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Comment by hombre_fatal | Hacker News Reader

So, what data is it accessing and where does that data come from? I assume it can show you players that you otherwise would have no info about in the game UI?

For example, this data had to come from network packets, so if the server is oversharing data, why wouldn't you just intercept the packets? What exactly is the cheat?

The file doesn't explain much.

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It's accessing player location data after it's been decoded into structs in the game memory. The packets are encrypted, so you'd need to MiTM the key exchange to decrypt them, which takes you the same place this device goes (you either need something running in the OS, or something outside of the OS with access to host memory) - and it's a lot easier to just let the game handle that for you and slurp the data once it's available.

Why is the game sending all this data which is essentially just hidden by the UI? What is the point of sending enemy location and health data when they aren't near/visible to the player? For a non game dev like me it sounds like wasted bandwidth and a way to enable wallhack.

Because knowing which data is hidden by UI from server is hard problem.

To achieve real-time feeling game apply (most) your inputs immediately without having to wait relatively long time confirmation from server. So if you decide to push button and peek around corner you expect to see enemy immediately but server will know about your peek "much" later.

You can for sure limit some information by locations but you always must leak more than it's actually seen by client. Also it isn't easy to solve: can any part of volume be seen from another volume inside arbitrary 3D environment. Enemy size and movement through network frame => players all possible eye positions.

I think current best solutions rely on very rough (manual?) map piecing. So is it worth to invest for such thing that makes some cheats bit less powerful but cannot really prevent them.

Keep in mind that CS:GO is ALREADY built on very very old BSP maps, so knowing that some players aren't visible to others is super trivial, if not 100% accurate (ie it's a little conservative)

In warthunder this results in very noticeable pop in of enemy vehicles when you are using aircraft in realistic tank battles. The rendering distance for both tanks and aircraft is the same but since aircraft are 2km above the ground their effective view distance is much shorter than that of a tank.

VALORANT (Riot’s new CSGO competitor) uses a fog of war technique which only sends data for players in a certain radius or cone I believe. It can be done, it’s just silly to expect Valve to make important and valuable changes like this to their game.

A older summary of the packet encryption is here:

https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Counter-Strike:_Glo...

Based on the README, it looks like it's a partial fork/mod of this upstream repo [0], which is essentially set of tooling that "uses PCIe hardware devices to read and write target system memory".

So if I'm reading this right, the partial fork has changes specifically to read CS:Go data directly out of device memory to another device, which in turn processes that data and renders a web-based map of all player locations.

[0] https://github.com/ufrisk/pcileech

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