Banning cheaters in games is TIGHT!!!

No problem. Unfortunately the prompt for an application being denied access usually only shows up when the game first creates a save point. So you might have to get just far enough until the game saves to trigger it.

Issues like that are usually related to windows security settings which block applications from modifying the contents of user specific folders.

If a game likes to write save files to those locations and you have enabled ransomware protection, you’ll need to allow an exception for it:

Go to Windows Security -> Protection History -> Protected folder access blocked (look for the game’s executable in this list) -> Actions -> Allow on Device

I doubt it would work well, but with enough training data it would be able to pick up on some areas. Especially if there are large landmarks in the frame (mountains/hills/rivers, etc.).

One interesting alternative would be the Visual Positioning System (VPS) that Niantic has built from Pokemon go player data. Basically you can take a picture outside and your phone will know exactly where you are:

https://www.nianticspatial.com/locate#vps

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/11/niantic-uses-pokemon-go-player-data-to-build-ai-navigation-system/

Too bad they’re getting close to being bought out by a company that’s notorious for squeezing out every penny from their player base.

Edit: Correction, Pokemon Go is being bought from Niantic… The company itself is not being bought.

I did a quick search but couldn’t find any issue with their anticheat.

From what I could find, it’s not a kernel level anticheat.

As far as damaging hardware, reading from a drive doesn’t really degrade it much at all, the bigger concern there would be if it was writing to your drive a ton (but honestly you should worry more about Window’s Page File system since that makes it possible to use your storage drive as RAM).

I found a post from one player on the steam forums with concerns about the anticheat because their system kept crashing, but that sounded more like an isolated incident (or more likely related to the Intel CPU issue that was confirmed that same year).

There is a highly upvoted review for the game which has concerns about the anticheat reading all files on a drive and “overloading your processors (ignoring frame-rate caps and going past it).”

I agree that reading every file on a drive is concerning, I’d rather any anticheat stick to just the game’s folders itself.

However, I’m wary about their understanding of programs/computers if they think that anti-cheat software should be limited by, or has anything to do with frame-rate caps. Also, they don’t provide a source for any of their information or how they tested it.

Most other cocerns about anti-cheat quoted that same review in one way or another.

Yeah, you can see it here:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2016590/Dark_and_Darker/

I looked into this a bit more and here’s a quick video of someone testing out the demo that they have online:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7iyWO8XaT0

Direct link to the demo itself:
https://www.sesame.com/research/crossing_the_uncanny_valley_of_voice#demo

That’s just what Apple wants you to think:

https://timsh.org/tracking-myself-down-through-in-app-ads/