I worked in wearable electronics back in 2013. At the time, everyone was trying to crack wristworn heart rate monitors. It’s a challenging problem to solve: having to detect a faint color change in human skin while ignoring the massive shifts in ambient light from sunlight to shade all while bouncing around on a wrist.
Different vendors had different solutions and couldn’t even agree on what color LED was best for illuminating the skin.
Anyway, when the next generation of Nike Fuelband came out and didn’t include heart rate monitoring, I’ll never forget one of the comments I saw on a review.
“Come on Nike, it’s not hard to add a heart rate monitor. Just use pulse tracking.”
Same with any game, “how hard is it to detect cheaters‽”. Turns out, very.
Being an engineer, you’ll know that the amount of shit that has to go right to get a single pixel to glow is pretty crazy, some when armchair dickheads that have never written so much as a Hello World say shit like “it’s not that hard!”, it just…
…listen, I’m not a violent man…
…listen, I’m not a violent man…
“Aaaand…?”
“No that’s it. I’m not a violent man.”
The cheater thing just makes me think of Rocket League. Every action you can take is handled server side and the game is so unique, so you literally can’t cheat in ways that would matter. You technically could have wallhacks; but there are no walls. You technically could have aimbots; but there’s no point to it.
I’ve never understood why any cheat detection can’t just be “this is the code we wrote, this is the code that all players must be running, and if any of it deviates from this, they’re cheating.” Is it just super hard to do? Is there a need for differences in the code to exist that could be used for something benign as well as cheating? But I also don’t necessarily know how the cheats work. Afaik, they are changing how the game runs as it’s running, which should be very noticable right? I mean obviously if it was that easy, someone would have done it so what’s really going on?
I can’t answer for Psionix, because… I don’t work for Psionix. But having worked on other projects, I can tell you that a fully-authoritative server (that’s the word you’re looking for, btw) is not the end-all-be-all of anticheat. Every game has different levels of mechanical complexity, logical complexity, and a myriad of other variables that factor into what type of architecture is used in online games, and that a fully-authoritative server not only isn’t feasible for all projects, but also isn’t a silver bullet against cheaters.
What’s going to tell if the client has been modified? The client, which has been modified…?
I hate that i’m guilty of that. I don’t know anything about that stuff, i’m just here for the jokes. I know it’s not easy, but my first reaction is always: “aaaaw c’mon, just make it so it doesn’t do the thing it’s not supposed to do.”
But for real, i have a question. Why is it that every game even the newest most polished game in 2024 can’t get rid of clipping? Like in a character creator, slightly bigger top? Hair goes now through it. I remember playing overwatch for the first time and the game looked stellar and the characters interacted with way more things that i woul’ve imagined, but then you look closely and roadhogs anchor still clipps through his belt. Like what would happen if you drew a hard line saying: your clothes don’t go through anything anymore. Would the game just freak out? Would it just eat up processing power like crazy? Or is it just one of these not really a real problem so why looking for a solution kinda things?
if(goingtohitstuff) {
brake;
}
I’m so so sorry. I put in
if(isGoingToHitStuff) { Break; }
and now thousands of people are dead.
Fun fact, that’s literally what the code does in Teslas. They shut off self driving if they sense an imminent impact in an attempt to shift legal culpability onto the driver.
Elon:
*leans over shoulder of Tesla engineer, presses Ctrl+N in a code editor and writes this code into the new file*
There you have it. I just wrote the most safety-critical piece of code for Full Self Driving. Now just put it in the right spot in the codebase and sort out the dependencies while I go collect my well-deserved bonus. Don’t bother me with the low-level stuff like computer vision but if you find some new trolley problems the car might need to solve, you know where to find me. And don’t you dare touch this code. It’s perfect, first try. If all of you write code like I do, y’all be drivin’ home in robotaxis by December. I swear, it’s not that hard!
Yeah, and nowhere in my code it uses that damn expensive radar. I think we can just do cameras. If I can safely drive by sight only, so can that thing. See, unengineering! Saves so much cost! I think I can have another billion in bonuses just for this.
But then you have to program it to get where you want