Can video game hacks ever be stoped?

1    14 Jan 2017 07:23 by u/ExpertShitposter

The people making map hacks and auto-aim bots are just as smart as the game makers, and its a very lucrative business. Not being a programmer my self i don't really know how these work but i do notice that no game developer in the history of time managed to protect the game against hacks 100%. As soon as they shutdown one version of the hack software, the hack developers make another better one.

Will there ever be a time where FPS games will be aimbot free? And RTS games maphack free?

22 comments

4 u/AOU 14 Jan 2017 07:41

It will happen when games will be stored in remote servers and video streamed down to players' computers.

3 u/ExpertShitposter [OP] 14 Jan 2017 07:44

Tho that would require much improved internet ?

I know that developers are usually combating cheaters by making various things server side instead of client side, but its never enough.

Maybe you can elaborate.

2 u/AOU 14 Jan 2017 07:55

In today's internet, average pings are not low enough to get a decent response time without much delay.

Video game screen streamed down to player's computer > player's response with controllers (KB, mouse, joypad...) > control data sent back to server.

The player would have to get a screen capture app with a massive AI to analyse the video stream and separate players from environment. The delay induced wouldn't be worth it.

0 u/ExpertShitposter [OP] 14 Jan 2017 08:00

And the financial investment would probably also reduce the numbers, since someone would have to develop the AI, and everybody would need a CC.

But doesn't that mean that all computing and rendering would have to be done by the server and you would be just receiving a video stream. The game devs would have to pay for massive hardware for each player then?

1 u/AOU 14 Jan 2017 08:04

Remote gaming with will (damn autocorrect) become a reality when Quantum computers will go mainstream.

And next, a single server at home to video stream virtual machines to every single device you own. That's how I see the future.

1 u/ExpertShitposter [OP] 14 Jan 2017 08:06

So basically, i'm stuck with cheater scum until i'm 90 years old. Cool.

1 u/AOU 14 Jan 2017 08:34

lol, there will always be cheaters.

It's inevitable. :D

0 u/rwbj 14 Jan 2017 09:33

I think massive AI is a substantial exaggeration. It doesn't even have to be particularly fast because of frame continuity - most of what's there in one frame will be there in the next. It could have a simple probabilistic detection that gets refined each frame.

Cheating this system would certainly be far easier than creating it. Latency is one challenge like you mentioned -we need at most 17ms latency for a 60FPS game- but that might not even be the biggest problem! Think about the bandwidth involved here. Movies are compressed like crazy. A game running at 60FPS 1080p without compression would require 1920*1080460 bytes of data per second - that's half a gigabyte per second. So the servers obviously need to not only render the data for every single player but then also create some sort of per-user relational compression before sending it out which would involve contrasting two complete frame buffers. And then you need redundancies for when things inevitably and constantly break, without meaningfully interrupting the players' experience in any way.

I don't see any clear way quantum computing could help here either. Quantum computing isn't a "just like regular computers but a million times faster." The technology behind quantum computers is useful for a very small subset of all problems. For They'll definitely do things like break current forms of encryption since factorization falls into this subset of problems, but quantum computing is not the future of computing that some are making it out to be.

0 u/AOU 14 Jan 2017 10:01

I think massive AI is a substantial exaggeration. It doesn't even have to be particularly fast because of frame continuity - most of what's there in one frame will be there in the next.

You're not taking into account that some objects are moving too (trees, grass, animals...).

Real-time detection and discrimination of objects versus the real players on the map will require a lot of computing, and thus will considerably increase the latency.

Also, video stream codecs are not lossless, and create artefacts in dark areas and moving objects (trees, plants...), where players of FPS usually tend to hide.

The only way to overcome this, is to bribe one of the devs working at the game company your game is from, and get him to code/install cheat modes for your character. ^ ^

1 u/rwbj 14 Jan 2017 10:29

It is, given current technology, relatively trivial to rapidly identify the 'class' of objects within a scene. Image recognition has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of deep reinforcement learning. The current 'turing tests' for image recognition have gotten to the point that competitors are not expected to just identify features/objects of an image but describe implicit relationships - the cat just jumped from the table on the right to the chair on the left.

The reason frame continuity is important is because you can prioritize a scene into various regions. So for instance if you know for a high certainty that a certain region of the frame is a wall with no actors - then you an lower that regions processing priority for future scene analyses. And similarly if there's some sort of dynamic object that can't be carefully identified you can prioritize it. And these prioritizations carry over from one scene to another. For instance once you do find a player it will be trivial to 'lock' onto him every frame until he is completely obfuscated. "Increasing latency" makes no sense. From a player's perspective it would be completely seamless.

1 u/wesofx 18 Jan 2017 02:29

I was making an text-based game recently and it occurred to me that you could have cheater-free multiplayer by doing everything server-side and just streaming the text to display back to the client. Translating this to a 3D action game, you'd need to render graphics server-size and stream video back to the client. Any amount of latency would likely be unacceptable for a fast-passed competitive game, but maybe not for a slow or casual game.

0 u/adfasdf 27 Jan 2017 04:22

One of the key problems of computing is that anything that can be done with computers can be reverse engineered and repeated. So the way to eliminate this is to make it too costly and/or time consuming to do. Most of this is reasonably possible with better security. If games use good enough strong encryption in enough places, then it will certainly happen.