CS2 Fog Of War: Server-sided anti-wallhack occlusion culling for CS2 servers

This has been done before in both 1.6 as well as Source. I helped with some of these implementations back in the late-2000s when I was playing professionally and I even tried to kickstart an anti-cheat hardware solution about a decade ago[1].. spent way too much time working on some of these problems. The main issue with occlusion was slightly increased latency, visual jitter because of interpolation (especially around corners), and a few other more technical problems[2]. It's good enough for public servers, but not tenable in serious competition.

Cheating has always been a problem in FPSs, and it likely won't go away. That's why premier competitions have always been on LAN.

[1] https://www.pcgamer.com/introducing-gameref-the-anti-cheat-h...

[2] Hard to fully obfuscate audio sources, hard to obfuscate hitboxes since you still need them for collision checking (e.g. if a grenade bounces off an enemy player behind a wall—the server does not do all physics for all clients), and this is on top of the engine itself sometimes requiring actual entities, so you're stuck with these dummy entities in memory, and so on.

I wonder how often wall hacks are actually used in high-level competitive play by cheaters vs ESP. ESP seems like the better route to avoid manual review flagging suspicious activity. Audible cues (which this currently does not mitigate, and I'm not sure it can) are things that can genuinely separate players by skill and you'd think someone running such a cheat just has very good hearing.

>CS2FOW uses static baked map geometry. Dynamic occluders such as doors, breakables, props, smokes, particles, and projectiles are intentionally out of scope for now.

Market window on Mirage just became more powerful on these servers :)

Very cool project nonetheless.

Moving away from the technical solution space - I'm curious, have their been any games (or communities) with a high entry fee/deposit (e.g. $500 USD) to join kept in escrow and lost in the event you're discovered to be cheating?

There are plenty more questions like paying for mods/review, securing the money, paying for servers, etc.. but my basic question is if cost of entry exceeds cost of reward from cheating has ever been attempted in a game.

Apparently buying a new copy of a $10-20 game isn't enough to keep people away from cheats. Less so when there is prize money on the line or skins (e.g. CS2) worth $100k.

    > Does it cause pop-in when peeking?
    The goal is early reveal, not exact last-millisecond reveal.
    CS2FOW predicts using movement and ping, reveals enemies slightly before exact visibility, and keeps revealed enemies visible briefly. This intentionally leaks a small near-corner window to avoid late pop-in.

Why hasn't valve poured a billion or two on fixing this concept and implementing it?

Wallhack is locked into the DNA of CS for some reason. The most common defense by far is mass denial. For the great majority of players that seems to be good enough.

Why doesn't Valve implement this natively?

This is good. However, it still sends info about the players ~200ms ahead which still makes you lose.

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