Server-side wallhack detection eating my tick CPU – how do you keep visibility checks light?

[Max Cook]

Hey guys, I’ve been poking at anti-cheat for a custom competitive shooter I’m working on and I keep hitting the same wall (pun intended). The old-school approach of detecting wallhacks on the client by sniffing render state is basically useless – anyone with a DLL injector laughs it off. So I moved to server-authoritative visibility, where the server ray-casts each entity against a collision mesh every tick to figure out who can actually see whom. Problem is in a big free-for-all the O(N·M) math absolutely wrecks my CPU, pushing per-tick cost past 15ms and my 64-tick server starts stuttering like crazy. Anyone here has experience keeping this kind of check cheap enough to run live without making legit players lag?

I’ve been reading about spatial partitioning and BVH structures to cut down the ray-cast count, but I’m not 100% sure how to wire that into a deterministic lockstep tick loop without introducing desync. Also curious how people handle the false-positive side of things – I don’t want to ban honest players because a visibility check misfired during a lag spike. Any war stories or concrete setups you’d recommend?

"Street Fighter 6 Master Rank (Classic Controls) • Hitbox Controller"

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