Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

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Windows has no lack of power. All this anti-cheating stuff is mostly a scam to stop the dumbest of the dumb cheaters and probably collect information from your computer that's useful to advertisers/investors/law enforcement agencies.

If I wanted to aimbot in an FPS, I would just analyze the HDMI output from my computer (via an FPGA) and have it directly create the necessary USB transactions to move my mouse to the target's head. I would introduce randomness, "input lag", jitter, and even some misses, so that people looking at the kill cam wouldn't immediately think "aimbot" as they are apt to do whenever they die. (You also don't want to make your mouse movements statistically different from anyone else's, or it's the server that will pick up on your cheating... or at least a well-crafted MapReduce. Do game companies have MapReduce? I hope so.)

Executed well, the developer of the game could do nothing about it; maybe I'm really good, or maybe I'm aimbotting. My computer is completely normal, down to the device descriptors on my mouse and monitor. There's no wine, no virtualization, no additional software running.

In the end, trusting the client is crazy. If you want to decide win/loss based on things computers can do easily, your game is probably bad. And aiming is something computers can do in their sleep.

I think you're missing a major component of these deals restrictions: they also want to prevent running 30 headless VMs on a single computer all botting into games to grind whatever free content is available.

This is actually a major component of bot use for f2p games. A lot of companies try really hard to prevent anything that looks like playing in virtual envs. Having these bots fill up your games and play terribly is a bad look for any game that depends on multi-player interactions to keep people involved.

Ah, that sounds like a very fair argument to me.

I believe you can get pretty affordable Windows VMs these days, however. I'm not sure that blocking wine really accomplishes a lot. (There are also companies that sell access to consumer Windows PCs on consumer ISPs these days. If you don't play Hearthstone, you probably don't mind $10/month in free money for letting someone bot Hearthstone on your computer. And it's not like Blizzard is going to say "look, enough Comcast, shut these people down or else we lock all Comcast customers out of battle.net". It's pretty tough to run a gaming client these days, I would imagine. So so much stuff is totally out of your control. I do not envy their engineers at all!)

It actually was a major issue for Valve with TF2. It used to be you could run the game headless and have it join a server to idle farm items for you. In college my roommate and I each bought about 3 copies of the game then ran them headless in VMs to try and farm hats. Never got anything super great sadly.

Analyzing the HDMI is definetely not an up-to-date hacking technique by any means.

Besides having to rely on real-time computer vision which is more expensive/resource consuming and harder, the results wouldn't be as good as with other techniques (although this might fit your argument of having some misses and jitter/lag/etc... to act as cover).

Next generation aiming for twitch shooters will use a camera that tracks eyeball movements.

Already available in the form of the Tobii 4C for approximately 150 USD. Only accurate for most people to about a circle with diameter of about an inch on the screen though, and it feels strange to use it for an FPS.

What does MapReduce have to do with the rest of your post? MapReduce is used in distributed computing - I thought shooters were basically always single servers to keep the lag reasonable.

(I see two flagged posts asking the same question)

It would be used for analysing past gameplay, not during live matches

Aimbots...map reduce...HDMI outputs...and jitter all in one post.

...pretty comfortable in saying that you're not up to speed on 2004 era hax.

I can tell you're a member of the gaming community because you have basically dismissed my comment in a condescending manner without providing any actual information.

Please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the guidelines yourself. That doesn't help and only makes this place worse.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Can you please not snark or post unsubstantive comments here? We're trying for a bit better than that. If you know more, it would be great to share some of what you know so we all can learn something. Alternatively, it's always ok not to post.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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