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To some extent though- the games do need information about players that are behind walls. In CSGO/CS2, even if you can’t see the player you can hear their footsteps or them reloading, etc. the sound is very positional. Plus, you can shoot through some thin walls at these players. Even if they can’t be seen.

I don’t believe server side anti cheat can truly be effective against some cheats. But also Vanguard is trash and makes my computer bluescreen. I’ve stopped playing league entirely because of it.

You don't happen to have used some means to install win 11 on an unsupported device have you? People bypassing the windows install requirements and then vanguard making false assumptions have been a source of issues.

I’m on windows 10. Vanguard always complains about some driver that it prevents from running. (Might be fan control I think? Hard to figure out) And in addition to that it’s caused several blue screens for me. (Kernel access violations I think?) The blue screens say the error was in vgk.sys which is vanguard. It’s not at all consistent, but when it happens it’s as I’m getting into a game, so I miss part of a match for it every time.

Ah that's unfortunate. Have you messaged riot support? I've heard they're quite earnest in trying to fix these bugs in light of the backlash

Nit, but surely hit detection happens on the server? Shooting wildly should always register a hit, regardless of what the client knows.

> The only reason wallhacking is possible in the first place is a server sending a client information on a competitor that the client should not know about.

Some information is required to cover the network and server delays.

The client predicts what things should look like and then corrects to what they actually are if there is a discrepancy with the server. You cannot get around this short of going back to in-person LAN games.

You may have players complain that when they walk around a corner, the enemy who they should be able to see immediately is briefly invisible.

So the server must render the 3d world from each players perspective to do these tests? Sounds ridiculously expensive.

> So the server must render the 3d world from each players perspective to do these tests?

Just some raycasts through the geometry should be sufficient, which the server is already doing (albeit on likely-simplified collision meshes) constantly.

If you really do have a scenario where occlusion noticeably depends on more of the rendering pipeline (a window that switches between opaque and transparent based on a GPU shader?) you could just treat it as always transparent for occlusion checking and accept the tiny loss that wallhackers will be able to see through it, or add code to simulate that server-side and change the occlusion geometry accordingly.

Server side hit detection is nowhere near as complex as occlusion, you need to make sure you account for latency or you get people popping into existence after they round the corner.

Here is one for CS:GO, server occlusion geometry must be made separately as auto generating from map is another hard problem.

Not "just some raycasts" otherwise everyone would be doing it:

https://github.com/87andrewh/CornerCullingSourceEngine

> Not "just some recast" otherwise everyone would be doing it:

Only needing raycasts through the geometry was in response to the idea that the server would need to "render the 3d world from each players perspective to do these tests". I don't intend to claim that it's as a whole an easy engineering problem, but rather that the tests don't need to involve much/any of the rendering pipeline.

Of course you can. You can measure telemetry like where the aimpoint is on a hitbox. Is it centered or at least more accurate than your globabl population? Hacker, ban. How about time to shoot after hitting target? Are they shooting instantly, is the delay truly random? If not then banned. You can effectively force the hacking tools to only be about as good as a human player, at which point it hardly matters whether you have hackers or not.

Of course, no one handles hacking like this because its cheaper to just ship fast and early and never maintain your servers. Not even valve cares about their games and they are the most benevolent company in the industry.

Valve does not have kernel level anticheat. Faceit does. Most high ranked players prefer to play on Faceit because of the amount of cheaters in normal CS2 matchmaking.

isn't vac kernel level?

VAC is not kernel level. Valorant’s Vanguard is kernel level - it runs at all times and if you exit it out, you must reboot your computer to play Valorant

Aside from aimbots, there's plenty of abusable legitimate information exposed to the client.

E.g. For CS:GO, the volume of footsteps and gunshots vary by distance so you could use them to triangulate an enemy's position.

You have no idea what you're talking about. Even mediocre FPS players use positional sound as a huge cue for how to react, which means the client is going to know the positions of every player and non-player entity in a medium range. That's a _huge_ advantage to any hacked client.

Even if the FPS had no sound, an aimbot-free hacked client that knows the positions of only the players that you can see would still provide a significant benefit because a high fidelity radar and pointers can be placed on the screen. No one can sneak up on you. And no you can't base it on which way the player is looking because you can turn around faster than network latency.

Can you limit the impact of hacked clients? Sure, people might not be able to do egregious stuff like X-ray your position from across the map. Locally, though, game clients need a large amount of information to provide a good experience.