This is so funny because rust has one of the worst cheating situations and majority of their players are windows users, and theres lots of games that have anticheat that allows linux and have notably less significant cheating problems like marvel rivals. in reality rust doesn’t take cheating very seriously because if they did they would have more server side software that detects illegitimate behaviour like tons of other games do successfully… even most popular Minecraft servers have better functioning anti cheat that is completely server side than rust has while getting kernel access to your pc. its pathetic and lazy development tbh and this entire post from them reads like such extreme cope…
Explain something to me. It’s a multiplayer game anything that affects all players should be handled on the server side, not the client. So if I make a cheat it can only be installed client side, not server side.
So if my hypothetical cheat looks at object placement and any time I sees a small object approaching at a high velocity it can say “I’m going to assume that’s a bullet based on what the server told me about it.” Then my cheat would say “your character moves from here to here until the bullet passes by, then moves back. I will tell the server you moved to the left 20 inches in the blink of an eye then moved back”
This works because the server just trusts what it’s told in this example.
So there are two options here to resolve this. Either the server sets thresholds and denies any placement changes look like the Flash is playing rust, or the server evaluates suspicious placement changes later when the cpu load it’s under is lower. The first approach stops much of this instantly but is computationally expensive and could not scale well for lots of players. The second would work well enough. You need to catch cheaters but it’s doesn’t have to be within the same exact cpu cycle.
In either case, these work because the server is taught to look for something that shouldn’t be possible. The enforcement happens server side. The client doesn’t fucking matter.
There is zero reason to put anti cheat on the client side when it’s not a P2P instance. Target a few servers, not thousands of players.
The client side anti cheat is a low effort hack that was good enough. Video game anti cheat devs are cheap as fuck because looking at client bits cost nothing compared to expensive machine learning pipelines that need to analyze all player performance. This is not a tech problem but a product/skill one.
You don’t need machine learning for this we’ve had perfectly good server-side anti-cheat for a while now and none of it’s been AI-based until recently. If we know the top speed the game should allow players to move any movement greater than that speed must be a cheat or lag, either way it shouldn’t be allowed.
Your head is in the right place, but your example is very wrong. First, unless it’s a very slow projectile that’s not how bullets work in games, second movement takes place in the server, to do so in the client is nuts. Client sends inputs, sever moves, gives back player location, client adapts. While waiting for a reply the client simulates the movement expected, but sometimes the server doesn’t receive the package and so tells you you haven’t actually moved and you teleport back.
What’s usually not done is calculate vision cone, instead the server gives you everyone’s position and you calculate whether you can see them on your GPU. Which is why if you can get access to the GPU pipeline you can tweak it so it shows you objects through walls. If you move the LoS calculation to the server you completely eliminate wallhacks, however that is very expensive to do (although ray tracing GPUs might provide a good approach in the future)
For the vast majority of games, it’s in between, because the latency if you waited for the server every frame you moved would be way too much.
It’s something like you have a local model of where everything is, and send updates to the server of where your local model says your character (and whatever else your inputs affect) are. The server receives that data, potentially validates it (server side anti cheat checking that your movement makes sense, similar to the OP post, for example), and then forwards that info to all players. The client side positions of everything are updated based on that info. Usually some interpolation is added to make things move more smoothly.
Yes I meant movement happens server side, which is why this example cheat couldnt work. it would be telling the server what to do, and the server could always say “no, fuck off, thats not something you were coded to be able to do”. Sorry if I didnt convey that clearly.
I also understand the client has to draw things faster than the server can respond “okay, I moved you 12 inches to the left” so it guesses the outcome and if the server later responds with “denied, no teleportation in rust” it will just snap you back to the last position the server approved of.
My point is anticheat client side suggests bad code server side.
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.
Yes but if you are verifying server side anyway, why do you need anti cheat client side?
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).