why is hitbox hacking still a thing?

Discussion in 'PlanetSide 2 Gameplay Discussion' started by iDante, Feb 21, 2019.

  1. NotziMad


    ohhh I was confused, I should said why but you made things clear for me, I was confused by the how the hitboxes were "increased". But it was just to show and make the video, cause obviously in game, a cheater would decrease it, thanks :)
  2. iller

    Automating "anti cheat" NEVER WORKS in the long term. All it does is create a nonstop arms race to see who can write the best "Bypassing" injectors for their DLL hooks. And it works even less when the GMs only scan the people who get reported the most through Customer-Contact instead of the actual in-game reporting tool. (which leaves out TONS of subtle cheaters)

    And this studio has already ANNOUNCED part of the real solution! They've Expanded the 3rd person / 4th wall Camera SPECTATING features to people who apply for it. It's not just for Wrel or famous youtubers anymore. Anyone with a good long honest record can apply for limited Privs there

    NOW all they need to do, is perfect it to record in the 1st person view of those other players and spit out Demo Files (basically a Logfile of every Vector change for every person in the immediate area) that we can spectate as "Deputy Marshals" in a cheater-reporting program sort of like being private Server admins on Steam except that we would still need to send in those Demo (log) Files to RPG. ...And then their GM's could look at the part we "highlighted" for viewing where the cheaters are clearly Aim-Snapping or looking through walls too often, or their aim Vectors aren't lined up entirely on the GRAPHICAL geometry box of the heads they're clicking on.
    • Up x 1
  3. iller

    I could probably explain it (as someone who's actually written Cheats, created Asset hacks, and also been a "white hat" Admin for a couple of gaming servers).

    There's several pieces of Geometry that goes into a player model. First is the bounding box which you don't even really need to know anything about even if you're an Animator. Then there's the Collision Hull which is sometimes also used for Melee-attack detection. And then there's the Interpolated Hitbox clone, along with the actual Server side Hitbox. You can see these last two demonstrated in a slightly older Engine (but more frequently updated ironically enough) in this video here:



    You'll immediately notice it's not just 1 box, it's actually a bunch of smaller boxes all stacked together that are "Parented" to the bone system more or less. What's happening now days, is that the cheat makers are manipulating the packet data of the "Lag Compensated" Hitbox on their own client and "juicing" the interpolation negotiation loopholes that have ALWAYS been a huge security vulnerability for this company and especially this proprietary Engine that they used for the Hit detection and Netcode.

    ^ (some people actually experience this really often on accident if they don't have enough ram or have a mem leak and jump out of a vehicle in a way that then causes them to fall through the world)

    See the Cheater doesn't actually have to match 100% what's happening on the Server for these boxes. It would be too expensive for DayBreak (Latency wise) to double verify all of this information including the data VOLUMES at-time-of-impact that are being used by the client to calculate where in the game-space that player had his vectors aimed and THEN make the servers run a redundancy check on every single bullet striking every single hitbox on that skeleton. This is the same reason they'll never "solve" No-Clipping.... it's just TOO expensive (for DBG at least) to do a redundant check on whether every single Bounding Box is adhering to the intended client-side Physics 100% of every single tick-rate, LET ALONE every single Frame of gameplay.


    TL;DR -- they have ways of messing up their own hitboxes Server-side (which AFFECTS YOU) by making the server believe it has "fallen behind" the cheating client's suddenly super fast falsely-reported Framerate & player couching/zigzagging, while also using lag-wizard scripts to make the models of the people they're shooting at move in a perfectly straight line for a whole second, or just have larger Critical-Regions than the Asset Checksum reports at its less frequent update rate
    • Up x 3
  4. NotziMad


    thanks iler :)
  5. RastaMoose

    There is a cheater abusing this cheat right now on NC Miller. They've been playing for less than a year(they don't have enough directive points to have played multiple characters a considerable amount) and already have reached the top 0.5% for kpm, hsr, and accuracy for almost every weapon they have used and have almost a 6 infantry k/d. At first I thought it was aimbot or recoil compensation software until they shot me full auto without missing a single headshot from 40ish meters when about 3 pixels of my head were exposed. Pretty ******* insane for a new player.

