User:GolphThanathorn/sandbox

BattlEye is a proprietary anti-cheat software system which protects games and their players from hacking, cheating, and other forms of exploits while playing an online game. It was initially released as a third-party anti-cheat for Battlefield Vietnam in 2004 and has since been officially implemented in numerous video games including PUBG: Battlegrounds, ARMA 3, and DayZ.

BattlEye Has high potential to be more than generic anti- cheat that just kicks and bans the cheater. Keeping a log of any activities between the client and the server can be used to help identify and ban the hacker.

BattlEye supports Valve Corporation's Proton compatibility layer and is usable on the Steam Deck.

History
BattlEye was first used in Battlefield Vietnam as an external 3rd-party anti-cheat software. The founder of this anti-cheat system was Bastian Suter back in 2004, swiftly gaining reputation and acknowledgement in the community, then finally requested by them to integrate the system into the first professional competition in early 2005. Not long after that, Battlefield 1942 ported BattlEye to be its anti-cheat and was continually used by new professional competitions after that. A few months later, BattlEye developed a brand new version for the upcoming and highly anticipated game, Battlefield 2. They made a breakthrough from the large and growing community which have demanded BattlEye to be used in a lot of competitions, and sometimes was chosen by the server admins to guard their public server after the game release in June 2005.

In 2006, Warsaw, a free-to-play first-person shooter game, supported the use of BattlEye on the game officially by the developers to be integrated directly and run internally in the game. This enables the system to work better in terms of cheating detection compared to how the system performed in the past, then this was followed by the popular indie game called Soldat. In the following year, BattlEye achieved a big milestone from getting integrated into popular multiplayer games, which are ArmA: Armed Assault / Combat Operations and  S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl. This was followed by ArmA 2 and the standalone extension of ArmA 2, Operation Arrowhead using the same support from BattlEye in 2009 and 2010. This support BattlEye reputation and it was used for a widely known and popular mod called DayZ released in 2012 and also supported integratedly for the WWII game known as Front: Liberation 1944.

In 2014, BattlEye marked the most outstanding milestone so far, for preventing cheaters with high success rate from the community feedback that show how the cheating had been reduce to absolute minimum and how it was use in the a massively anticipating ArmA3 and the standalone game, DayZ, has high potential to be more than generic anti-cheat that just kick and ban the cheater after they already did something that affect others. and in 2015, BattlEye has transformed the system into a proactive system which defends the game and makes it so that It detects cheating before the cheat affects the game.

Design
The BattlEye anti-cheat works as a proactive system, which means that the system will detect and prevent the cheating softwares before they can bypass and affect the game and the remaining hacking will be dealt with using an intelligent dynamic active detection system to make sure that the game will be free of hackers and cheaters .The scan will start once you launch the game as you will see the program in the process, and it will run in the background without taking much resources from your performance in regard of CPU, RAM, or network bandwidth. But even with that, there is some feedback from the user that notices the drop in performance. The cause may be from malware, adware, or PUP that is constantly trying to reload into your game, which can be fixed easily by anti-virus software.

Part of the prevention process is Ring0 kernel agent which uses a combination of DLL Whitelist and/or OB_callback routines as a way to prevent the game process from external hooks. To detect the external program that tries to inject some of its codes or files to cheat, all of the anti-cheat programs have to detect a specific pattern that the cheat might use. For example, strings (cheat names or scripts), program certificates, memory patterns, register entries, or simple file scanning.

The architecture of BattlEye is built for the client interaction with the server and also improves the protection. There are certain outcomes that are known in the game and can be checked, for example, a bullet should not change the direction while traveling, but because the server is what manages all of the checking, performance, and impact done on the game and the server should be considered. Keeping a log of any activities between the client and the server can be used as a strategy to help identify and ban the hacker or make the game more complex in the hacking process for instant, unpacking, extracting, identifying or misleading and creating trap by creating fake checks, fake detections, using ban waves or delay bans.

When the hacking has been spotted, BattlEye will prevent that player from hacking or cheating by either issuing a ban, or blocking the cheater's access to the game as well as the penalties from cheating. And due the proactive nature of the system, even if the players haven’t activated the cheating program but just have it installed on the computer, BattlEye will detect that while they are playing without using it and can be banned.

Impact
The inclusion of BattlEye did lead to some games having performance issues according to the developer of Destiny 2, or some players that experienced the issues mentioned. According to Bungie, the developer behind Destiny 2, the inclusion of BattlEye may result in a performance drop with the hope to ban any cheater from using any variety of cheat programs. Furthermore, BattlEye may increase the game load time.

BattlEye did have a problem with banning people. Due to how BattlEye works, any program that has a certain signature or tries to attach itself to the game might lead to a positive result, and some people “claim” they do not have any cheat programs. BattlEye generally will only ban people who use the actual cheat program during their game activity and overlay programs such as Fraps, Reshade, SweetFX, etc. should not have resulted in bans. If players do ever get banned and actually do not commit any cheating, players can appeal with BattlEye support forms by sending them some information about the ban and contacting BattlEye teams directly.

Games using BattlEye

 * Tibia (1997)
 * ARMA 2 (2009)
 * PlanetSide 2 (2012)
 * ARMA 3 (2013)
 * Rainbow Six Siege (2015)
 * Heroes & Generals (2016)
 * Escape from Tarkov (2017)
 * Ark: Survival Evolved (2017)
 * Unturned (2017)
 * Destiny 2 (2017)
 * PUBG: Battlegrounds (2017)
 * Fortnite Battle Royale (2017)
 * Z1 Battle Royale (2018)
 * DayZ (2018)
 * PlanetSide Arena (2019)
 * Watch Dogs: Legion (2020)
 * Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord (2022)
 * The Cycle: Frontier (2022)