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Game Hacking – Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC)

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Re: Game Hacking – Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC)

#101
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Win32 API mouse input and trigger a mouse click in Windows when crosshair on enemy head (more likely when crosshair is within enemy head position).

That would require a lot more than editing memory offsets though.

No they just read the memory. The whole point of an external cheat is to only read memory. They can still use Win32 to send inputs.

Re: Game Hacking – Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC)

#102
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, VAC handles Cheat Engine and the like very well. You won’t get banned for simply having them open, only for having them attached to the game, which I think is reasonable.

I used to use CheatEngine on single player games that I ran through Steam, and I don't recall Steam having a problem with that at the time. Not sure if it's changed, but it was pretty reasonable. Never used it on Multiplayer games though.

[deleted]

Re: Game Hacking – Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC)

#103
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Win32 API mouse input and trigger a mouse click in Windows when crosshair on enemy head (more likely when crosshair is within enemy head position).

That would require a lot more than editing memory offsets though.

In Source Engine games, your inputs are stored in a struct ("usercmd", if I remember correctly) before being sent to the server in a client tick. You can modify that struct, a mouse click there is a bit flip on one of the fields. Rotation and movements are float fields. Modifying that struct makes your client send the "inputs" without a need to actually "call" anything.

Re: Game Hacking – Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC)

#104

Years ago for educational purposes I decided to venture down understanding how easy/difficult it was to create a hack for Counterstrike. After just a few hours of watching YouTube tutorials and translating what I could grasp from C/C# into JavaScript (the only language I knew at the time), I had a working Node.js executable that edited memory offsets (using data from hazedumper[1]), letting me see enemies through wal…

I'll never understand what people actually get out of cheating in games. I'll admit I've tried it a few times just for giggles (way back in the Age of Empires II/MSN Gaming Zone days), but the novelty quickly wears off and then it's just not even fun anymore. There must be some very interesting psychology behind this.

I was a cheat developer and I did hang out with cheaters and other developers. I'm surprised people in this thread haven't mentioned one big motivation for cheating yet. Plain old trolling, making other people mad at you, making them insult you in chat, etc.

There were TF2 bots that autonomously queued for the game's casual matches, spammed the chat, aimbotted and made the game generally unplayable for a while, you could host a bunch of them on a not so beefy computer and make them queue separately or together.

One of the features of those bots was streaming the chat logs from the matches into Discord/Telegram channels for cheaters/bot hosters to laugh at and make compilations of. It was funny and entertaining to see people having their moods ruined for no reason.

In game (TF2 specifically), when I see cheaters, they are usually also extremely annoying/purposely abrasive in other terms as well - frequent use of racial, transphobic, homophobic slurs, furry/anime/my little pony profile pictures, blatantly cheating while denying it, general smugness - they are trying to maximize the negative reactions they can get out of you. I'm really ashamed to have once been like that and I'm really glad that I grew out of it. It was absolutely not a healthy way to have fun for myself, and not a great community to spend time in (a lot of cheaters pretend to be extremely bigoted for a reaction, but some are genuinely like that). I met some genuinely good, talented people there, but they didn't stay involved with the cheating community for long, and eventually I left it too.

Re: Game Hacking – Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC)

#105

Years ago for educational purposes I decided to venture down understanding how easy/difficult it was to create a hack for Counterstrike. After just a few hours of watching YouTube tutorials and translating what I could grasp from C/C# into JavaScript (the only language I knew at the time), I had a working Node.js executable that edited memory offsets (using data from hazedumper[1]), letting me see enemies through wal…

I'll never understand what people actually get out of cheating in games. I'll admit I've tried it a few times just for giggles (way back in the Age of Empires II/MSN Gaming Zone days), but the novelty quickly wears off and then it's just not even fun anymore. There must be some very interesting psychology behind this.

Because the average joe needs the sense of achievement. Lots of people have near zero success in life, or power above something, and this is their supplement.

