drewdarko

MJBrune, 10 miesięcy temu

maybe these companies could move their cheat detection to the server where they control the code. maybe don’t just send all player positions so wall-hacks become impossible.

That’s not how video games work. If you want interpolation of positions then you have to send the positions of the players that you can’t see but are heading towards a place you can see. You could take a bunch of difficult math to do and filter out who to send the data to or not. It would create a lot of bugs. So you could just send just the people who are within X distance of you and call it good. Most, if not all game engines do it this way.

You have to have interpolation on the client side, it’s the only way you can play the game on the internet. It’s what Doom did to get multiplayer working and we’ve never been able to find anything better.

maybe use some machine learning to look at input patterns and detect when a player is sending things that don’t look human.

They already do that. It’s called heuristics.

the list of things companies could do to actually fix cheating in pvp games is long and all they want to do is pay for ridiculous anti-cheat that impacts normal users.

dunning-kruger at its finest.

MJBrune, 10 miesięcy temu

I wrote a snarky response because of the final insulting comment in yours but then thought better of it, going to try to address a couple of your points legitimately even after the unnecessary personal attack.

Sorry, It’s not meant as an attack. I am simply calling it as I see it because I get a lot of gamers who think they’ve arm-chaired thought far more about my job as a networked gameplay engineer than I have. I’ve been doing this for a very long time and I know where developers cut costs. Anti-cheat isn’t just a slap-it-on and call it a good solution. There are a lot of reasons you want to trust the client and it makes the gameplay feel far better.

It’s a lot cheaper to make your server dumb. It costs you less in programmers with deep multiplayer programming experience, it costs you less in ongoing hosting because of reduced CPU usage, and it makes the problem less “yours” as a developer.

Typically, the server, especially in counter-strike’s case, isn’t dumb. In all games, the server still handles the dealing of damage which typically includes validations of that damage. In counter-strike’s case, very little data is calculated on the client. Most of it is raw data sent from input to the server.

Your argument seems to be that a quake-style predictive algorithm is the only solution possible for online games. I doubt that is the case, but even if it were, using some raycasts on the server for some basic sanity checks on what data to send to players is an example of where lots of developers just can’t be bothered.

Lots of game engines including source include and utilize ways to ensure the player is reporting sane inputs. Also, interpolation is different than extrapolation. Lastly, you don’t need to do raycasts to double-check this data. A lot of the time the raycasts are done on the server itself. In counter-strike’s case this is also true. Raycasts are done on the client typically for cosmetics only. You can see this with 3kliksphilip’s videos on sub-tick.

If you want to dismiss machine learning as heuristics, I’m sorta ok with that, as I think they are just glorified heuristics, but even the most basic analysis isn’t done by most developers. Instead, they rely on the sales pitches of various anti-cheat software and don’t implement anything beyond it, even when there might be some low hanging fruit.

Heuristics haven’t been done by developers in a long time. A lot of that is actually done in Valve’s case by Overwatch. Also, Valve makes it’s own anti-cheat called VAC. They aren’t getting sales pitches.

I am not saying developers are lazy, there’s tons of stuff to work on. I am mad that this problem gets repeatedly pushed onto the users rather than the developers, though, and I think it’s reasonable for me to offer some pushback when both my CPU cycles and my privacy are being abused.

Frankly, I feel like it’s wrong for you to say that the problem is pushed onto users when you don’t understand the code and effort the developers are writing to solve this issue specifically with counter-strike. VAC is probably the anti-cheat with the least amount of client code. It rests almost entirely on the server. One thing VAC does do is lock down the client on Windows to prevent modifications. One thing you can easily do is replace assets for walls with transparent textures to see through walls. That’s why things like the code and assets can’t be tampered with. Most game engines only send updates to the positions of actors in a network bubble. Maybe Counter-Strike’s network bubble is too large at the time but that’s not an argument you made.

ampersandrew, 11 miesięcy temu

No need to go down fighting. Valve is a private company. They can just say no.

stopthatgirl7, 11 miesięcy temu

Microsoft wanting to buy Valve and Nintendo should tell you just how much what they really want is a monopoly on gaming.

Rodsterlings_cig, rok temu

A friendly reminder that the creators in the past have asked those interested in the game to pirate it instead, though of course I do not endorse such activities.

Poggervania, rok temu

Honestly, better to pirate the game because ZA/UM fucked over the original devs and now they don’t get any money from the game’s sales - and it ruined any potential for a sequel.

Here’s a Youtube vid on that drama.