Patent Discusses Preventing Wall-Hacking In Shooters Using Ray Tracing

Over the years, the multiplayer genre as a whole has grown significantly. Along with its growth and many improvements came the surging numbers of hackers. Anyone who is into multiplayer games must have faced hackers at least once. That feeling of frustration after losing a game due to hackers is undoubtedly painful, and to overcome that, companies have introduced new and advanced ways to deal with it.

Different gaming corporations have come up with different ways to deal with specific cheating methods. The two most popular software applications that are used to prevent hackers in games are Easy Anti-Cheat and BattlEye. Despite doing a good job at stopping hackers, they are limited. One of the most popular ways that hackers hack even with these two software applications is through wall-hacks.

If you are unaware of wall-hacks, then it’s a method of patching a game in such a way that the walls become invisible or non-solid. Wall-hacking has been around for as long as shooting games have. People come up with different methods to deal with the problem, but most fail.

Recently, we came across a patent that was filled by an unknown Canadian software company, TooMuchVoltage Software Inc., in January and published earlier this month. The patent claims to have a method and system that might be the next revolutionary way to deal with wall-hacks. The patent describes the method that can deal with wall-hacking using ray tracing technology to filter out data packets during a multiplayer gaming session.

The abstract for the patent states, “A method for preventing wall hacking by using ray tracing to filter data packets to be provided to a plurality of user devices during a video gaming session, each respective user device being associated with a respective player having a respective player geometry in the gaming session, the method being executed by at least one processing device, the at least one processing device being connected to the plurality of user devices.”

The method requires at least one device or more that is connected to the plurality of players in a gaming session. The process begins by feeding the device with the map information of the gaming session, which is then connected to players of that gaming session and receives information about their actions during the entire time of the said session.

Afterward, the method uses the information from the map and per-frame data from the player and generates a visibility matrix to feed the game server. Then, the method sends back that visibility matrix to the game itself. Lastly, the method runs the player’s frame-per-second data through the visibility matrix and transmits the packets accordingly.

This is just a brief explanation of a complicated process in the patent but the fact of the matter is that this method and system will theoretically help with wall-hacking in multiplayer shooting games. That said, the patent is filled by a rather small and unknown software company, so there’s not much credibility behind it.

However, the company has formerly worked on some intriguing projects, such as a technique that makes visibility buffer/deferred material rendering faster for rendering engines that use visibility buffers/material rendering without a DAIS buffer; one example of which is the rendering of Nanite geometry in Unreal Engine 5. Furthermore, the company also released its HighOmega technology which made it possible for getting denoised path-traced graphics without any RTX-compatible GPU.

While the claims regarding the prevention of wall-hacking using ray tracing technology seem ground-breaking in theory, the technology required to execute the method and system is seemingly costly. There was a lot more going on in the patent and other claims on how this method and system can help in different situations. However, it remains to be seen how the patent is executed in the future, if at all.

What do you think about this? Do tell us your opinions in the comments below!

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