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Comment by johnisgood | Hacker News Reader

> the most advanced cheats

How do they work? I know that in a game (Red Dead Redemption 2, for example) cheaters have infinite health and so forth. How? The server is responsible for validating all actions performed by players to prevent cheating, such as verifying movement, health, ammunition, and other game variables. It is not supposed to accept health values sent by the client without verifying against expected game logic. The server is the authoritative source. It is not supposed to rely on the client for authoritative game state, and if it does, it is fundamentally and terribly flawed.

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> The server is the authoritative source. It is not supposed to rely on the client for authoritative game state, and if it does, it is fundamentally and terribly flawed.

Indeed. Likely the client is responsible for certain state things and/or implicitly trusted with state updates. How this happens is that most of your game devs are not paid enough or given enough time to do it right. Engines are selected (generally not built) for their ability to get shit to market fast and multiplayer is an after thought, hacked on. And management just shrugs and says we'll force players to run anti-cheat ring0 nonsense.

Say you have a shooter with support for surround sound and immersive sound effects aka "an enemy comes from behind, so make the sound appear from rear left". For that to render properly the client needs to know where the enemy is positioned, which is information a cheat can read out from RAM and display it as an alert for the cheater. Or your average aimbot - the precise position of the enemy is (by definition) known to the client, so a cheat can "take over" keyboard and mouse when it sees an enemy and achieve a perfect headshot.

Or in racing games, extremely precise braking and steering assistance. Everything that a gamer can do, a cheat can also do.

In the case of aimbot: it is very easy to detect aimbot though, and you can always look for patterns, even in cases of triggerbot.

As far as assistance goes: I despise it. Modern games have "aim assist" which is just a built-in aimbot. sighs

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