Can an online FPS be engineered so players can never wall hack?

[76561197963519852]

Is that possible?

[JPMcMillen]

Początkowo opublikowane przez Nebsun:

Początkowo opublikowane przez redacted:

Is that possible?

Certainly, but not without impacting gameplay.

One way is for the server to restrict data sent to players based on whether they should be able to see another player or not, for example where any player that is not in line of sight (or should not be seen), the data will not be sent out... but this means the server needs to calculate this each time the data is being updated, and there is a very small delay between where line of sight changes, and the server sends out the updated data for it, and the computations required increase exponentially as number of players increases

For games with a small number of players in a match (like CS2), it probably wouldn't have much of an impact. The main issue will be people needing vastly more powerful machines to host their servers on.

But ultimately that's the issue, is that servers today are lazy and send players data about other players that they really don't need to. A wall hack only works because it has information about player locations that it really shouldn't.

[[N]ebsun]

Początkowo opublikowane przez JPMcMillen:

Początkowo opublikowane przez Nebsun:

Certainly, but not without impacting gameplay.

One way is for the server to restrict data sent to players based on whether they should be able to see another player or not, for example where any player that is not in line of sight (or should not be seen), the data will not be sent out... but this means the server needs to calculate this each time the data is being updated, and there is a very small delay between where line of sight changes, and the server sends out the updated data for it, and the computations required increase exponentially as number of players increases

For games with a small number of players in a match (like CS2), it probably wouldn't have much of an impact. The main issue will be people needing vastly more powerful machines to host their servers on.

But ultimately that's the issue, is that servers today are lazy and send players data about other players that they really don't need to. A wall hack only works because it has information about player locations that it really shouldn't.

On CSS, there is anti-wallhack that works this way - but yep, as player count increases and with higher tickrate, there becomes a noticeable "delay" where players will pop out of nowhere due to the delays between server checking line of sight rules, and deciding to send the data, and then the client receiving and displaying it.
The delay is bad enough to the point that it is worse than just dealing with cheaters, especially since it will affect everyone regardless of whether there is an active cheater or not.
When playing with small number of players, it's usually friends that trust each other enough to not need it.. so it "works" in theory, and "works" in practice, but it's just not worth it

[BJWyler]

Początkowo opublikowane przez redacted:

Imagine if you could have 10 of the best game coders and network engineers in a room.

You showed them every current method of known cheats and you asked them, "how do we stop this from happening before it even starts?"

What kind of program could they develop. What kind of tactics could they use to make most current cheats on the market today, non-starters. We know of all the current exploits that are just repackaged and reused over and over (walls, aimbot, antiaim), so how can we make a game environment that prevents all current forms of that?

Imagine just a perfect-world scenario, what could be done with just that brain storming session?

That's the kind of tech that Valve should be looking at developing IMO. Will it be expensive, yes. However, if you approach it with the knowledge of what cheaters are already going to try to do the second it's released to the public, you have a pretty big head start on how to deter them.

That all assumes that none of this has been done already, over say the last two decades to one extent or another.

Again, you are looking for a magic bullet. Magic bullets do not exist. Magic bullets will never exist, no matter how many brilliant magicians you lock in a room and tell them to make one or they are never getting out. It doesn't matter how much money or how many brilliant minds you throw at a problem to try to come up with a perfect solution. Sometimes perfect solutions to problems simply do not exist, so you have to do the best you can with what you have. As Tito mentioned, and Nebson demonstrates, it's all a balancing act.

The thing that always gets me a laugh about these types of discussions, and has over the course of the last 20 years, is that people seem to assume that the cheat makers are some 14 year old kids sitting in mommy's basement for the lols. This couldn't be farther from the truth. A lot of these guys (and gals) are just as skilled and brilliant as the best game coders and network engineers in the field. The moment some new anti-cheat is created, the haxxors have it reverse engineered and have improved their cheats to get around it within 24 hours. At the end of the day, all any of this is lines of code. And no line of code is unbreakable.

I'll let everyone in on a little industry secret. Devs have what they call the Ignore Bin. That's the place they mentally put users who come on to forums thinking they know everything because they looked up C++ on Wikipedia one afternoon and believe that all any problem needs to be solved is to toss a couple of interns at it for a few hours. Generally these are the types that throw out words like lazy and incompetent when referring to developers. But they always have the attitude that the devs don't care and aren't doing enough about the problems they constantly complain about. When these people show up, the devs immediately place them in the Ignore Bin because they generally have little of value to add to any conversation and usually let their egos and attitudes do the talking for them.

