- Aimbot
An aimbot (sometimes called "auto-aim") is a type of
computer game bot used inmultiplayer first-person shooter games to provide varying levels oftarget acquisition assistance to the player. Since it gives the user an advantage over unaided players, it is normally considered a cheat; however, valid use for aiming software does exist for players with physical disabilities, whom would otherwise not be able to enjoy an appropriate level of game play.Aimbots have varying levels of effectiveness. Some aimbots can do all of the aiming and shooting, requiring the user to move into a position where the opponents are visible; this level of automation usually makes it difficult to hide an aimbot--for example, the player might make inhumanly fast turns that always end with his or her crosshairs targeting an opponent's head. Highly-skilled players are frequently accused of using such programs, and numerous anti-cheat mechanisms have been employed by companies such as Valve to prevent their use and thus avoid such accusations.
Some games, including "
GoldenEye 64 ", "", "Timesplitters ", "Half-Life 2 ", and "Unreal Tournament 2004 ", have "auto-aim" as an option in the game. This is not the same as an aimbot; it simply helps the user to aim when playing offline against computer opponents usually by allowing gunfire to hit so as long as the crosshair is within a certain area of the target. It is common for console FPS games to have this feature to balance out the lack of precision Fact|date=June 2008, compared to using a mouse on a PC game, in using analogue sticks to aim.Graphics Driver Based Aimbots
A step up in potency are graphic driver based aimbots. These types of hacks hijack control to the current API used to render a game's graphics to the screen to locate players and other objects. Once a player has been identified and tagged as the target, a series of calculations are performed to take the three dimensional location of a single coordinate within this model and convert it to a two dimensional set of coordinates. This pair of x and y values is then used in conjunction with some input API to move the cursor to the specified location, thus causing the player to aim at the target.
Colour Aimbots
Colour aimbots are an old and easy method to hacking - they can work in any game that supports coloured models. As colour aimbots don't hook the game or modify any file, most anti-cheats don't detect them. Despite being lower in performance than hooking aimbots, colour aimbots are fast enough to be used as cheats. They however have disadvantages - because the detection is purely colour coded, the aimbot may aim at textures that contain the colour, at dead bodies, parts of the environment, the flag in
Capture the Flag , or at team mates after switching teams.Colour aimbots work by scanning the entire or parts of the players screen for the selected RGB value. Once a pixel of the colour is detected the aimbot will move the players mouse cursor to that pixel. As such, colour aimbots need more system resources than a standard aimbot.
There are versions that scan a smaller area around the players sight and activates this scan when the player presses a button. This type of colour aimbot does not require as much resources and is much harder to spot. It does require more skill on the part of users because they have to aim at least somewhat in the correct direction.
ee also
*
Cheating in online games
*Exploit (online gaming)
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