want to send the player locations to the other clients or not. asofold already made a plugin called PlayersInCubes: http://dev.bukkit.org/server-mods/playersincubes It uses the VanishAPI to hide players that are too far away from each other (radius configurable). So instead of spamming NPCs we can simple hide them from each other.
Completely hiding players even when their line of sight between each other is clear would not be the best solution to thwart map users especially when it has consequences for others. PlayersInCubes has been dropped. The plugin I have suggested would be the most effective at stopping cheating (via the minimap), while still maintaining the same good gameplay for everyone else.
I don't think a player is in the line of sign if he is 250 chunks anyway (or more) but the hackers can still track him/her. You can config PlayersInCubes on which distance it should start hiding players from each other so if you fear that the gameplay might be limited then expand the config distance. No the NPC idea isn't the best because hackers can focus their radar/tracers on player names. For example: Every player that writes a message in the chat will appear on the radar and all other will be hidden, or whatever idea they would have to avoid this NPC protection by distinguishing players and NPCs somehow (Use /list, /who ?, ....). Also its quite hard to make such a plugin that makes NPCs simulate a real player, on the other way it would also confuse the NONE-Cheaters that will have difficulty's to distinguish real players with the NPC (because they will see the NPCs also for sure). I would also claim that the performance of this plugin concept wouldn't be super fantastic, I'm sure that it will cost some/much performance to handle all those NPC movements. Technically you could take Citizens2 and spawn around NPCs and let them walk around, that's all you need for this. PlayersInCubes has been dropped yea (still works for now) but I just wanted to show the method I would recommend to use for this issue. This would work way better if it would get implemented in Craftbukkit (no conflicts with other vanish plugins)...
