There's also potentially big advances to be made in single use but easily recondition-able aluminium-air batteries due to an expanding market. An anecdote I've heard is a lot of R&D is focused on these at the moment as they have a higher energy to weight ratio compared to lithium chemistries so are idea for "disposable" use cases such as suicide bomb drones. There's also the more pedestrian idea of automated battery swap stations.
On a similar note, thermal imagers have got shockingly cheap recently, 50KPixel cube camera modules are available for <$200 and <$800 for the 0.33MPixel version.
I recently picked up an integrated module with a 24x32 pixel sensor, LCD, uC and LiPo for £30n and it can "see" someone step out from behind a wall at a distance of 3 meters, ideal for my use case (airsoft!)
> An anecdote I've heard is a lot of R&D is focused on these at the moment as they have a higher energy to weight ratio compared to lithium chemistries so are idea for "disposable" use cases such as suicide bomb drones.
You could use normal fuel-burning engines for that, I'd suppose. Or rockets, depending.
> , 50KPixel cube camera modules are available for <$200 and <$800 for the 0.33MPixel version
The 50k case is not that recent (FLIR Lepton). Not sure about the 0.33MP. The 24x32 is very cheap and as you say, has enough res for some ok applications. I've been intrigued by it and wondered why FLIR seems to still have a monopoly over higher res detectors.
It's hydrolyzed urethane, but I wouldn't recommend including any acetone to remove it, as you'll start to melt the laptop's ABS shell. 99% IPA, a scrubbing sponge and a bit of elbow grease should do just fine.
If it's hard (possibly transparent) plastic and smells like stale puke, that'll be acetate based plastic and there's nothing that can be done. If it's a tacky "grip texture" which has turned into a combo of contact adhesive and staining goop, it's likely to be urethane hydrolysis.
Bad news about the former is it's an autocatalyzing reaction, once it gets going there's no stopping it. The good news about the later is it's relatively easy to scrub off using >95% IPA and a kitchen sponge.
Ahh good to know, thanks. PBT/PBAT is actually one of the "alloying" additives used to create PLA "Plus/Tough/Meta", as it increases hydrophilicity, deflection temperature, flow and ductility. Hopefully it's used at a low enough ratio that it doesn't get smelly!
Even modern high end graphics cards use abstractions of the base data to create vast amounts of the final output's fine detail. For example tessellation and other techniques used for complex geometry like compound curves, which allow millions or billions of polygons can be visually simulated without needing to be present as polygon data, increasing opportunity for processing parallelization, while reducing load on communication busses and VRAM.
As an example, you could probably represent something like the grip of this FLIR camera in a couple hundred polygons and surface/curve definitions to help the rendering engine tesselate correctly. On the other hand, this overall scan is 357000 vertexes. Sure you can simplify it and bake a bunch of the texture into a normal map, but that then requires manually reworking the texture map and various other postprocessing steps to avoid creating a glitchy mess.
They actually cover these concerns, acknowledge it was a problem with examples of siblings or students behind a shared IP, and then developed a parallel cookie based tracking system, using the "server welcome message" which is served as a web page in the in-game browser.
It's also worth noting this is a 3rd party dedicated server provider, who manages and leases community run game servers. Getting a ban here would prevent you from playing on that provider's servers, but not any of the official matchmaking ones or servers from another hosting provider.
On a counter-strike 1.6 server I help with moderating, we have the occasional cheater roll by, surprisingly often "ragehacking" with no attempt at subtlety (e.g. making noscope sniper headshots in mid air).
Since the server owner insists on allowing non-steam accounts (pirated copies) to connect we can't rely on SteamID bans, similarly to GUID in Unreal. It's a bit trickier to change the spoofed ID as I assume it's buried deep in the game install somewhere obscure, but still possible. It's actually a very popular game in northern Africa, the former Baltic states and surrounding areas as well as north and west Asia: without these players the server would be a ghost town.
Anyway, our approach is twofold carrot and stick style: Steam players get near instant reloads and immunity to some of the more "enthusiastic" automodding/kick features: so for the price of a handful of VPN keys you can get a legitimate, allowed advantage over most of the server population as well as reserved username and "VIP" tag, plus you now own the game. Seems a great way to do it, as it's available to anyone instantly for that one time fee (which goes direct to the game dev), or for free by playing at least 1 game a week for 5 weeks, then contacting the mod team on social media.
The other side to that (the stick), is that rather than simply kick/ban the player we usually take some time to have fun annoying them, to show them they're really not welcome, and make them actively not want to come back.
Disarming them then giving F tier weapons, a few random teleports out of bounds or stuck in the floor, repeat amx_rocket to turn them into a firework, amx_drug to max out FOV and add "drunk" effect, and ofc a bit of teasing about what a lowskill looser you must be to have fun while AI plays the game for you.
There's also "illegal" amx plugins and commands, which are generally frowned upon and extremely abusable, but quite useful in these situations. My favorite (which most of the "illegal plugins" are based around) is amx_exec which essentially gives admins direct access to any client's in-game console, to run any command or set any setting!
It's actually kind of terrifying that exists. For example this set of commands sets network baudrate to 1000 (that'll be fun for the cheater until they notice), changes name, wipes all keybinds, then binds the default chat key to close the game, while setting max FPS low enough to be bothersome without being obvious! There are pre-built macros that do far worse to your settings too: although easily fixable by deleting to restore defaults, would be very frustrating if you hadn't backed up your config files.