Plus most of the modern multiplayer games, especially fpses, are centered around a few individuals who have skills above the herd or they are playing by different rules (meaning of this is up to you...) and everyone else is just filler so that these above average players can "harvest" them. Just like Bodybuilding. You have the top notch competitors who everyone tries to imitate. And that is what sells the supplements, while all they buy is an illusion that one day they can achieve the same physique.

So let's say you have Apex Legends where well known players show how they literally obliterate everyone else. So the matchmaking (which is deliberately shit) sends these "predators" to hunt the prey, who are essentially sheeps.

People watch these streamers and try to imitate or get to know how to be at the skill level they have (which is near impossible for several reasons, I'd rather not explain). So the whole business centers around these outstanding persons, and the sheep buy the shiny digital bullshit, thinking that might elevate them to the "bigname" monkey's level.

Re: Game Hacking – Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC)

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll never understand what people actually get out of cheating in games. I'll admit I've tried it a few times just for giggles (way back in the Age of Empires II/MSN Gaming Zone days), but the novelty quickly wears off and then it's just not even fun anymore. There must be some very interesting psychology behind this.

It's pretty simple, nowadays the ONLY way to have fun in most multiplayer games is to win by any means. Outside of a few games like minecraft, every other game is designed around winning. 6 of the most played games on steam right now are some combination of competitive FPS / pvp survival or Dota 2. All of these games give you way more rewards for winning over just casually playing so over time the community is incent…

I saw a forum interaction: "game is not fun, always losing" with the singular predictable response of course being "get good".

But if the complainant actually got good then all that did was reverse the roles...

Re: Game Hacking – Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC)

#107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In games where available weapons/gear depends on some global "level", this could be a way to get your desired weapons without having to grind for weeks/months. I guess a silver lining of "pay to win" games is that you can now pay to avoid that. I remember trying to hack the levelling-up mechanism on Crysis 2 - it worked by sending your post-game stats (client-side) to a master server, so editing those stats in memory…

I wish more games let folks choose to grind for things or just have everything unlocked without grinding. I already have a job, I just want to play a game without another grind. I know some people love the grind, but I don't, I much prefer the L4D style "play what you want, how you want".

It's a nice idea, but it won't be applicable to all games...

I'm thinking of Ark:Survival Evolved here, where the grind on 'official' servers is insane - for example taming a Wyvern required you to be online more or less every two hours for three days. On the unofficial servers these were downtuned so you could do things a bit more easily.

But when we briefly ran our own server and realised that we could use god-powers to get the stuff we wanted without the grind... it turned out there wasn't really anything of a game left.

Re: Game Hacking – Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC)

#108
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would require a lot more than editing memory offsets though.

No they just read the memory. The whole point of an external cheat is to only read memory. They can still use Win32 to send inputs.

How do you determine whether the mouse is over an enemy head? Is there some variable the engine maintains for that?

Re: Game Hacking – Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC)

#109
post #17

Remote Code Execution like loading DLLs from a server and executing them sounds like malware.

It's "just" an automatic update, like Chrome, etc. It's one entry-point among others for RCE. If tomorrow NSA wants to gather any files on your computer, all they need to do is to ask Google to push an update for you through Google Omaha. https://epic.org/wp-content/uploads/privacy/nsa/foia/NSA-Goo... Google and NSA have a "partnership". Valve could also have such partnership in theory, through VAC, though unlikely i…

Valve has the same feature - it is deployed on more .ru machines than chrome.

Re: Game Hacking – Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC)

#110
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No they just read the memory. The whole point of an external cheat is to only read memory. They can still use Win32 to send inputs.

How do you determine whether the mouse is over an enemy head? Is there some variable the engine maintains for that?

There is a list of entities in memory, models have "bones" for animation purposes, knowing the address of entity in memory you can find out if it's an enemy player (compare team ids), where the head bone origin is, and you also can read the view angles of your own player to see where you're looking. The tricky part would be doing a ray cast to see that you can actually hit the enemy and not shoot a wall - internal cheats can just call builtin game functions, externals can't.
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