Punk Viewer is a faster solution for game server administrators who are using games with the anti-cheat program, known as Punk Buster. Punk Viewer allows administrators to go through their Punk Buster screenshots of players on their servers at a faster rate while also being able to be told about screenshots that Punk Viewer believes are suspicious. Then once an image is found of a player who is hacking, you can ban them from your server by getting there GUID which Punk Viewer will even copy to your clipboard for you to paste into your ban log. It will also let you take down the image location so you can upload the image of the player hacking to let others know. That is Punk Viewer in a simple nut shell.
Who’s Behind Punk Viewer?Ah yes the man behind the curtain, Lead developer and creator of Punk Viewer is Scott Mugford. As a long time gamer and a game server administrator, Scott came across the problem that most gamers and game server administrators face every day. That problem would be cheaters and hackers in multiplayer games. At the time Scott was playing the Call of Duty series and has ran a gaming server for every Call of Duty game up to Call of Duty: World at War. The Call of Duty games used a very good anti-cheat program called Punk Buster that is very efficient at caching cheaters and hackers in online games. That being said, we are not affiliated with Punk Buster or Even Balance Inc but we do believe in their cause and support their purpose. The Punk Buster program even logs players and gets a screenshot of the player from their own system. This allows administrators to see players and find players who may have a hack that Punk Buster is unaware of at that time. Only problem is that the log file can be long and you have to click each player to see their screenshot. This is where the idea of Punk Viewer came into play. Scott was in college at the time doing Programmer Analyst (Networking) and came up with the idea of making a program that will allow game server administrators to check their Punk Buster screenshots log file faster and also find screenshots that look suspicious so the administrators can check them first. The hope was to save game server administrators some time with looking through there Punk Buster log file and help them find cheaters on their servers faster so they can have more time to game on their own server. Let’s face it, the whole point of having a game server is to be able to play on it and enjoy it, not baby sit it. Scott worked on Punk Viewer one part at a time; none of the betas he made went public until beta 3 when he felt Punk Viewer was ready for use and testing.
The Inner Workings of Punk ViewerSo you know what Punk Viewer does and you know who developed it and why they developed it. So now you want to know how it works. The logic behind it is kept simple so game administrators don’t have to learn the in and outs of the program. A game server administrator will download their svss folder from the pb folder of their game server and upload its contents to their computer unless they are hosting from their computer or a dedicated server. In which case Punk Viewer can be used right on the dedicated server or computer that's hosting the game server as long as you have permission to install it. Then you go to the File menu and click Open. You will now navigate to your svss folder that you just downloaded to your computer with all its content in it. You’re now going to find the player’s screenshot log file which is usually called pbsvss.htm and load it. Once loaded, you will see a list box with all the players that played on your sever listed and the image block will show the first player screenshot. You can view the player screenshots by clicking on the names in the list box, using the next and back buttons, or using the automated screenshot viewer that is set to a time setting of your choice. You are also given the option to center, zoom, and stretch the screenshot for better viewing. The program has the ability to copy the screenshot location and the players GUID to the clipboard for pasting in your ban log or finding the image of that player on your computer for uploading or other uses. The most noticeable feature of Punk Viewer is its ability to scan every screenshot of every player in the screenshot log file for suspicious activity. To do this, you simply click the Scan Screenshots button and Punk Viewer will scan all players’ screenshots and then make the ones that look suspicious with a green check mark for administrator viewing. It does use a bit of memory however as it uses an advance algorithm to scan every pixel in each screenshot to find common colors and patterns used in cheats such as wall hacks, aim bots, player location hacks, cheat menus, etc…
