BattlEye
Contents
History
BattlEye (BE) was founded by Bastian Suter in October 2004. Starting out as an external 3rd-party anti-cheat for Battlefield Vietnam, first versions were quickly released and it rapidly gained first acknowledgement. In early 2005, it was integrated in the first professional leagues. Due to request by the community, BattlEye was then ported to Battlefield 1942 and again used by some leagues.
The breakthrough came a few months later, when BattlEye was newly developed for the highly anticipated Battlefield 2. After its release in June 2005, the demand for BattlEye from a huge and active community grew more and more and it soon was integrated in many leagues (including all large German ones). From time to time, many server admins decided to protect their public servers with the system as well.
In 2006, BattlEye was directly integrated into a game, called Warsow – a popular freeware FPS, with official support from the developers for the first time. It now ran internally in the game, allowing a far better detection of cheats/hacks than with the external solution for the Battlefield series before. Support for the popular indie title Soldat then came in the same way.
In 2007 and 2008, BattlEye was integrated into the successful commercial multiplayer games ArmA: Armed Assault / Combat Operations and S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, marking a new huge milestone. Support for critically acclaimed ArmA 2 and its standalone extension ArmA 2: Operation Arrowhead followed in 2009 and 2010, setting the stage for BattlEye protecting the hugely popular DayZ mod being released in 2012. In the same year it was also integrated into the WWII game Iron Front: Liberation 1944.
Finally, in 2013 BattlEye was added to the biggest Arma-series game to date, Arma 3, and the well-known DayZ standalone game. Fighting cheaters in all games with success, at some point it was obvious that BattlEye had the potential to be more than a traditional anti-cheat that only kicks or bans players after the damage has already been done. Consequently, BattlEye transformed into a proactive system in late 2014 completely preventing most cheating from happening. This marked the biggest milestone so far.
The cheater-plagued DayZ community has confirmed many times that cheating has been reduced to an absolute minimum ever since the new proactive system was introduced in February 2015. Mission: Success! Being passionate about protecting games for almost 11 years, we are looking forward to assisting game developers in their fight against selfish cheaters for many decades to come.
As of May 2010, the services of BattlEye stopped being used in Soldat due to financial reasons.
Engine
The BattlEye system consists of the BE Client and the BE Server that communicate with each other through the game's netcode. In addition, there is the BE Master which is queried for new core software and cheat detection updates. The BE Client (as well as the BE Server) runs within the game, allowing best possible detection of cheats.
BattlEye scans the game and the system in RAM and on HDD, mainly using generic methods that globally catch all cheats/hacks of one type (including private ones as far as possible).
In order to work, BattlEye requires absolutely no user input or server-side administration - it comes as is and does its job independently. This also applies on the effective auto-update system which works reliably flawlessly and thus ensures that each player is always up-to-date.
Furthermore BattlEye has no special system requirements - it needs only little resources regarding CPU, RAM and network bandwidth. The player simply will not notice that BattlEye is running in the background.
Known Bugs
- Problems downloading updates in version 1.4.1.
- BE doesn't kick server admins in version 1.4.2.
- BE causes server to crash if player joined before BE is initialized, version 1.4.1.