On an intriguing side note:
Many servers charge for VIP advantages, to the tune of up to $20/month! At first I thought this pretty shocking, until I found out that there's some kinda shady clique where to be listed in a reasonable spot on 3rd party server browsers, a hefty fee is required, and a significant proportion of this income gets spent on "boosts".
When our server owner stopped paying for "boost" for two months, mean player count dropped from 14/32 to 3/32, and max players from a regular 28/32 on weekends, to 12/32 on a Friday night if lucky. The player count rocketed as soon as the owner started paying again... but the crazy thing is it's $180/month!
Before getting involved with moderating, I thought running a fun, deathmatch, well moderated, low ping, high performance server dedicated to remakes/remixes of the 2nd most popular map in the game would be enough to be popular/busy. But no, apparently you have to pay extortionate fees to incumbent gatekeepers, if you want your server to be visible to the majority of the playerbase!
> There's also "illegal" amx plugins and commands, which are generally frowned upon and extremely abusable, but quite useful in these situations. My favorite (which most of the "illegal plugins" are based around) is amx_exec which essentially gives admins direct access to any client's in-game console, to run any command or set any setting!
Yes, we have something similar for UT2004, but only a handful of people are even aware it exists. It's too powerful and too easily abused. I have yet to share it, even with other admins.
It can be. There have been in-game commands with code execution vulnerabilities that turn into RCE because the game server can make clients run commands.
Yes, it's why I don't share knowledge of it. There are less than 300 people actively playing this game (maybe fewer) so any impact of something like a RCE running wild is relatively small.
Changing steamid is easily doable on most nosteam cs 1.6 copies through a cfg file.
I used to administrate CS 1.6 until a few years ago. I got a question concerning amx_exec. I thought cl_filterstuffcmd basically killed any usage admin slowhacking?
or is it that most nosteam cs 1.6 client have it set to 0 ?
I'm not sure about the pirate copies, but weirdly, my Steam install had it set to 0, and it's quite a fresh install too!
It seems like yes most of the "slowhack" methods have been patched out, but knowing the demographics of the playerbase I wouldn't be suprised if there are some semi-secret 0days.
Honestly I wasn't aware of cl_filterstuffcmd being a thing, though when set to 0 it's still possible to change the settings it protects (motd_write,cl_filterstuffcmd,bind,unbind,unbindall,connect): I expect you could just run a command to create an alias containing one of those, and then run the alias, or include a malicious .cfg in the mod content and exec it remotely.
It seems to me that what is needed is a "provisional" server that grants you access to the "good" server.
So an GUID accumulates reputation after some amount of play in the provisional server. If you get enough reputation by not cheating, the GUID gets whitelisted for the "good" server. You can have multiple tiers, so the really good/fun people get to the third of fourth tier of demonstrated non-cheating.
If they cheat, get banned, they need to climb the tiers with GUIDs again. The cheaters will want to cheat, they won't want to pay the dues. The legit players will happily try to get to the second and third tiers, so you could probably just require 1 hour of not-cheating for the first tier of server, and then maybe 8 hours to get to the third tier.
You could shadowban/honeypot after the first tier, so you shut all cheaters that you detect to their own cheater server where the cheaters can all get shunted to.
Not really feasible though: even now where players don't even need to buy the game, the server owner has to pay hundreds of $ a month for advertising/promoted ranking on serverlists just to get a decent population.
The VIP system somewhat works for this anyway, regulars who hang around long enough to become familiar to admins, as well as everyone playing through steam, get a couple extra seconds grace in anti-camp areas, reload their guns in 250ms instead of 1800ms, and get green chat text and a "VIP" tag.
Plus, some of our regulars have played the game since release and are so good it's suspicious sometimes. Several regularly have cheating accusations leveled at them cause they're so good. The server automatically records a demo every game and gives admins ESP in spectate mode, so it's simple to spot cheaters, and easy to prove innocence in the case of a false ban.
It took me a couple of years to notice the "beautify" filter on my samsung S7 as I only ever activated the screen side camera by accident. When I did eventually use it a bit, I subconsciously knew something was off but assumed it was just spec differences between the two sensors and lenses, but then I noticed the "eyeball star twinkle" and realised what was up.
On closer inspection it turns out it was actually smoothing my hair and boosting the contrast so I looked like I had dyed "highlights", along with airbrushing my cheeks a flat orangey coloured skin tone with a rosy center, as if I were wearing foundation and blusher!
>the anti-helo drone isn't running a whole sound analysis, just a narrow range
Why? Sure you might be limited to that if you're using an Arduino but with an FPGA or even a cheap "edge AI" NPU you could do a very thorough analysis (even credit card sized image recognition modules with camera are <$50 now). Heck even a seeedstudio respeaker can do live voice identification and isolation, noise cancellation, and 16 direction source location/indication using 4 microphones!
Performance wise, most matte filaments are more brittle and have worse layer adhesion due to the matting pigment, but do a good job at hiding lines as the reduction in specular highlights reduce the visibility of them. Another good trick is fuzzy skin setting with both length and depth settings at 0.4x-0.8x layer height.
