I added hitplot writing to Nexuiz. With this, you can after about 100 frags find out whether someone is using an aimbot/triggerbot or not.

Here are some typical hit plots:


A human. Not very skilled though


The bots that come with Nexuiz. Very human-like (they are coded to be that way), but the pattern looks more regular than a human one. Humans get distracted e.g. by specific properties of the player model which causes some bias in the hit plot, as seen in the human one. Bots only see hitboxes, and tend to make a regular pattern.


An aimbot that focuses on head shots. No further comment


A trigger bot. A trigger bot is a bot that does not change the aim, but controls the fire button whenever the crosshair is above an enemy. These are hard to see when watching a demo, but in the hit plot there's just too many hits near the edge of the hitbox. Why is that? Because when you move the mouse over a player, the trigger bot shoots as soon as you first touch the player - which is near the border of the hitbox.

Triggerbot very insignificantly differs from human IMO.

Still, tell us how to use it? I have 3 whole nexuiz clans I would like to check with this.

Very significantly does. Look at the red blobs at the left and the right.

Omg, you're insane
You still have too much free time on your hands (fortunately )

daaaaammmnn

Oh no, Alpha will catch us all

IRC LOG wrote:[12:35][12:30] <alpha``> hurrrrrrrrrrrrr
[12:31] <alpha``> looks like i'll be catching some botters real soon
[12:31] <alpha``> http://forums.alientrap.local/viewtopic.php?t=4745
[12:32] * Spalter is now known as spalter
[12:33] <vociferous> ohh now that is awesome
[12:33] <all-bundy> nice
[12:33] <all-bundy> start with my demos please
[12:33] <all-bundy>
[12:34] <vociferous> finally we can catch kojn =)
[12:34] <morphed_> alpha``: it should have bigger exposure, maybe giant text before you enter the game "we can now detect botters" that way you will catch more ppl
[12:35] <all-bundy> the colors are beautiful and stuff .. but i dont understand it -.-
[12:35] <morphed_> why do you want to undestand it ? :>
[12:35] <alpha``> vociferous exact.y
[12:35] <vociferous> hehe
[12:35] <alpha``> kojn, green marine, bundy, revenger
[12:35] <all-bundy> cause it looks interesting
[12:36] <alpha``> I can't wait
[12:36] <all-bundy> hrhr, alpha`` will be so disapointed to proof
[12:36] <all-bundy> that we dont cheat

so, how does it work in practice? I assume it will be included in 2.5.2? Then it's a serverside-setting that generates these images per player? Which intervals? Per Map?

div, i'm still waiting for a manual on how to use it.

Also, you devs should set up a level of sufficient hitplot evidence that would justify punishment.

It unfortunately cannot analyze demos - it requires you to do g_hitplots 1 on a svn server.

It then writes .plot files for each player, which can be matched to eventlog entries as they use the same match ID and player ID as eventlog uses.

The analyzer tool generating these pictures is hitplot2tga.c in Nexuiz svn. Usage: hitplot2tga plotfile.plot imagefile.tga.

As you see in the post above, I updated the tool a little, to show blue pixels for each exact hit location, and to do better clipping of values > 1.

You need to record about 100 shots of the same player before you can even think about using this method of analysis. A single match often does not contain enough data. The name of the player is recorded at the top of the .plot files, so you can use that to collect data per player.

Unfortunately, demos cannot be analyzed by it. But once player input is moved to csqc, this feature can be added. Until now it has to be enabled on a server.

Also, for now a human eye is required to see if someone is botting. Maybe some automated testing can be added in the future (especially for triggerbots).

I managed to change my trigger bot to evade this method of analysis.

It however also made the trigger bot much less effective. A noob with this changed bot will still be below average. For a good player, I'd expect it to increase frags by about 20%.

Another method of catching trigger bots - especially if a noob is using them - is watching how they aim. If they slowly swipe the crosshair over a player, and once it hits the player, it shoots, I think you should know what's going on

The best way to use a trigger bot is using a bad and ineffective one like I made for testing, and be NOT aware of using it[1]! But if you're a noob, you won't beat kojn with that... actually, I am sure I wouldn't beat kojn with ANY trigger bot, but if kojn wants, we could try that out

[1]: if you are aware of a cheat you're using, you will change your behaviour accordingly. Aimbotters tend to not even roughly aim, but just hit fire and let the bot do the rest. Trigger botters tend to slowly swipe the crosshair over enemies - which looks the more obvious, the weaker the trigger bot is. Wallhackers tend to track enemies that went behind a wall with the crosshair. It may be easy to throw off ways to detect a cheat (like this method), but doing so has to reduce accuracy of the cheat. So, such methods being available cannot prevent cheating, but they do reduce the effectiveness of cheating.

