Posted by jakey_bakey 4 days ago
https://technology.riotgames.com/news/demolishing-wallhacks-...
Not many first person games have that "fog of war", it turns out to be quite hard to implement well.
This video compares Valves own fog-of-war implementation to the implementation used by FACEIT, a third party competitive matchmaking service, which shows there's a pretty wide range of trade-offs to be made. Valve went for conservative and fast, while FACEIT went for aggressive and (presumably) slow:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8w1ICIBO3D4
Valves implementation is better than nothing, it at least stops cheaters from knowing which direction the other team is going at the start of a round, but beyond that it doesn't stop them from knowing exactly where most enemies are standing around corners because the serverside visibility checks are so coarse.
This has been replaced by 'subtick' which I don't know enough about to comment.
Many custom servers in games like CS enable a more aggressive version, in cases where you geographically will be close, so you can rule out high latency connections and have more aggressive fog of war.
The engine has a flag that is mainly used to draw the player's weapon (which is rendered above the rest). Using this flag for players was the "engine compliant" way of making a wall hack.
Or in team fortress, replace the sniper's red aimpoint dot with a big model. They become easier to avoid.
Of course not great from large distance / players behind multiple walls but I think the server wouldn't send you the info of those guys anyway.
https://old.reddit.com/r/GlobalOffensive/comments/37ebes/maj...
> Added trace-based visibility checks to prevent networking invisible enemy players.
If you're remembering playing with the r_drawothermodels console command to get a faux-wallhack effect, that was still subject to the engines clientside occlusion culling so it didn't show everything the client (and real cheats) were actually aware of.
The thing I remember was that my friend's graphics card had a global transparency setting built in (AKA a wall-hack mode lol). You could see other players come into view as soon as the came into an area that was rendered. Then a CS patch came out and the players weren't visible until very shortly before they would become visible had we not had the uhh... transparency mode on haha.
Maybe the grass is always greener, but it just sounds like an incredible opportunity for anyone working on the Valorant team. You get to solve challenging, interesting problems that hundreds of millions of users will benefit from, that's just so cool to me.
But on the flip side, that one cool thing might be the ONLY thing they do, all day, every day, which might not be as cool after 6-10 years.
But I do think your point about benefitting large numbers of people is a strong motivator..that's partly what academia relies on to keep employees as below-market rates -- the mission oriented drive to make the future better. I don't mean to poke at that issue specifically, but it's a great example of how teachers, etc. will continue to work for pennies as long as they can afford it (it's almost abusive).. but that drive is a critical part of their personal happiness
Yeah, sometimes I think I'd like to be a systems engineer and work on databases or similar but then I think about that being 100% of my work and realize I don't desire that kind of job.
This stuff seems fun until you realize it means you're choosing to specialize in something pretty niche. I prefer being a product engineer working on web stuff for now until I find something worthwhile specializing in.
Probably different at Riot? Not sure.
But companies like Blizzard/Activision and some smaller companies were described as very toxic environments.
[0]: https://www.riotgames.com/en/news/2024-rioter-update - 11% of staff let go
You're ever chasing the mouse. If it's not some hacker, it's some bug. If it's not a bug than its a feature and then all three.
Directors want results, 24 hour of stressful debugging to discover why some new person can now shoot through walls, creating a patch, replicating and ensuring it doesn't exploit or nuke any other feature and pushing the patch out without effecting gameplay is stressful. Partly why Overwatch had real-time patching abilities on each game.
You don't get downtime, no sitting on tickets. Hacking costs revenue and you got to ensure your work is correct.
Wake up the next day and start all over.
While playing FPS', I wondered why corners were a point of contention for me, both in dying or killing, and now I have additional insight.
I can sit at a corner and die from an oncoming enemy, or I can take the corner and take the enemy. I assumed it was all due to my own biological perceptual system, and now I see the synchronization would be giving each player an advantage depending upon who's overtaking the corner.
So in that sense, corners are pretty much a point of contention for everyone at every level since most of the game is based around taking and holding corners/angles.
The peeker vs holder relationship is pretty interesting to analyze as there is more to it then just server sync. But how both players try minimize/isolate the amount of angles they attack/are exposed at any given point in time.
As well as use their general game knowledge to make predictions about where the enemy is most likely to be in a certain situation. Prioritizing their attention/crosshair on those angles while ignoring the others.