The real way to help make progress and get changes implemented is by not coming in with attitudes and assumptions, but by spending the time to thoroughly educate oneself on a variety of topics related to the issues at hand. Yeah, sometimes that education can take years. But it pays off in the end when one gains the respect and trust of those in the industry and can be called upon to put forth good faith discussions and knowledge on how to improve things, and aren't demanding that someone invent a magic bullet.

But that's just my two cents.

[76561197963519852]

Początkowo opublikowane przez Nebsun:

Początkowo opublikowane przez JPMcMillen:

For games with a small number of players in a match (like CS2), it probably wouldn't have much of an impact. The main issue will be people needing vastly more powerful machines to host their servers on.

But ultimately that's the issue, is that servers today are lazy and send players data about other players that they really don't need to. A wall hack only works because it has information about player locations that it really shouldn't.

On CSS, there is anti-wallhack that works this way - but yep, as player count increases and with higher tickrate, there becomes a noticeable "delay" where players will pop out of nowhere due to the delays between server checking line of sight rules, and deciding to send the data, and then the client receiving and displaying it.
The delay is bad enough to the point that it is worse than just dealing with cheaters, especially since it will affect everyone regardless of whether there is an active cheater or not.
When playing with small number of players, it's usually friends that trust each other enough to not need it.. so it "works" in theory, and "works" in practice, but it's just not worth it

So are there wall hacks that just don't work on CSS because that data isn't there?

It's funny you mention how players just "Appear", because i see things like this in CS2. I've heard that some cheaters can delay their packets long enough to give them a mini-teleport when approaching certain angles they wish to peek from.

How different is Source from Source 2 in terms of the network environment? LIke, I won't lie, I was aghast when I saw all the same cheating exploits (bhopping and anti-aim especially) show up in the same form in CS2. And they left a command for a dev-made wall hack in the console? Why?

Początkowo opublikowane przez BJWyler:

Początkowo opublikowane przez redacted:

Imagine if you could have 10 of the best game coders and network engineers in a room.

You showed them every current method of known cheats and you asked them, "how do we stop this from happening before it even starts?"

What kind of program could they develop. What kind of tactics could they use to make most current cheats on the market today, non-starters. We know of all the current exploits that are just repackaged and reused over and over (walls, aimbot, antiaim), so how can we make a game environment that prevents all current forms of that?

Imagine just a perfect-world scenario, what could be done with just that brain storming session?

That's the kind of tech that Valve should be looking at developing IMO. Will it be expensive, yes. However, if you approach it with the knowledge of what cheaters are already going to try to do the second it's released to the public, you have a pretty big head start on how to deter them.

That all assumes that none of this has been done already, over say the last two decades to one extent or another.

Again, you are looking for a magic bullet. Magic bullets do not exist. Magic bullets will never exist, no matter how many brilliant magicians you lock in a room and tell them to make one or they are never getting out. It doesn't matter how much money or how many brilliant minds you throw at a problem to try to come up with a perfect solution. Sometimes perfect solutions to problems simply do not exist, so you have to do the best you can with what you have. As Tito mentioned, and Nebson demonstrates, it's all a balancing act.

The thing that always gets me a laugh about these types of discussions, and has over the course of the last 20 years, is that people seem to assume that the cheat makers are some 14 year old kids sitting in mommy's basement for the lols. This couldn't be farther from the truth. A lot of these guys (and gals) are just as skilled and brilliant as the best game coders and network engineers in the field. The moment some new anti-cheat is created, the haxxors have it reverse engineered and have improved their cheats to get around it within 24 hours. At the end of the day, all any of this is lines of code. And no line of code is unbreakable.

I'll let everyone in on a little industry secret. Devs have what they call the Ignore Bin. That's the place they mentally put users who come on to forums thinking they know everything because they looked up C++ on Wikipedia one afternoon and believe that all any problem needs to be solved is to toss a couple of interns at it for a few hours. Generally these are the types that throw out words like lazy and incompetent when referring to developers. But they always have the attitude that the devs don't care and aren't doing enough about the problems they constantly complain about. When these people show up, the devs immediately place them in the Ignore Bin because they generally have little of value to add to any conversation and usually let their egos and attitudes do the talking for them.

The real way to help make progress and get changes implemented is by not coming in with attitudes and assumptions, but by spending the time to thoroughly educate oneself on a variety of topics related to the issues at hand. Yeah, sometimes that education can take years. But it pays off in the end when one gains the respect and trust of those in the industry and can be called upon to put forth good faith discussions and knowledge on how to improve things, and aren't demanding that someone invent a magic bullet.

But that's just my two cents.

I will be the first to say, I've been a ♥♥♥♥. I'm sorry. I honestly hold Valve in pretty high esteem but at some point, I have begun to question their willingness to address the biggest game-ruining issue in a competitive game: Competitive Integrity

I am not the guy complaining about sub-tick, 64-bit server architecture, peekers advantage, etc. I understand that there are limitations in an environment that involves signals via cable routed all over the world. I get that this is a balancing act.