    You know what's sad? I'm fairly sure this guy played in outfit wars too.
  6. TRspy007

    As you can observe from the youtube videos, the battleeye and customer service do their jobs.

    If it amuses them to create a new character every day so they can rack up one or 2 miserable kills before they get banned again, so be it.


    It's a misconception that everyone is a hacker. Clientside, latency and poor netcode causes very funny things, but I can assure that there's less than a dozen cheaters like this across all servers combined, and they get caught really quick.


    Sometimes, you just have to admit the guy is better than you, has a better rig or is simply playing from Mars. But spreading hackusations like it is the in game norm to hack is pretty silly. Really, if everyone hacked who would be raising these issues? The very fact you're being paranoid and spreading misinformation just strengthens the fact that cheating is an anomaly.



    It reminds me of this dude the other day, who kept on accusing everyone who killed him of being a hacker, while proceeding to tell us he was so good people sent him hackusations.


    Really guys, barely anyone cheats, the ones that do get caught. Quit being silly, there's way more important issues to deal with.
  7. NotziMad



    I'm really not so sure about that TRspy007. Though this particular topic is one that has always existed with pretty much any pvp game (and I've been playing pvp games since 2006, in the early years, even competitivly). But even on these specific forums, this topic has been discussed over and over and over since 2013..

    You always get the same profiles posting the same stuff, for example :

    -> cheaters everywhere omg !
    -> I've never seen a cheater you must be dreaming!
    -> Look this video hes shooting people from underground even when they are inside spawn!
    -> Yeah there are some cheaters (that's you :p), but not that many, all those you see in the video get banned fast

    and so on and so on etc.

    At the end of the day, way I see it, is the following reasoning :

    There are cheaters, that's obvious, but when people think of them, thing of the guys that couldn't possibly not be cheating, (like shooting you while you're in the speawn).

    That, and here I agree with you, that's not a lot of cheaters, you don't see them very often, and when they do, they only last a couple hours if only because all the people they kill report them.

    But the thing people forget, and without having ever cheated myself (except in single player games) is that if a player can cheat so that he kills everyone from under ground and inside a enemy spawn, don't you think that this would also mean that if that player chose to, he could cheat in ways that are less dramatic? Less obvious? Less likely to get them banned?

    This is a 7-8 year old game, people have been cheating in it from the start, you'd think by now that they may have developped cheats that they could use without getting banned?

    Just a quick illustration (I have no idea how this works, but let's imagine) if you could set the preferences in your aimbot so that instead of hitting 100% head shots, it mirrored the behaviour of a good FPS player, how would anyone every detect that?

    Point is, cheaters people talk about the most are cheaters who obviously know that they will get caught, but without having the stats, I'm willing to bet that these players represent only a tiny minority of all the players who cheat, since most of them don't get caught.

    After all, appart from having a few hours of fun, there's no point in cheating if you get caught is there? And knowing how many of these players there are or not, is pretty much impossible in my opinion, but you could speculate that yeah, there's a ton.
    • Up x 5
  8. Towie

    Good post and I agree - in fact i'd go as far as to say that only those people who really want to be 'discovered' actually get banned these days (for the purposes of advertising a hack or notoriety or just for the lols). Even coming up with very humorous names, taunting PS2 and the community.

    DBG have done a lot but the cheats are way ahead. Stopping the file check thread ? Bypassing Battleye ? They are public. So someone who wants to be a bit sneaky and not obvious can get away with it like forever. As many folks have been doing for years.

    My only light at the end of the tunnel is that most people don't do this, they want to play a game for the challenge on a level playing field and get a sense of achievement, no matter what they actually achieve. Then there are the scumbags but alas - there will always be scumbags who need to feel a level of achievement or adoration no matter how it is earned.
    • Up x 1
  9. TRspy007





    II think if it finds the big cheats, it can find the smaller ones as well. I mean, in the end, manipulated code is manipulated code. Also, with all the reports even good players are getting in game, I'm assuming some have had detailed investigations from the customer service team. I mean, I know/knew a few players like this that would mop the floor with a whole room of dudes, and I'm sure a few of those dudes reported them for cheating every fight, which would leave a pretty high number at the end of the day (The team does investigate, one of my friends learned the hard way).