I think this what makes it fun. Theirs a lot of thinking + buildup/anticipation for the moment of contact between players which is then usually resolved in <1s. And since the dead player has to then sit out the round it feels meaningful.
Going up, your head is exposed, so that becomes the primary target, when people typically aim for center mass. But center mass isn't visible immediately, so head takes all of it. On top of that, the whole 360 degrees of the next floor becomes visible at once, so there's no way to take slices of the room at a time, like you would a doorway.
Staircases are very brutal. But really, room clearing as a whole is the last thing you want to be doing. You can do it completely correct, and still die. Room clearing is a matter of minimizing chances, not eliminating them.
Maybe you implied it, but adding to the 'going up' case, there is bullet ricochet -- also reffered to as skipping or bouncing bullets -- that makes it so that bullets will ricochet out at a shallow angle and ride out the wall or floor, making your head hittable without even aiming at it. Here is a instructional FBI video talking about it.[0] And a more modern take.[1]
[0] https://youtu.be/7tUW0cUkNv0?feature=shared&t=240 (I think the date is wrong, other places mark it as being from 1974-5)
I call it the hedgehog. It lifes here now. Very good at trench clearing too. https://imgur.com/a/hedgehog-De90woA
Bonuspoints if it can be transported and drone dropped!
Sounds like a stairwalking robot that has 360° cameras would be pretty useful
The button side of jackets thing is true though, except usually also told wrong. We're often taught in fencing that men's jackets button left over right so that a sword drawn by a right handed person doesn't fuck up your own clothing. That's also wrong, but close: men's jackets button left over right because you traditionally put your shielded side forward, your left side, and you wanted any armor pieces to overlap so that there's no holes to get caught in if you're poked from the left. Which is a stance backwards from later style one handed fencing. The not messing up clothes on the draw of a sword is just extra bonus from the original reason.
And in fact, both people can be making one at the same time, but the trick is that they are a slightly different lines because each client has a slightly different idea of where both players are.
But any process your user runs can read memory of other processes of the same user, Windows provides an API for it. So its not just kernel stuff that is scary.
Vanguard might be nice if you want to dedicate a PC to locked-down gaming, not so much if you just want to do legitimate $anything_else with it.
And yet Valorant and every other game with kernel-level anticheat seems to have been hacked anyways
Even with kernel level nonsense a cheat can be made technically undetectable by essentially making a 'player robot' that uses a camera and CV to watch a screen and traditional mouse/keyboard interfaces. It'll only be detectable via player-action/movement heuristics and 'best guesses', and it needs no hooks into software or OS.
This type of 'bot' is going to explode across consoles and the like soon given the focus on AI with general purpose reasoning; you can already easily implement this style of bot against slow paced games like mahjong or poker inferring against big clunky slow image-inferring LLMs; given how easy most coding LLMs can spit out the code for specialty CNNs when knowing the criteria we're going to see this kind of cheating get a lot more accessible.
And I mean this practically. Go talk to Claude or ChatGPT about making a bot in this fashion for just about any slower paced deliberate-action game -- it's shockingly good at doing so with very little user input. Provide it with a few screenshots of the interface and it can even automate finding the bounding boxes or whatever other thing-of-interest you need to coordinate purely by description -- the barrier to entry for game cheating is lower than i've ever seen it , and that's one of the things I did for a living for a portion of my youth.
Matchmaking rather than finding opponents/matches on IRC and private servers is also a big factor modern cheating.
People are locked in to the game with you in Valorant or CS, they are penalised for leaving and thus can be held hostage by someone who is blatantly cheating.
In older times, you would just quit and find another match, or if it was a community public server they will get banned.
Had no idea it went this deep on your device.
Also their parent company is Chinese Tencent, which is a major alarm coupled with this type of invasive software.
One of these days I’ll find a way to run Valorant in a windows vm
Overwatch has a long time-to-kill, interesting to compare tradeoffs.
Some of Valorant's game servers are hosted in a data center very close to my house. When I played, my ping was in the single digit milliseconds. Some people accused me of being a Riot employee.
Of course, that low ping didn't prevent me from being utter trash. My K/D ratio was usually around 0.3.
Come to think of it, seeing the network buffering they perform, I wonder if having such low ping actually gave me a disadvantage when peeking towards someone with a 30 ms ping?
Yes. Counterintuitively, the players with the worst connections often get away with the most ridiculous nonsense.
Those timestamps are compared to a window against the server's and other players'.
Did you feel it potentially made the game MORE fun for you, having that high ping? I presume yes?