However, don't play me for a fool. Valve knows exactly how bad actors are circumventing every barrier they have in place and they refuse to do anything about it for years. On top of this, they release a stand-alone update to their biggest IP (CS2) and they make 0 statements about cheating besides boosters will be punished.

Anybody who's played the game knows how OP using cheats are. Cheats create an environment in which the cheater doesn't have to think. They can rely on their cheat to:

1. Move for them (counter strafe, edge jump)
2. Aim for them/Shoot for them
3. Anti-aim for them (move out of the way)
4. Tell them where everybody is
5. Tick manipulation via fake lag

To me, CS2, if it valued competitive integrity, would have tried to address at least some of this. Instead, we got a game that feels like it is just as susceptible to cheating as its predecessor. To me, that is baffling. I literally don't understand why that was considered acceptable. And to add to this, they added a leaderboard so all the cheaters get their 15 minutes.

I just don't believe Valve couldn't have foreseen these issues. I know they know and so, to answer your first statement, no I don't believe they held that meeting.

I would have taken an iterative update that made CS2 look like roblox, if it meant the client/network environment was more secure at the behest of graphics. You talk to every legit competitve player, and they will say graphics come second to gameplay.

If everyone is cheating, there is no gameplay.

[Phénomènes Mystiques]

Not yet... yet...

[Ben Lubar]

Początkowo opublikowane przez redacted:

Is that possible?

If you're talking about Counter-Strike, a game where you hear enemy players through walls by design, no.

[76561197963519852]

Początkowo opublikowane przez Ben Lubar:

Początkowo opublikowane przez redacted:

Is that possible?

If you're talking about Counter-Strike, a game where you hear enemy players through walls by design, no.

good point...

they need to nerf that.

wallers have essentially turned any footstep as a insta-deflect to lining someone up perfectly through 3 walls

[Satoru]

I dont think people really understand how games work when they ask this kind of question

I mean sure you 'could' do this

But you dont actually want to because players would actually hate it

Think of a very basic situation, an enemy appears from around a corner and shoots at you

Now the ONLY way to make something 'wall hack' proof is to not send the fact that a player is behind a wall. Ok so what is the threshold for when you tell the client to render the other player? "just before you see them" well ok so think of the server calculating that and then with latency basically 500ms later you see them suddenly appear out of thin air.

The reason why your local client has to know where other players are, is so that players do not 'pop in' amongst other problems

Other games rely on player positional audio. As such the game client needs to know where players are to render the local sound correctly

Games can mitigate this in several ways. They can set a distance for where player positional data is sent to the client. This is useful in general as it reduces the amount of data the server sends. Some games will put in false data into the stream as well. So that even if wallhacks are used, the cheater has no idea which player is actually real or not.

The point is, if you think gamedevs havent though of this stuff before and you're just coming in with 'innovative' ideas, you're not

The only practical way to make something 'cheat proof' is to never trust the client. And the only way you can do that is to have the client do nothing. Which functionally means the only way you can is to stream the game to the player. Since the game client is only rendering the streamed game, no information can be gleaned from it, and no information can be injected into it. This of course has its own set of problems the primary being that its expensive bandwidth and subject to extreme latency

[76561197963519852]

Początkowo opublikowane przez Satoru:

I dont think people really understand how games work when they ask this kind of question

I mean sure you 'could' do this

But you dont actually want to because players would actually hate it

Think of a very basic situation, an enemy appears from around a corner and shoots at you

Now the ONLY way to make something 'wall hack' proof is to not send the fact that a player is behind a wall. Ok so what is the threshold for when you tell the client to render the other player? "just before you see them" well ok so think of the server calculating that and then with latency basically 500ms later you see them suddenly appear out of thin air.

The reason why your local client has to know where other players are, is so that players do not 'pop in' amongst other problems

Other games rely on player positional audio. As such the game client needs to know where players are to render the local sound correctly

Games can mitigate this in several ways. They can set a distance for where player positional data is sent to the client. This is useful in general as it reduces the amount of data the server sends. Some games will put in false data into the stream as well. So that even if wallhacks are used, the cheater has no idea which player is actually real or not.

The point is, if you think gamedevs havent though of this stuff before and you're just coming in with 'innovative' ideas, you're not

The only practical way to make something 'cheat proof' is to never trust the client. And the only way you can do that is to have the client do nothing. Which functionally means the only way you can is to stream the game to the player. Since the game client is only rendering the streamed game, no information can be gleaned from it, and no information can be injected into it. This of course has its own set of problems the primary being that its expensive bandwidth and subject to extreme latency

I understand that all current FPS competitive games are dead from an integrity standpoint at this point in time and for whatever reason, out of all the options, nobody is making an effort to improve upon anything that's already currently out there.

