4 ms·

I know there's nothing that can or will happen about it (for various reasons) but the whole model around multiplayer games is flawed. You're giving someone code

I know there's nothing that can or will happen about it (for various reasons) but the whole model around multiplayer games is flawed. You're giving someone code to run on their PC and hoping your anti-cheat code can catch their code doing bad things. I believe there are AI anti-cheats being developed and used in China so maybe we'll end up with a Recall-esque anti-cheat everywhere in the future :)

Dalewyn 2y ago
I wonder if game streaming will become one way of kicking off cheaters if this arms race gets really bad. All of the code is stored and executed on trusted systems, you would only need to sanitize control inputs which is a significantly easier task.
- hypeatei 2y ago
  It would definitely stop most cheating but at a huge cost: performance. You're not running on bare metal anymore and that would be a non-starter for competitive games.
  - maximus-decimus 2y ago
    Is it really a problem is all competitors have the same performance hit?
    - tiagod 2y ago
      Imagine all Olympic athletes were to start competing with an AR headset on, which added 5ms of lag to their vision. Would it be a problem if they were all forced to use it?
      - fragmede 2y ago
        Not sure I understand your point. There are a lots of rules and regulations on what Olympic athletes are allowed to do. What they eat, what they inject, what they wear. All of that is to make the competition as fair as possible and to have a level playing field so as to make for an interesting competition, to draw viewers, which is what the sponsors care about. For people watching esports, they need to believe that the game isn't rigged and people aren't cheating. A couple more scandals and the sponsors are going to require cloud-gaming just to keep viewers.
        tiagod 2y ago
        My point is that it would change the game into a different one, with a different skill-set, and forcing everyone through the same restriction wouldn't make it any better. And even if I disregard all this, cloud gaming wouldn't solve the problem, as hardware cheats that don't run on the gaming machine would still be usable.
      - maximus-decimus 2y ago
        No, I don't think it would be a problem, which is why I'm asking the question. Human eye has a 13ms latency according to google and yet it doesn't stop Olympic athletes from existing. I don't see what making the latency 18ms instead of 13ms changes if everybody has the same.
    - phonepostingsux 2y ago
      For an FPS? Completely unplayable. Wouldn't be surprised if nausea became a widespread issue - vsync is enough to get me there, let alone network lag on mouse input.
- andrewflnr 2y ago
  > you would only need to sanitize control inputs I'm pretty far from the multiplayer game dev scene, but isn't this close to how a lot of multi player sync works anyway? Just* distribute everyone's control inputs and have them all run a deterministic simulation. And then I guess you would run the same input cheat detection on all the honest clients, which are hopefully the majority... Is this impossible or did I just reinvent something that already exists? * Yes, I know. But at least I know determinism is possible.
  - hipadev23 2y ago
    A common cheat in FPS games watches the rendered frame and sends mouse input to aim+fire. The server being authoritative doesn’t help in this situation. These sort of cheats are often entirely out of band, running on a mirror of the video stream on a second machine, and transmitting user input back via USB. Clientside snooping won’t catch it either.
    - lathiat 2y ago
      Yep.. "DMA" direct memory access.. reading the HDMI output, simulating controllers.. it all exists. The google term is "hardware cheats"
    - andrewflnr 2y ago
      That seems like it ought to be detectable statistically, unless the cheater adds jitter to the inputs to mimic human hands on a controller. And if not, it seems literally impossible to prevent so you may as well give up. (As an aside, hearing about this kind of setup really makes me wonder what the point is of cheating. Prestige? Among what set of peers?)
      - ThatPlayer 2y ago
        > And if not, it seems literally impossible to prevent so you may as well give up. But if you give up, and your game's competitors don't, players will switch games. The way I see it, a game developer anti-cheat goals isn't necessarily to have no cheaters, but definitely to have less cheaters than your competitor.
eddd-ddde 2y ago
Just today I was thinking about the theory of making untrusted hardware run trusted software. Imagine all the things that would be possible. Truly decentralised servers, where the end user can run server side logic.
- rishabhjain1198 2y ago
  Aren't Playstation games doing exactly this?
  - kevingadd 2y ago
    The playstation hardware+firmware+software solution has many layers of trust.
- Zambyte 2y ago
  Something I was thinking about just today is using a distributed message bus for networking for competitive games (I had NATS in mind, since I've been playing around with that a lot lately), and having non-players running validation and cheat detection on the messages in real time. I think some incentivization could be added to essentially reward "proof of work" for validating games do or do not have cheaters.
moe_sc 2y ago
Not only in China, Valve for example develops VACnet. For now it's not really that useful, which kinda gets amplified by banning in waves, to make it harder for cheat developers to adapt early, but keeps cheaters playing for longer. Gonna keep an eye on it, but I'm not to sure if it'll be the solution to this issue...

