I hope we get absolutely no solution for it.

We don't need kernel level anti-cheat.

We never have. We never will. We didnt need it on windows, and we dont need it on Linux

The fact that there are wildly popular games out there, that don't use it, that successfully control cheating to a level that you barely experience/see it, is proof of that.. its not only proof of it, it should be the absolute entropic death of the goddamn topic.

The only reason to want a kernel level anticheat is so they can poke around in everything you do and send it all home.They get to police their game... They don't get to police and monitor my whole fucking life and everything I do on my computer.

If I wanted big brother monitoring everything I do and sending it all back home, I'd be using Windows 11.

Any company that says they need this for their game is lying, and deserves bankruptcy and death.

The real answer is you either make the game only playable between friends or you have to hire moderators and generate report logs. None of this kernel shit is necessary people just dont want to pay people to work anymore. This is supposed to be entertainment, its not worth the spy network they're building inside of it to "stop cheaters".

Part of that is perfectly possible. In counterstrike some 3rd party matchmaking services do the visibility check already on the server side. iirc it's literally a variable that can be changed. But Valve has no intersest in wasting those extra CPU cycles on their servers. Same goes for all other BS anticheats. It's much cheaper to have the clients do all the work.

I figured this out as an 18 yo fucking around with GMod, making gamemodes that were designed to thwart exploits and hacks.

If a professional gamedev can't figure this out, that's a skill issue, or a manager who won't listen to the devs that do not have skill issues.

Every problem you have listed has a solution in proper game architecture and optimization, and latency compensation.

There are of course no 100% perfect solutions, but there are very, very good ones. You can't stop somebody that's gonna go to all the effort to set up a seperate box that does the aimbotting and hwid spoofs itself as not being there... oh well actually you can, overtime, with serverside analysis of games and gameplay.

Literally everything you've listed is a solved problem... its just that most devs don't think these will be problems untill they're halfway through making the game, and then its too late to make low level changes without fucking up the dev cycle set by management.

Basically, the answer to most of your questions is 'yes' or 'cleverly'.

There are publically available papers on all of this.

That doesn’t stop a client from rotating walls so they get culled and don’t appear,

You're talking about FPS games, a subset of competitive games. This, and the other things you've brought up aren't a problem for other types of games.

Most types of RTS and 2D fighting games will not have any of the problems you've listed.

But for FPS games specifically, the server should not report player location unless the player is visible. If people elsewhere in this thread are right, the server already does this with ray tracing. Not the fancy lighting stuff, just the basic "draw a line and see if X is hit" stuff.

And most FPS games will already have that logic built in, as they tend to use ray tracing for bullet hit detection, often referred to as 'hitscan'.

So no amount of wall invisibility will have an effect.

or modifying shaders to outline enemies,

IMO the game should give all players the ability to turn on outlines for enemies/teammates anyways. People who have difficulties parsing colors should have that as an accessibility option.

Marvel Rivals already does this, and allows the player to choose the color that most stands out to them.

or using coordinate data to run a map/radar

Not a problem if the server doesn't report player locations unless they're visibly.

and auto aim bot.

This one is admittedly a little harder, but again not impossible to deal with. Chess sites already do this with ELO tracking and matching moves against the best possible move.

If on Wednesday you're playing like an ELO 600, and Thursday you're suddenly playing like an ELO 3200, you're cheating. In an FPS that would look like going from an accuracy of 12% to an accuracy of 100%.

Most of the time I think you can let the community self police, but for competitive play you probably can’t stop all forms of cheating.

Sure, but instead of being passive and using kernel level spyware like most AAA studios like to do, doing the basic sever side authority checks are far more effective.

That chess guy used a remote controlled butt plug to cheat, people will always find a way.

And he was caught. Do you think we should be checking every chess grandmasters butthole going forward?

Same reason GabeN switched.

Took him a while, though. Remember that he was originally employed by Microsoft and when he founded Valve and they licensed the Quake 1 engine, among the first things they did was to port the engine to Microsoft Direct3D (luckily they kept the OpenGL renderer because back then Direct3D ran worse).

GabeN actually used to work for Microsoft, untill he realized more people had DOOM installed on home PCs, than... Windows.

He helped basically port DOOM to Windows 95 / DirectX, realized you can run games on PCs and there was a market for it, therefore, found Valve.

Tim “steam is a monopoly and must be destroyed because of it”

Also Tim “windows being a monopoly is fine actually and we should do nothing to support alternatives”

Then he cries about valve having a monopoly after he can't catch up.

You are not wrong. This is a good take and something to keep in mind.