> I keep seeing these mentioned, and today I saw a load of people quit our > server after accusing someone of using one. > > So I was wondering what they actually are, how they work, and if they're > detectable (and stoppable).
Reductor can probably tell you all about aimbots! ;) Aimbots are basically bots that "help" the player aim at enemies. They do this by constantly adjusting the view angles of the player from the client side. Back in the Quake I days, the aimbots intercepted the network packets and made modifications to the raw network data to "help" the player aim at enemies. With Half-Life (since the network stream is encrypted) the aimbots work by hooking into the client.dll loading and adjusting the view angles of the player by modifying these entities directly. Many of the anticheating attempts try to detect players that are using aimbots. The ones that are hooked into the client DLL will have a DLL of their own. If you know what this aimbot DLL filename is and what directory it is located in, you can detect that. If the aimbot creates CVARs on the clientside, you can detect those as well. If the aimbot don't use CVARs (or names them randomly) and if the DLL file doesn't have a detectable filename, it make it much harder to tell if someone is using an aimbot. Valve's anticheating technology will supposedly make it more difficult to hook DLLs into the client.dll and make the client side application more secure. If someone is able to hack the network stream, unencrypt the packets, modify them, then reencrypt them, you'd be back to the oldschool Quake I aimbot problems once again. The best you could do in this case would be to kick people off of the server if their aim is "too good". Jeffrey "botman" Broome _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: http://list.valvesoftware.com/mailman/listinfo/hlcoders
