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An aimbot (sometimes called "auto-aim") is a type of computer game bot used in multiplayer first-person shooter games to provide varying levels of target acquisition assistance to the player. As it gives the user an unfair advantage over unaided players, it is considered cheating and is often frowned upon by honest players.

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 007, Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II, Timesplitters, Half-Life 2, Unreal Tournament 2004, and Call of Duty: World at War, 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, compared to using a mouse on a PC game, in using analogue sticks to aim.

Contents 1 Graphics driver based aimbots 2 Colour aimbots 3 StoogeBot 4 See also

[edit] 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.

[edit] 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.

[edit] StoogeBot

First and certainly the most enduring example of an aimbot was the Stanford StoogeBot, a proxy-based system for the game Quake written by students at Stanford University. The StoogeBot featured a number of different modes (each of which implemented a different strategy), named after members of The Three Stooges. The StoogeBot's operator (known as the "driver") used an unmodified Quake client, and moved around the game world as normal, picking up equipment and pursuing (or, in theory, fleeing from) adversaries. Rather than being connected directly to the Quake server, the driver's client connected to a custom proxy on which the StoogeBot code ran, a man in the middle attack. The driver's movement commands were passed through unaffected, but the StoogeBot assumed responsibility for selecting, targeting, and firing weapons. As Quake's network protocol allowed clients (and thus the StoogeBot) to know the positions of players even when they were obscured by scenery, the StoogeBot had the uncanny ability to shoot players moments after they emerged into view (even with slow-moving weapons such as rockets).

The driver's view didn't turn to match the StoogeBot's inhuman aim, instead behaving as if the StoogeBot wasn't present. The StoogeBot's operation was entirely automatic, and it made no attempt to hide its superhuman prowess. Indeed, it announced its presence (in an in-game chat message) and altered the player's name (as sent to the game server) to include the prefix "SBOT*", and its authors didn't release the source to their program knowing unscrupulous users would immediately remove this protection. The StoogeBot's skills were so blatant and made games so one-sided that when hacked StoogeBots (which didn't announce themselves) became available, their use remained glaringly obvious.

Other current day examples include aimbots for games such as Battlefield 2, Battlefield 2142 and the Call of Duty series.

[edit] See also

• Cheating in online games
• Exploit (online gaming)