    So no, I don't think that there are "subtle" cheaters, and if there are it's likely they get caught a few weeks later. Many of these players just live on this game, and once they take a break from it, even I can kill them fairly easily, when they would've wiped out entire platoons before (or did they forget they needed aimbot to play the game)?


    Even if for some reason these "subtle" cheaters are out there and don't get caught, if they somehow modify their aimbot to mimic a good player (which I'd be really curious to see how that works) then you're basically just fighting a "good" player, and you do have a chance of winning, just like you would when fighting a player that's actually good. So it wouldn't impact gameplay that much, if their cheats are meant to not have a great impact on gameplay so they don't get caught in the first place.
  10. Towie

    You should check some of the old Hagsclub PS2 videos out.

    Hacks came early to PS2 but they were mostly very crude. Things like teleporting to a player (which you can still see today occasionally) isn't going to fool anyone.

    Same with aimbot - someone getting constant headshots or 100% accuracy is easily picked up. So the hack writers made modifications to make it much harder to spot - with adjustable aim assist, bone targeting (so not all headshots), no-turn hits (early aimbots would 'snap' to targets - again easy to pick up and comical to watch). The sophistication they achieved was incredible.

    With the asset modifications, just think how difficult it would be to pickup someone who increased the head hitbox by 10% - yet think how much benefit that might give you ? Same with ESP - seems minor but can help tremendously without much suspicion (except cloaked infils being found very easily and yelling cheat).10% faster running anyone ?

    Then of course we have auto-shoot. In fact there was an early AHK script to do just that based on spotting the enemy dorito in a certain screen area and hitting fire - and auto recoil adjustment. Crude but somewhat effective.


    Even today you'll still see people doing the stupid stuff - we're a very long way from being able to block them from even entering the game.
  11. TRspy007




    Incredible indeed. I'd really have to see this in action to believe it. Please post a video of you doing this for a week, and let us know what happens.
  12. Towie

    Well I personally cannot STAND cheats - but some people like to video their 'fun'.

    Hags-club you can find easily enough on youtube - more worrying is this one as it's so recent:


    He had 5 responses on the thread - 3 of which were asking how to buy (which makes my blood boil) I suspect this is the same hack used for flying a Sunderer around recently.

    If you want to see what is possible with asset manipulation:https://streamable.com/qlgn5

    There's loads of videos from people on the receiving end too - saddens me that a minority of people do this.


    DBG have done way more than most people think to stamp this out but they just keep on coming.
    • Up x 3
  13. Johannes Kaiser

    There are some weird things that can be done without cheats.
    1) Latency can cause extremely weird scenarios, I once was shot by a guy with his back truned to me, I messaged him and (unless he was a quite convincing liar) he killed me during a server hiccup with a last hit, the other person doing the majority of the damage wasn't even shown in the kill screen. Probably because the second during which all that happened ended up in suspense (hence the kill with the back turned). And no, he didn't just tell me that, we worked it out together, as he had had similar experiences around the time.
    2) You can drop any vehicle with an ANVIL on a Biolab landing pad and then drive it inside. Easy to yell "cheater", but since this stuff was implemented it is actually quite easy to pull off without using any cheats, abuses or wiggling vehicles on Galaxies. Just click the drop and profit. They might want to use no deploy zones for ANVILs, just an idea...
    3) Some people play with bad ping (due to long distances from the server with bad connection inbetween or just potatoe internet. If they get used to that over years of experience they can appear like they cheat, because they know how to work around their bad ping and convert it from a nuisance into an asset. I personally can't stand these people, but on the other hand I kind of understand that when you are involuntarily stuck with a bad connection that you can either try to live with it or leave, and some want to play regardless.

    Not saying there aren't any hackers, there certainly are (encountered enough people in walls, turrets in walls, absurdly accurate people, people appearing out of thin air and so on), but some of the wonky and suspicious **** can be achieved (voluntary or not) by methods that are not cheats.
    • Up x 2
  14. TRspy007



    As I pointed out, they don't last long. If creating a new character to kill a few dudes illegally every day is fun for them, great.
    • Up x 1
  15. gunnner10

    ^ Defending the "No Hacks Here" Narrative. Me thinks TRspy may be a hacker and getting everyone to look the other way :rolleyes: