Comment by sounds

Comment by sounds 20 hours ago

6 replies

About halfway in the article, there's a brief nod to CS:GO. It uses a tick system and the server controls what is possible, such as physics or awarding kills. Fighting genre games use the same server-based game logic.

Cheating is a big draw to Windows for semi-pro gamers and mid streamers. What else is there to do except grind? Windows gives the illusion of "kernel level anti-cheat," which filters out the simplest ones, and fools most people some of the time.

chowells 19 hours ago

Fighting games do not use server-mediated simulation, in general. Cheating is actually a huge problem in popular games. And in fact, even running a server-mediated simulation wouldn't help with any of the common cheating in fighting games.

For instance, a common cheat in Street Fighter 6 is to trigger a drive impact in response to the startup of a move that is unsafe to a drive impact. That is recognizing the opponent's animation and triggering an input. There's no part of that which cares where the game simulation is being done. In fact, this kind of cheating can only be detected statistically. And the cheats have tools to combat that by adding random triggering chances and delays. It's pretty easy to tune a cheat to be approximately as effective as a high-level player.

Kernel-level anticheat isn't a perfect solution, but there are people asking for it. It would make cheating a lot harder, at least.

ben-schaaf 16 hours ago

> About halfway in the article, there's a brief nod to CS:GO. It uses a tick system and the server controls what is possible,

As does Valorant and virtually every other first person shooter. The cheats aren't people flying around or nocliping, it's wallhacks and aim assists/bots.

  • sounds 3 hours ago

    Admittedly, Valorant still has a cheating problem. But cheating is already less successful due to server side sim. Next gen games will have improved cheat detection, eventually leading to cheating drying up.

  • JoshTriplett 15 hours ago

    Wallhacks depend on the server giving the client information the client shouldn't have.

    • joha4270 12 hours ago

      You will find that competitive games already attempt's this, but it's impossible to eliminate entirely.

      I can move and reveal what's behind a corner a lot faster than a network roundtrip, so either the server needs to give some advance warning or you're going to see enemies pop into existence suddenly.

      And computing if somebody is almost visible isn't trivial either. Level geometry can have narrow openings such as holes in a wall. Or what if somebody jumps?

      And that's before getting into non visual information. It's not perfect, but you could still add a significant advantage by drawing the exact location of footsteps.

      So yeah, (some) games try, but network latency means the client needs some information a wallhack can use, and the alternative: being killed by an enemy that was invisible is at least as frustrating as being killed by a cheater so the visibility estimate has to be generous.

      • ben-schaaf 9 hours ago

        Additionally these games usually have dynamic shadows, and some even fully dynamic lighting. Good luck predicting where those could end up within a network round trip.