Wallhack
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The term wallhack is used to describe various methods for cheating by changing the properties of walls in a multiplayer first-person shooter. This allows cheating players to see things they normally wouldn't be able to. Wallhacking enables the player to locate the other players on the map, which can grant the cheater the ability to kill other players while remaining unseen. It is the FPS equivalent of maphacking.
Many FPS games provide weapons such as grenades that can kill unseen players, but such explosives rely on splash damage rather than direct hits. However, in a game like Counter-Strike, certain guns can shoot through walls, rifles in particular. This allows them to see the enemy and kill them instantly, unseen. On Steam, the online play system for Counter-Strike, the offender may get banned for up to 10 years. However, this rarely happens.
Other types of wallhack include "wallwalk", in which players become able to see through and walk through walls. Sometimes referred to as "ghostmode", this hack enables sneak attacks on anyone walking by the wall, as the player inside the wall is essentially invisible.
A final, perhaps more malicious, form of wallhack is "noclip". Noclip is a cheat code in many games that disables clipping, allowing the player to fly by holding down the "jump" key, move through walls, and causes shots to go through the character. This comes in varied forms, some of which are less unfair than others. Although this cheat is theoretically unable to be used on multiplayer, it can be enabled for online use by changing a single line of code. Fortunately, noclippers are incredibly easy to detect, and usually end up banned from the server that they use their powers on.
Detection
Wallhacks can be instantly recognized by a player who physically sees the cheater's computer screen and thus can be impossible to use at LAN parties. When playing over the Internet, detection is not always as simple.
Cheat detection software such as PunkBuster might find it difficult to detect wallhacks. While most wallhacks are achieved by making changes to the game's renderer or maps (and are therefore detectable), some can simply be exploited hardware issues. For example, a player might discover that an obscure combination of a specific video card and an old driver causes the game's doors and other props to be rendered in wireframe.
Wallhacking can be difficult for other players to correctly identify in-game. A wallhacker might be skilled at hiding their virtual extra-sensory perception from other players. For example, consistently shooting people in the head through walls might alert players, but just knowing there's opponents hiding behind a box or a corner is more than enough to give that player a extra preparedness. Skilled or lucky players can be misinterpreted as wallhackers. Experienced players become extraordinarily familiar with preferred hiding places and might shoot at or bombard these spots even if they have not seen anyone there.