Aimbot
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An aimbot, sometimes called "auto-aim", is software used in online multiplayer first-person shooter games that assists the player in aiming at the target. Since it gives the user an advantage over unaided players, it is considered a cheat.
Aimbots have varying levels of effectiveness. Some aimbots can do all of the aiming and shooting, requiring the cheater to only move into a position where they can see opponents. This level of automation usually makes it difficult to hide an aimbot though; for example, the player might make inhumanly fast turns that always end with his or her crosshairs targeting an opponent's head.
Some games, including Half-Life and Unreal Tournament 2004, have "auto-aim" as an option in the game. The vast majority of online game servers disable this option though.
StoogeBot
The first 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. 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 any game involving a StoogeBot-assisted player so drastically one-sided, that when hacked StoogeBots (which didn't announce themselves) became available, their use remained glaringly obvious.
External link
- Homepage of the Stanford StoogeBot (http://graphics.stanford.edu/~quake/)
- Collection of Aimbots (http://www.rage-xtreme.de/)