BattlEye
The 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 released pretty soon 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. However, the whole Battlefield community was rather dead at that time and thus BattlEye wasn't utilized very much. 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, too. 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 runs internally in the game, allowing a far better detection of cheats/hacks than with the external solution for the Battlefield series before. Since the release of the new Warsow version (including BattlEye support) in May 2006, the BattlEye system is being used on almost all game servers. Considering the popularity of Warsow, this is a great success and a huge milestone.
The 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.
