How do video game cheats, like walls, for instance, work?

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I don’t know much about video games outside of playing them. I recently encountered someone playing with aimbot and it got me wondering how people make software that can identify, not only where a player is, but what a player is, and then have your reticle fixed on them.

Walls are even more puzzling for me to understand. How can some software identify where someone is even without the cheater’s POV?

In: Technology

2 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Cheat software works in a bunch of different ways – every time someone figures out a new way to cheat, the game developers work to detect it and ban those players. So they are constantly finding new ways.

– Some of them involve actually looking at the screen and can only see what the cheating player themselves can see.
– Some modify game textures so make walls transparent.
– Many don’t look at the screen at all. They look at the computer’s memory and find the part of memory that says where the other players are. The game has to know where they are to show them properly, after all.
– Instead of memory, some look at the network traffic and do essentially the same thing, reading the updates the game is getting about where other players are.

Anonymous 0 Comments

In order for online games to work, they need to send every player all the other players coordinates.

If it only sent you the coordinates of players you can see, then someone could enter your view, but not load in until we’ll after they are supposed to be in view.

Aim bots can take those coordinates and your own position and point your crosshairs right at where the other player’s head is.

As for wall hacks, it just takes the other’s players coordinates and display a silhouette of the player on your screen after it has rendered the wall. Normally things thay are further away get rendered first, so if something is supposed to be in front of it, it can get rendered second and overwrite the further away object. This is also how spectators are able to see players through walls, or if there’s a game that shows your own silhouette when you are behind a wall and have a 3rd person camera