Just today I was thinking about the theory of making untrusted hardware run trusted software.

Imagine all the things that would be possible. Truly decentralised servers, where the end user can run server side logic.

Aren't Playstation games doing exactly this?

The playstation hardware+firmware+software solution has many layers of trust.

Something I was thinking about just today is using a distributed message bus for networking for competitive games (I had NATS in mind, since I've been playing around with that a lot lately), and having non-players running validation and cheat detection on the messages in real time. I think some incentivization could be added to essentially reward "proof of work" for validating games do or do not have cheaters.

I wonder if game streaming will become one way of kicking off cheaters if this arms race gets really bad. All of the code is stored and executed on trusted systems, you would only need to sanitize control inputs which is a significantly easier task.

It would definitely stop most cheating but at a huge cost: performance. You're not running on bare metal anymore and that would be a non-starter for competitive games.

Is it really a problem is all competitors have the same performance hit?

For an FPS? Completely unplayable. Wouldn't be surprised if nausea became a widespread issue - vsync is enough to get me there, let alone network lag on mouse input.

Imagine all Olympic athletes were to start competing with an AR headset on, which added 5ms of lag to their vision. Would it be a problem if they were all forced to use it?

Not sure I understand your point. There are a lots of rules and regulations on what Olympic athletes are allowed to do. What they eat, what they inject, what they wear. All of that is to make the competition as fair as possible and to have a level playing field so as to make for an interesting competition, to draw viewers, which is what the sponsors care about.

For people watching esports, they need to believe that the game isn't rigged and people aren't cheating. A couple more scandals and the sponsors are going to require cloud-gaming just to keep viewers.

My point is that it would change the game into a different one, with a different skill-set, and forcing everyone through the same restriction wouldn't make it any better.

And even if I disregard all this, cloud gaming wouldn't solve the problem, as hardware cheats that don't run on the gaming machine would still be usable.

No, I don't think it would be a problem, which is why I'm asking the question. Human eye has a 13ms latency according to google and yet it doesn't stop Olympic athletes from existing. I don't see what making the latency 18ms instead of 13ms changes if everybody has the same.

> you would only need to sanitize control inputs

I'm pretty far from the multiplayer game dev scene, but isn't this close to how a lot of multi player sync works anyway? Just* distribute everyone's control inputs and have them all run a deterministic simulation. And then I guess you would run the same input cheat detection on all the honest clients, which are hopefully the majority... Is this impossible or did I just reinvent something that already exists?

* Yes, I know. But at least I know determinism is possible.

A common cheat in FPS games watches the rendered frame and sends mouse input to aim+fire. The server being authoritative doesn’t help in this situation.

These sort of cheats are often entirely out of band, running on a mirror of the video stream on a second machine, and transmitting user input back via USB. Clientside snooping won’t catch it either.

Yep.. "DMA" direct memory access.. reading the HDMI output, simulating controllers.. it all exists.

The google term is "hardware cheats"

That seems like it ought to be detectable statistically, unless the cheater adds jitter to the inputs to mimic human hands on a controller. And if not, it seems literally impossible to prevent so you may as well give up.

(As an aside, hearing about this kind of setup really makes me wonder what the point is of cheating. Prestige? Among what set of peers?)

> And if not, it seems literally impossible to prevent so you may as well give up.

But if you give up, and your game's competitors don't, players will switch games. The way I see it, a game developer anti-cheat goals isn't necessarily to have no cheaters, but definitely to have less cheaters than your competitor.

Determinism as a networking model is rare now a days(Still used though!) client/server is a better solution most of the time. And having determinism means the cheater could see everything. But having a deterministic sim means you must insert the cheating in the distributed to everyone inputs... So -if- you could detect cheated input reliably this could be useful.. This route probably isn't worth pursing for just cheating deterrence alone though.

Not only in China, Valve for example develops VACnet. For now it's not really that useful, which kinda gets amplified by banning in waves, to make it harder for cheat developers to adapt early, but keeps cheaters playing for longer.

Gonna keep an eye on it, but I'm not to sure if it'll be the solution to this issue...