Kernel AC is by-passed 7 ways from Sunday.

If they can't detect and remove cheaters, I think the answer is starting with a manageable pool of players with extremely in-depth match-tracking. People want to be able to trust the people they're playing against. I know that will limit the reach of a global F2P game, but I think it would be profitable and it would restore some integrity back into esports.

Otherwise, we're on a dead-end path and all the "we can't because" excuses are going to dry up the *actual* player-base. You know, the people who play to challenge themselves and for fun. Not to cheat or show off skins.

[Mad Scientist]

Początkowo opublikowane przez Satoru:

I dont think people really understand how games work when they ask this kind of question

Well a few people keep making threads about cs+cheating in cs/what to do about it, outside of the cs section., I think they know there's no easy solution without a lot of coding or issues involved.

Początkowo opublikowane przez Satoru:

The point is, if you think gamedevs havent though of this stuff before and you're just coming in with 'innovative' ideas, you're not

Like the many threads from the same people that seems to be the case, similar/same ideas as before including the other one suggesting mandatory personal id/information collection which is a terrible idea.

It's just not as easy as what people think to combat this.

[76561197963519852]

Początkowo opublikowane przez Mad Scientist:

Początkowo opublikowane przez Satoru:

I dont think people really understand how games work when they ask this kind of question

Well a few people keep making threads about cs+cheating in cs/what to do about it, outside of the cs section., I think they know there's no easy solution without a lot of coding or issues involved.

Początkowo opublikowane przez Satoru:

The point is, if you think gamedevs havent though of this stuff before and you're just coming in with 'innovative' ideas, you're not

Like the many threads from the same people that seems to be the case, similar/same ideas as before including the other one suggesting mandatory personal id/information collection which is a terrible idea.

It's just not as easy as what people think to combat this.

We live in the age of data. I don't know why having my personal identification linked to one account is "oooohh, crossing a line" when literally every other TOS does that.

[Mad Scientist]

Początkowo opublikowane przez redacted:

Początkowo opublikowane przez Mad Scientist:

Well a few people keep making threads about cs+cheating in cs/what to do about it, outside of the cs section., I think they know there's no easy solution without a lot of coding or issues involved.


Like the many threads from the same people that seems to be the case, similar/same ideas as before including the other one suggesting mandatory personal id/information collection which is a terrible idea.

It's just not as easy as what people think to combat this.

We live in the age of data. I don't know why having my personal identification linked to one account is "oooohh, crossing a line" when literally every other TOS does that.

That's not an excuse to collect personal information.
It's also illegal in many countries that understand why that's a bad idea.

[76561197963519852]

Początkowo opublikowane przez Mad Scientist:

Początkowo opublikowane przez redacted:

We live in the age of data. I don't know why having my personal identification linked to one account is "oooohh, crossing a line" when literally every other TOS does that.

That's not an excuse to collect personal information.
It's also illegal in many countries that understand why that's a bad idea.

Valve has different policies for different regions as it is a global company.

I know in the USA (where they are based) this would not violate any of our laws. In fact, it would protect them and give them the legal ability to go after anyone breaking their TOS.

I know the Euro's are more sensitive to this, but fundamentally, it would boil down to volunteering that information in the name of fair play. Most people understand that fair play is important and are willing to hold themselves to a standard in the name of just that.

[Mad Scientist]

Początkowo opublikowane przez redacted:

Początkowo opublikowane przez Mad Scientist:

That's not an excuse to collect personal information.
It's also illegal in many countries that understand why that's a bad idea.

Valve has different policies for different regions as it is a global company.

I know in the USA (where they are based) this would not violate any of our laws. In fact, it would protect them and give them the legal ability to go after anyone breaking their TOS.

I know the Euro's are more sensitive to this, but fundamentally, it would boil down to volunteering that information in the name of fair play. Most people understand that fair play is important and are willing to hold themselves to a standard in the name of just that.

COPPA is one of more existing laws in regard to data collection, especially for minors.

[76561197963519852]

Początkowo opublikowane przez Mad Scientist:

Początkowo opublikowane przez redacted:

Valve has different policies for different regions as it is a global company.

I know in the USA (where they are based) this would not violate any of our laws. In fact, it would protect them and give them the legal ability to go after anyone breaking their TOS.

I know the Euro's are more sensitive to this, but fundamentally, it would boil down to volunteering that information in the name of fair play. Most people understand that fair play is important and are willing to hold themselves to a standard in the name of just that.

COPPA is one of more existing laws in regard to data collection, especially for minors.

I think it'd be ok if you had leagues that were age-bracketed.