Dalewyn 2y ago

I wonder if game streaming will become one way of kicking off cheaters if this arms race gets really bad. All of the code is stored and executed on trusted systems, you would only need to sanitize control inputs which is a significantly easier task.

hypeatei 2y ago
It would definitely stop most cheating but at a huge cost: performance. You're not running on bare metal anymore and that would be a non-starter for competitive games.
- maximus-decimus 2y ago
  Is it really a problem is all competitors have the same performance hit?
  - tiagod 2y ago
    Imagine all Olympic athletes were to start competing with an AR headset on, which added 5ms of lag to their vision. Would it be a problem if they were all forced to use it?
    - fragmede 2y ago
      Not sure I understand your point. There are a lots of rules and regulations on what Olympic athletes are allowed to do. What they eat, what they inject, what they wear. All of that is to make the competition as fair as possible and to have a level playing field so as to make for an interesting competition, to draw viewers, which is what the sponsors care about. For people watching esports, they need to believe that the game isn't rigged and people aren't cheating. A couple more scandals and the sponsors are going to require cloud-gaming just to keep viewers.
      - tiagod 2y ago
        My point is that it would change the game into a different one, with a different skill-set, and forcing everyone through the same restriction wouldn't make it any better. And even if I disregard all this, cloud gaming wouldn't solve the problem, as hardware cheats that don't run on the gaming machine would still be usable.
    - maximus-decimus 2y ago
      No, I don't think it would be a problem, which is why I'm asking the question. Human eye has a 13ms latency according to google and yet it doesn't stop Olympic athletes from existing. I don't see what making the latency 18ms instead of 13ms changes if everybody has the same.
  - phonepostingsux 2y ago
    For an FPS? Completely unplayable. Wouldn't be surprised if nausea became a widespread issue - vsync is enough to get me there, let alone network lag on mouse input.
andrewflnr 2y ago
> you would only need to sanitize control inputs I'm pretty far from the multiplayer game dev scene, but isn't this close to how a lot of multi player sync works anyway? Just* distribute everyone's control inputs and have them all run a deterministic simulation. And then I guess you would run the same input cheat detection on all the honest clients, which are hopefully the majority... Is this impossible or did I just reinvent something that already exists? * Yes, I know. But at least I know determinism is possible.
- hipadev23 2y ago
  A common cheat in FPS games watches the rendered frame and sends mouse input to aim+fire. The server being authoritative doesn’t help in this situation. These sort of cheats are often entirely out of band, running on a mirror of the video stream on a second machine, and transmitting user input back via USB. Clientside snooping won’t catch it either.
  - lathiat 2y ago
    Yep.. "DMA" direct memory access.. reading the HDMI output, simulating controllers.. it all exists. The google term is "hardware cheats"
  - andrewflnr 2y ago
    That seems like it ought to be detectable statistically, unless the cheater adds jitter to the inputs to mimic human hands on a controller. And if not, it seems literally impossible to prevent so you may as well give up. (As an aside, hearing about this kind of setup really makes me wonder what the point is of cheating. Prestige? Among what set of peers?)
    - ThatPlayer 2y ago
      > And if not, it seems literally impossible to prevent so you may as well give up. But if you give up, and your game's competitors don't, players will switch games. The way I see it, a game developer anti-cheat goals isn't necessarily to have no cheaters, but definitely to have less cheaters than your competitor.

eddd-ddde 2y ago

Just today I was thinking about the theory of making untrusted hardware run trusted software. Imagine all the things that would be possible. Truly decentralised servers, where the end user can run server side logic.

rishabhjain1198 2y ago
Aren't Playstation games doing exactly this?
- kevingadd 2y ago
  The playstation hardware+firmware+software solution has many layers of trust.
Zambyte 2y ago
Something I was thinking about just today is using a distributed message bus for networking for competitive games (I had NATS in mind, since I've been playing around with that a lot lately), and having non-players running validation and cheat detection on the messages in real time. I think some incentivization could be added to essentially reward "proof of work" for validating games do or do not have cheaters.

moe_sc 2y ago

Not only in China, Valve for example develops VACnet. For now it's not really that useful, which kinda gets amplified by banning in waves, to make it harder for cheat developers to adapt early, but keeps cheaters playing for longer. Gonna keep an eye on it, but I'm not to sure if it'll be the solution to this issue...