I’m here since the reddit API changes, which lead to the app I used being shut down (I don’t remember the name anymore).

Im still lurking on reddit, but haven’t logged in ever since.

I didn’t know there’s a website to login to. Always ever used the app. But yes, I can open it:

I have two D5 and the app and cloud connection is working just fine!?

My point applied in specific cases where relevant, and the dishonesty in your argument here is by acting like I am talking about not having a game.

It’s tellingly ironic that for you it’s totally okay to make a broad statement, then when being called out cut it back to “where relevant”. And in the same sentence you make a strawman yourself, claiming that I’m acting like you are “talking about not having a game at all”. If you want your arguments understood “where relevant”, maybe show the same consideration.

As for the grenade and bullet examples I simply disagree. Given a certain observable trajectory it’s freakishly easy to get a good enough point of origin to get an unfair advantage with that information. As for an example about the bullets, I believe there’s enough FPS games with tracers out there. An extreme example would be Unreal Tournament Instagib matches. Where you see literally all tracers - directed at you or not.

If we’re going to that extent, we might as well also then say that all client side anti cheat is worthless because you can use a secondary machine to read the ram of a primary machine or other such high effort cheating strategies.

Correct. Client side anti cheat can only make it so hard. Never impossible.

because they never claimed anything was a kill-it-all solution. They claimed one thing was a specific solution for a particular problem, which it is.

Yes, they said wall hacks would not exist if the server would only send what a user can actually see:

The only reason they are possible is because the positions of all players are being sent to the client and then the client just doesn’t draw them to screen.

And that’s not true. Wall hacks would still exist, as necessary information can be used to determine an enemies position. To a certain extend.

And yes, put to an unreasonable extreme it would eliminate wall hacks entirely. Just nobody would want to play such a game.

Have a good day.

I don’t understand how you lump my arguments into “extra latency”. Server side anti cheat doesn’t add latency (I mean technically it does, but that’s not the concern right now), but latency is very much the reason for the downsides I pointed out. The smaller the margins, the higher the chance one of the two players doesn’t see the other coming solmoothly around the corner, but suddenly materializing in full view.

Your examples illustrate that very well. It’s OK for PUPG or Tarkov (and even there only long distances), but a hard for Valorant.

This example is contrived, and just the type of thing where there are a number of options available.

And now, instead of the irrelevant bucket, make the same argument for a relevant object - like a grenade, or tracers. You cannot just get rid of everything or implement random delays or randomized origins.

There is no kill-it-all solution, and this is a clever little re-framing of the argument by you where the new solution has to be perfect, when the status quo can just be mid.

It’s not reframing. The original argument I replied to claimed these hacks only exist because the server sends everything, and it would be extremely easy to fix this. Neither of which is true.

I think the one who’s not thinking about the scale is you. As the server owner you pay (compute) for every additional player. This goes directly against the wish to have as many players as possible playing your game.

This discussion spun of from a company stating specifically they don’t want to invest more into anti cheat solutions. And that’s from a company which absolutely could afford it.

How does the client detect that when running said cheat on another machine? It doesn’t.

You make it sound like I said that, but I didn’t. In fact I’m very much against kernel level anti cheat.

Still both can be calculated back to the source of origin. It may not be enough for a wall hack to reliably point out the enemies exact position, but definitely enough for a radar or proximity hack.

Edit: Your also completely ignoring the mandatory threshold where the server absolutely needs to send you enemy information already in order to avoid enemies popping into existence. The faster the game, the bigger that threshold.

And by all means, sound (in video games) is a pretty linear thing. You can only randomize so much, until players complain that it’s not reliable.

In the games were talking about these kind of additional info or heads-up are an unfair advantage in competitive play.

The solution sounds easy, but I do believe that if it was, we would see it in at least some current games.

Absolutely.

Please see my other answer. Yes server side fog of war solves a lot, but not everything because it works with your FoV+some extra. On top of that there’s enemies’ sounds and objects that will make wall/radar hacks work.

Yes, skill based matchmaking would take care of the consistent not-inhuman cheater, but unfortunately the number of games getting that right can be count on two hands, I would say. It’s an interesting problem on its own for team based games.

And you are not the first person to have this idea.

Most games do that to some degree. The thing is they are working with a threshold, which means they send your client the information of a few “extra meters” - beyond your field of vision. If they didn’t, enemies would sudddnly pop into existence, instead of smoothly running around the corner. Especially in fast paced games there’s nothing more frustrating than losing to this.

But there’s more: non visual clues. If an enemy is outside your vision, but makes a noise, you cannot give that information to the client without revealing the enemies position. It’s simply not possible (again, not without risking giving completely wrong info by the time it reaches the client).

Same goes for non-player objects, which are the result of a player’s action somewhere else. If a player kicks a bucket across the map, the bucket flying through your screen makes it trivially easy to calculate the point of origin - and you know something happened there / player was there.

We’d be really really lucky if server side fog of war would be the kill-it-all solution to cheating.

Well, first off: Money. The more you verify, the more it costs you to run your game’s servers.

But also because you cannot detect every kind of cheat via server side anti-cheat. How does a server detect if my flick-headshot (which won this crucial round) in counter strike was luck, or if I had help from a program running on my machine? Maybe it didn’t even make me react faster, just nudged the cfosshair another few pixels to ensure the hit.

Of course you can run statistics, and can flag outliers. But it’s no proof. If someone always cheats you won’t catch them, while you will flag someone have a good day (or a friend playing on their machine).

Yeah but this approach makes the game stutter and/or sluggish for everyone. Client side computation isn’t just cheaper, it also ensures that you have a smooth gaming experience.

As someone else said, most games do a middle way here. Compute on client side. Verify on server side.

It is. All games have this kind of server side verification which denies not allowed actions. The difference is in Minecraft it comes down to “no, you cannot fly, or” no, you cannot build a pig spawner because you don’t have one in you inventory". But in Counter Strike you need to decide if one player’s 14ms headsbot is legit, while some other player’s 20ms kill was not. Or if someone was acting on information they shouldn’t have (radar and wall hacks). That’s orders of magnitudes harder.

Generally speaking, the slower a game, and the less hand eye coordination are necessary, the easier is server side cheat detection. On the other side, there’s chess…

But they haven’t so far, and the question was why it’s popular at this moment.

Possible future enshittification disqualifies all software, unless you prevent it from going online - which you can also do with Unraid.

I genuinely thought it’s not limited, but yes, the trial.

Decent UI. Affordable lifetime pricing. Actually just-works. No retrospective enshittification. Free trial is actually free, not ad supported.

You get what you pay for, and you’re not the product.

That’s actually quite easy to explain. Reddits entire monetary value (or at least a very large portion) depends on how relevant it is as platform to mine user interactions - to use as training material for AI.

Reddit getting references less is a sign that the models, or the owning companies, value reddit data less compared to before.

Still the point is you don’t spend money without knowing what you get so it is better. Still predatory, but better

Do we work for the same company? Exactly same story here. Also just botched the Oracle to Aurora migration.

I don’t know, so I can only guess.

The desalination plant could have been there already, because for whatever reason it was more practical (or even required) than taking the water from the river.

Or maybe the desalination plant requires very little power, maybe less than what the osmotic plant produces.

Or the whole thing is indeed energy negative, but not as energy negative as having just the desalination plant. So at least they get to use the brine from the desalination to recoup some of the energy. Because the osmotic plant is power positive.