is timing sound track unfair?

Don't sound files get played regardless of where you are on a map? The benefit of the sound "cheat" would then be that you'd get an accurate timer even if you couldn't tell when a mega is being taken due to sound being too silent because of the distance. That's how I understood this?

There are two modes of sound playing -- one is location based and the other is global. I believe the megahealth sound is local (not confirmed), but in a smaller map, it doesn't matter whether it's local or global since it's audible anyway.

About anti-cheat on specific sound files, don't forget that user can easily bind a key to play any sound file (please see my previous posts on this thread), right after picking up a megaheath item. Their hands don't need to remove from the keyboard to push a kitchen clock. Since we allow players to play their own background music (now console command, and soon to be menu-driven), it might be hard to prevent users from using any kind of audio cues.

@Antibody: a checksum would be a good start for an sv_pure mode as other games call it, but I'm not sure we can send files to clients and replace them in a nice way once the game code takes over. If we did the check in the engine (before gamecode is loaded, but after a connection is established), the engine could be modified to send fake information. The gamecode is downloaded for each server though in bytecode form, much more challenging to modify that. But the engine can still be modified to open a different file on the first accesses to provide the original checksum to the gamecode...

Since I've been messing about with configs recently, I remembered this post and a timing idea came to mind. Users could probably set up a bind that will do something like "defer 25 hud_pannel_timer_bg 1; defer 5 hud_pannel_timer_bg 0", as you can probably tell that will just enable the timer backround after 25 second, and disable it again in 5 more. Obviously this would still require the player to know when it was picked up, so this could be thought of in a similar way to people binding keys to play.

You could also possibly get quite interesting with this, having different binds for timing different things, each item could change a different hud element to different colors, you could probably cause hud elements to blink if you get fancy enough and such. So, here is a more visual way of timing items, some food for thought.

P.S. sorry for bringing back the dead.