Hacker News Reader

Comment by phplovesong | Hacker News Reader

VAC is actually an AI based anticheat. I guess IF (a big if) it ever gets good enough it will be better than any kernel level AC, because it analyzes the gameplay, not the inputs, meaning a DMA cheat would also be caught.

But so far that still seems to be miles away.

View on HN

"VAC" is a catch-all term for all of Valve's anti-cheating mechanisms.

The primary one is a standard user-mode software module, that does traditional scanning.

The AI mechanism you're referring to is these days referred to as "VAC Live" (previously, VACNet). The primary game it is deployed on is Counter-Strike 2. From what we understand, it is a very game-dependent stack, so it is not universally deploy-able.

I don't think that's what VAC is. I think VAC just looks for known cheat patterns in memory and such, and if it finds indisputable proof of cheating it marks a player for banning in the next wave. Maybe there is some ML involved in finding these patterns but I think it's very strictly controlled by humans to prevent fase positives. That's why VAC bans are irreversible, false positives are supposed to be impossible.

Valve has some AI detection stuff for CS2, but it’s remarkably ineffective. VAC itself delivers small DLLs that get manual mapped by Steam service, do some analysis and send that to Valve (at least to the best of my knowledge, there may be more logic implemented in Valve’s games or in Steam/Steam service).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com