Thread: Aimbot, Vecs, Eth32 Explained

Do you wonder how aimbots work? Or how to find good settings for a server? Then this is the place to be.

When you fire a bullet, the server will draw a line from the startpoint of the bullet, to the endpoint of the bullet. If anything intersects that line, you hit something. To determine if you hit a player, or a head, the server assigns to each object (player, head, etc) a rectangular bounding box, also called a hitbox.

You could shoot at the center of the body, and always hit. If you go to a low ping etpro or etpub server, and set your bot to body only and disable multiaim, you will see that your accuracy will be in the 90~100% range - depending on how much spread your weapon has and your distance to the target.

Shooting heads on the other hand will kill a lot faster, by default a normal hit anywhere on the body will do 18 points of damage, but a headshot will do 50! Only 3 headshots are needed to kill someone. The problem is that the head is a small thing compared to the rest of the body, and correspondingly the head hitbox is a lot smaller too.

To make matters worse, the bot gets perfect center-of-body positions for enemies, but never the position of the head. The bot has to figure this out for itself. In addition, many different mods use different positions and sizes for the head hitbox.

This is were 'vecs' come in, and where eth32 really shines.

Below you'll see a picture of the 2 hitboxes for a player, a small head hitbox on top, and a small body box below.

body and head hitbox

So if you fire a bullet, the server calculates if the path of your bullet touches anywhere on either of the two boxes. If so, you will have hit someone and damage is taken. Note that it does not matter where you hit on one of these boxes, any place will do equal amount of damage.

But if the server sends you the positions of players (in this case, the center of the body box displayed above), how do you know where the head is? In a simple aimbot you could take this center position and add a fixed amount, but you will get horrible accuracy because the players not only stand still, they also move or animate, and the headposition changes constantly.

Fortunately, the engine itself does most of the heavy lifting. To know where to draw a head, or rather, where to connect all the attributes of a player (head, legs, arms, weapons, etc) the models are made with tags. A tag is simply an attachment point for a certain attribute. For example, tag_head is where the head model will be attached to the body model.

As you can imagine, this point is somewhere in the neck. The image below shows the exact position of tag_head where body and head come together - this is also the place most aimbots will aim at if you set your vecs to 0,0,0.

tag_head

To go from tag_head to the center of the head model, you will have to shift or move the center point relative to tag_head, most notably in the upward direction. This is known as vecs, which specify the difference between the center of the head, and tag_head. Usually these are three numbers, because after all, ET is a 3D game and you can move upwards, sideways, and forward.

Any shot anywhere on the hitbox will generate a hit, which means that someone need not even be visible, but you are still able to kill him because part of his hitbox was visible!

multiaim in action

To achieve this effect, more sophisticated bots do not simply calculate the position of the center of the head, and fire at it, but generate many points that are on the entire hitbox area. This is called multiaim. You can do crazy things with it, but it comes at the price of increased CPU usage.

ETH32's multiaim functionality is extensive, and easily configured, as shown by the picture below:

• head points - the total number of headpoints to check for (if set to 0, the bot will not fire)
• aim priority - a few options to select which body part the bot should aim for
• trace style - these options determine how the number of head/body points should be placed. If center is selected here, it will only shoot at the center. The other options determine multiaim behaviour

A lot of people got confused about eth32's firing and aiming behaviour. For their benefit, I will explain how it all works:

Aim, the top bar, can be off (aimbot off), aim on fire (move the aim to a target IF and only IF the user is holding down the fire button), and it can be set to 'always', which is the familiar autoaim behaviour, always aim at targets no matter if you're holding down the button or not.

However, to aim at a target, the bot must know what to aim for. If you do not have any body or head points, the bot will not know what to aim for, so make sure you have at least one.

The validate attack checkbox will prevent the bot from firing even if you're holding down the firing button unless a target is visible, at which point it stops blocking, and if you press fire, it will start shooting. This option only has effect if you set Aim to Aim on Fire.
This option is typically used if you dont want to waste bullets and get max accuracy.

If you are not sure which hitboxes to use, you can select a few from the 'Hitbox style' dropbox. Must users will want to select 'etpro' here for pretty much all servers for good performance. etmain should be used for etmain servers and etpub for really old etpub servers (like <0.6, almost none-existent today).

Exaggerated example for wrong hitbox:

aweful vecs

This will guarantee you miss every shot. So you can see that if you make mistakes in selecting the right hitbox, the aimbots performance will be severly degraded!

There are many more advanced tweaks and settings availble to you in eth32, like prediction, various corrections, auto manouvers, etc. Feel free to experiment with it, and if you get it right, you will be rewarded with a stats like this or better:

good settings, indicated by a headshot accuracy of ~ 90%

And a final remark:

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS STEN OR MP40 VECS!


I cant say this enough. Its a bold faced and evil lie. To suggest that a player's bounding box would suddenly change depending on your weapon is rediculous. ALL weapons have the same 'vecs', if you like. The only thing that *could* change is the position of the muzzle of your weapon - but this is not the case for bullet weapons either! And this is why there are no 'weaponvecs' in eth32.

Awesome guide...
Nicely written...
Truly helpful...
Thank you!

/stickied

thx very helpfull for much people

jep really kewl!

Nice post

Nice

NICE!! but I know u explained it in there, but how do u test vecs on teammates, i know it shows where ul shoot but how do u do that..?

Originally Posted by mark121

NICE!! but I know u explained it in there, but how do u test vecs on teammates, i know it shows where ul shoot but how do u do that..?

You have 2 serious options for testing new vecs. Either you go to a server and find some idle player standing around in spawn, or, you start up a local server (like I did to get those screenshots, and the vecs that are built-in eth32) and join to it with 2 computers. If you dont have 2 computers, you can just start a server, connect to it, and ask a friend to join you.

To see where your bullets go, and how the server hitboxes look like, you can set the server cvar g_debugbullets to 5. But for more info on the subject of servers, read the excellent guide on http://www.rtcw.jolt.co.uk/content/e.../server_guide/

after reading this im ready to took down servers

the cheat work only on linux? why you don't release eth for windows? now i no think have cheat to windows that undetected.but thx i sure who use linux he is heppy.