[psgdev]

Sending copies of fake character data isn't a thing because there eventually has to be a flag that tells the client to not render that character that the client hack could simply read.

It should be clear that servers already do not trust the client, they do many checks hence you don't see teleportation hacks in games like Counter strike or Valorant. There used to be cheats in the counter strike games like "nospread" where you could have 100% pixel perfect aiming but that was because the the client was trusted however now in most games with some randomness in bullet spray patterns the random seed is different between the client and server so something like "nospread" are no longer possible.

You might be stumbling upon "fog of war" that is not sending data to a client unless the enemy player is close to visible which is a thing. It's widely used and I'd say effective in MOBA/MMORPG/RTS games however in FPS games fog of war is many times more computationally expensive which matters at the scale of games these days. It has been a thing for a long time in counter strike with server plugins like "SMAC anti wall hack" or "server side occlusion culling" however the implementations sometimes have not been perfect and require significantly stronger servers. https://github.com/87andrewh/CornerCullingSourceEngine

Riot games also implements fog of war at scale in Valorant and has a blog post covering some of the issues they overcame. One thing you can see the gif at the end of the blog post, even though fog of war is effective it is only effective in reducing the effectiveness of wall hacks and wall hacks still provide a significant advantage. https://technology.riotgames.com/news/demolishing-wallhacks-...

[mjevans]

There would be no such flag. The clients would cull the characters that are out of position. Yes that's some client load for the culling, but it's probably less overhead than 'anti cheat'.

The important reason I suggested MULTIPLE clones of a character and only forking new paths off of existing characters in the world is that it should eliminate any information oracle about which of those is the real character.

[psgdev]

There is a high level of server load for this as well, not only placing these fake characters but making them move and act like real human players so they are believed and then culling them (server would cull them not the client to be clear because how would the client know to cull them without a flag?) only right before they are visible while taking account of lag (ping), interp, packet loss etc..

I definitely could see someone games doing this as a one-off to just catch specific cheaters they are suspicious of to confirm they are cheating (Many 3rd party anti-cheats in counter strike and the 1st party valorant anti-cheat do manual bans based on replay reviews) but also since they already do fog of war someone with wall hack seeing an enemy player pop in for 1 frame before disappearing would make it not effective on a wide scale.