This is very interesting. I think a thread on these methods was posted before. It will be fun to see if it catches anyone

I still need a plot of a SKILLED human...

my Over The Lazy Dog servers (except for Race) run with hitplot writing enabled. Some good player please join there and do about 100 frags

edited **I will play some 1v1s there later on // is it better to play minstagib instead of dm mode?

alpha wrote:Triggerbot very insignificantly differs from human IMO.

Still, tell us how to use it? I have 3 whole nexuiz clans I would like to check with this.

You are so lol

Wow this is awesome However I think 100 frags are way too many, even with aimbot it would be really hard to make that many in a 15 minutes long CTF match. (frag on every 7th second on average) I think around ~75 would be more realistic.

With 75 there just isn't enough data to say anything conclusive.

You basically need data from more than one match to do this analysis. This is very feasible e.g. in the ladder

Well I'll try and kick around the ctf pubs for a while then at some point. Not been playing much lately though due to studying etc.

Bundy (obviously no bot), aims too far to the left on average


ownage (regular human)


jurik (often seems to focus too far to top left)

None of them is botting

At least for those games

Oh boy, i must try this! i wonder how my pattern would look like....

i have an awesome idea:
i will combine a triggerbot with an aimbot with a macro to posts random comments (maybe some DCC Beginners hints) and set up a cron job....

If you want your plot made, play a minstagib botmatch with g_hitplots 1 and fraglimit 150 or more, and send me the .plot file that has your nickname in the first line

divVerent wrote:Another method of catching trigger bots - especially if a noob is using them - is watching how they aim. If they slowly swipe the crosshair over a player, and once it hits the player, it shoots, I think you should know what's going on

I tend to aim with the nex this way, and I don't use a triggerbot at all. I just find it easier to aim that way.

A lot of players aim that way (moving arm).

Nice, not that I've seen an aimbot in Nexuiz live except some sort of laser bot (???) called death or smth similar.

Oh btw. did you made 2 Hitplots of me? I guess if both are mine, the first one were DM and the others Minstagib? It would be awesome if you or anyone else could explain a bit more about these plots, if that is possible. Looking at the pictures, I would say that Unknowns aiming is more "stable" then mine, as it also has better highlighted points (more lighty colors) in the graphic.

Psychcf wrote:

divVerent wrote:Another method of catching trigger bots - especially if a noob is using them - is watching how they aim. If they slowly swipe the crosshair over a player, and once it hits the player, it shoots, I think you should know what's going on

I tend to aim with the nex this way, and I don't use a triggerbot at all. I just find it easier to aim that way.

Yeah, at least in insta I do that all the time.. aim slightly before the enemy player and fire when they run into it...

It would be awesome to catch these cheats, as they are talentless and tend to lift their own pathetic lives into the FPS community and give people the impression that they did all those frags on their own.

Cant Someone make a "Punk Buster" for Nexuiz?

NightRage wrote:It would be awesome to catch these cheats, as they are talentless and tend to lift their own pathetic lives into the FPS community and give people the impression that they did all those frags on their own.

Cant Someone make a "Punk Buster" for Nexuiz?

"Punk Buster" for nexuiz would be looking at the graphs and banning the offending IP addresses from your server.

Also punk buster is total garbage

divVerent wrote:I still need a plot of a SKILLED human...

my Over The Lazy Dog servers (except for Race) run with hitplot writing enabled. Some good player please join there and do about 100 frags

i volunteer.

As div0 has said, human aiming is distracted by some individual model characteristics. I realized after a long time of playing, that i always have much more trouble to nex-hit or mg hfor e.g that robot model (quark) or the marine cop one, rather than the headhunter one , cause they seem 2 me shorter and not as fat. Has anyone actually made some statistics over this? i kinda find it interesting, i m pretty sure that a grey/dark quark model played by the same player, would be less hit by others if compared to the same using a brightskin and the xolar or headhunter model.
Not that it matters, just out of curiocity ,whether this is a placebo effect : D