Server-rendered multiplayer games with Lua (no client code)

Re:Server-rendered multiplayer games with Lua (no client code) by ModernMech on Sunday January 04, 2026 @10:29PM (#46495051)

I had students build this kind of thing in 2020 by screenshotting the game and processing it with a standard OpenCV pipeline. No GenAI needed.

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Re:Server-rendered multiplayer games with Lua (no client code) by throwaway894345 on Monday January 05, 2026 @10:11AM (#46499657)

Thank you for educating me. How does OpenCV work from the perspective of recognizing things in an image? Is there some kind of underlying model there that learns what a target looks like or not?

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Re:Server-rendered multiplayer games with Lua (no client code) by ModernMech on Monday January 05, 2026 @10:32AM (#46499948)

The way they did it, they were writing an aimbot. So the pipeline was:

- take a screenshot

- run massive skeletal detection on it to get the skeletons of any humanoids

- of those skeletons, pick a target closest to the player

- for that target, get coordinates of head node

- run a PID to control the cursor to where the head node is located

- move the camera one frame, repeat the whole process. If you can fit that pipeline to 16ms it can run in real time.

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Re:Server-rendered multiplayer games with Lua (no client code) by throwaway894345 on Tuesday January 06, 2026 @04:06PM (#46518746)

Wow, that's fascinating. Were they able to fit the whole thing inside the 16ms frame?

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Re:Server-rendered multiplayer games with Lua (no client code) by ModernMech on Tuesday January 06, 2026 @06:38PM (#46520481)

oh yeah, with little problem, especially with a GPU it's not hard at all.

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