this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2025
198 points (100.0% liked)
PC Gaming
12069 readers
691 users here now
For PC gaming news and discussion. PCGamingWiki
Rules:
- Be Respectful.
- No Spam or Porn.
- No Advertising.
- No Memes.
- No Tech Support.
- No questions about buying/building computers.
- No game suggestions, friend requests, surveys, or begging.
- No Let's Plays, streams, highlight reels/montages, random videos or shorts.
- No off-topic posts/comments, within reason.
- Use the original source, no clickbait titles, no duplicates. (Submissions should be from the original source if possible, unless from paywalled or non-english sources. If the title is clickbait or lacks context you may lightly edit the title.)
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Running around in the sky at hyperspeed is a fine example of the kind of cheating that can easily be prevented server side and would be impossible if your game was designed correctly.
Personally I have no interest in keeping a Windows system around at all, so anything that relies on its kernel internals is never going to be useful for people like me. But that's not the only problem with "kernel level" anticheat. Many people who are willing to run actual Windows do so because they find it useful for more than playing just one game, and do not want its security and integrity compromised in order to temporarily slow down the cheaters for one lazy game dev who can't be bothered to find better ways.
Games have no business messing around with the OS kernel. For people who know things about computers, it just feels wrong — in much the same way as forcibly locking everyone inside at night in order to prevent nocturnal burglaries would be wrong, even if it was completely effective.
It's a big complicated topic. Here's one link to help you get started if you actually want to learn about it: https://www.cse.cuhk.edu.hk/~cslui/PUBLICATION/detect_cheat.pdf
There are many possible approaches, depending on the specifics of the game and the level of effort one's willing to put into it. Plenty of techniques to choose from. Messing with the client-side OS kernel is one that will soon be looked back on as a ridiculous dead-end approach that wasted a lot of people's time until we all realized it was futile, sort of like the way they used to use deliberate sector misalignments to produce disk i/o errors to prevent people copying floppy disks.