ive been playing a few fps and im by no means a codeing guru but ive dabbled with it so i had a idea on the way hack prevention is delt with i wanted to run this idea by some of you guys the ideas i have are two fold 1) prevention 2) identification so the first idea this came to me in the idea of a virus altering itself to survive but in the sence of the program itself ive noticed alot of these fps and games nowdays do updates weekly or monthly and add or replace existing files i had the thought that maybe we could treat the prevention part as though screwing up the hackers app via a download was more effortless then the actual act of making the hack that way one person could rewrite a file easily and screw over a team of hackers placing critical parts to be hacked in a seperate small file or dll whatever that could be easily altered daily or weekly that is done thru the update the effect you would wish to have is to force the hackers to rewrite a hack daily makeing it very difficult to keep up and distribute a working version on a daily basis 2) this one is on identification everytime a ban is done the server tracks the frequency but doenst make that info availible to the players if a person is getting called or booted out of rooms constantly they will end up with a very high signature of being called out mods can then browse this list and track the types of hacks being used or possibly test their code to see if their hack prevention schemes are working this could even be used against hack users so mods can go into games with them to see if they are really cheating or not without them knowing alternatly these stats could be public and let the community decide weather or not to trust the said person the said stats would be games played # of accusations # of games kicked from by vote a new account would leave you a noob untrusted so you would start off the same as you would with alot of kicks and accusations however honorable players would not have this problem over time and that would be the jem of that idea anyways what do you guys think ???

I don't know how easy it'd be to implement or how error-prone/slow it'd be, but one idea I had for protecting against wall hacking and somewhat against aimbots was to write the server in such a way that it doesn't send information about players if they're a certain distance away or obstructed.

e.g. The server knows (through some internal detection engine of some sort) that player X is behind a wall on which player Y is on the other side so it doesn't send X's coords to Y or Y's coords to X. With no coords to work with, an aimbot can't know where to aim... until they come from behind the wall and then it's game over. But this also works for wall hacks as if they can see through the walls... there's nothing there to see.

The idea is in its infancy, but might work with some tinkering.

Quote:Original post by Guinnie
I don't know how easy it'd be to implement or how error-prone/slow it'd be, but one idea I had for protecting against wall hacking and somewhat against aimbots was to write the server in such a way that it doesn't send information about players if they're a certain distance away or obstructed.

e.g. The server knows (through some internal detection engine of some sort) that player X is behind a wall on which player Y is on the other side so it doesn't send X's coords to Y or Y's coords to X. With no coords to work with, an aimbot can't know where to aim... until they come from behind the wall and then it's game over. But this also works for wall hacks as if they can see through the walls... there's nothing there to see.

The idea is in its infancy, but might work with some tinkering.

This is an idea which is certainly used in a lot of online games currently, although less frequently for action/shooter games.

Reading the source code for cheats is a great way to understand how cheaters are thinking (you'll find sources for many counter-strike cheats are open source). And unfortunately, many of them are pretty creative. Now, I'm far from an expert in the field, but at some point i got quite interested in how cheats work. And its rather difficult to use prevention.

About changing the exe/dll: Assuming you actually find a way to force the version of the exe/dll to be up-to-date (I don't think you can). While you can change where functions are located in a game exe/dll, cheats usually keep hardcoded offsets to these functions. Now, every time you change the code, those offsets in game might change, depending on how you change the code. This is a problem that i've seen happen between some versions of CS releases. To counter this, they added automatic offset updating. I believe they also managed to dynamically find the offsets of the functions. Conclusion: Using this method, it will be really hard to prevent much.

About the player data: In many fps-games (where wall hacks may have the biggest impact) you can shoot through walls. If just the tip of your weapon is visible, i guess most part of the player model is rendered, and therefore can be made visible even when its behind (and the position etc is sent over the network). Big enough advantage already. Even if you manage to render only the visible parts and not send player coordinates when not necessary, sounds are played in 3D and can be rendered in an overlay. You don't know who's behind the wall, but who cares? Conclusion: While making the life of a cheater harder, it certainly doesn't stop them from shooting you through a wall.

Finally, the stats/tracking idea: In my experience many player accuse others of cheating when they, in fact, only are good players. Even server admins get this wrong sometimes. And i don't really blame them. It's sometimes really hard to separate cheaters from skilled players. Unless, of course, if you play against a rage cheater (360 degrees aimbot, wall hack, speed hack, etc). Conclusion: "Regular" players don't necessarily provide good/proper stats.

Pretty much is already done to prevent cheating, but since the code is run on the client computer, there is only so much you can do.

-- Unleeb