Vestra Hyperion
Human aim wanders, overshoots and corrects. Hyperion notices when it doesn’t.
Our AI anticheat, built in-house. It reads aim the way the server sees it, one tick at a time, and passes anything suspicious to a person.
Vestra Hyperion is our AI anticheat. We build it in-house and it is in active development. The current release is Hyperion 1.2R, and we are testing it on our own Garry’s Mod server, where it helps our moderators decide what to look at. People make every decision.
Hyperion works from the server’s side, using what a player’s game already sends. For each shot, it looks at how the aim moved around it and asks one question: is this something a human hand produced?
Why aim data
A small addon on our server records every command a player’s game sends, 22 times a second: the mouse input, where the view points, and where the targets were at that moment, after the server’s usual lag compensation. Around each shot, Hyperion looks at the few seconds before it and a moment after.
- 22Commands a second, every one recorded
- 45 msHow long one command lasts
- 83 msBetween frames of a 12 fps video
Why not just watch the video? Because the decisive moment is often a single command, about 45 ms on a 22-tick server. A 12 fps clip shows a new frame every 83 ms, so that moment can fall between two frames and never be seen at all.
Video still has its place. Hyperion also has a video model that scores gameplay clips from several viewpoints, and we use it alongside the aim data, for clips and for reviews.
What it looks for
Hyperion looks for three kinds of cheat, and each leaves a different mark in the commands. Below, each one is played back at 22 ticks a second.
How Hyperion sees it
Illustration
Human
A real flick. The view follows the mouse, overshoots a little and corrects. The shot comes a beat after the crosshair settles: human reaction time is typically around 150 ms or more.
Aimbot
The view moves without mouse input to match. It lands on the target too smoothly and too exactly, then stays locked on while the hand barely moves.
Triggerbot
The shot fires on the same tick the crosshair reaches the target. A person needs around 150 ms or more to react; the faint mark in the Shot lane is roughly where a human shot would come.
Silent aim
The view the player sees never moves onto the target, yet the shot goes there anyway.
- Where the view points, one dot per tick
- Mouse input, where it differs
- What gives it away
Real play is messier than any illustration, which is why no single sign decides anything.
Where it is today
Hyperion is early and improving quickly. We’re testing it on our own server, measuring how often it catches cheating and how often it flags clean play, and tightening both with every release. We’ll publish those numbers once we’ve tested it at a scale we’re confident in, rather than quote figures from a handful of early runs.
Each moment is scored by a neural network and gradient-boosted decision trees working together, at two levels: review, where a person takes a look, and alert, where Hyperion is more confident.
Note
What a score means
A score ranks moments for a person to look at first. It is not the probability that someone cheated.
No anticheat is perfect, and Hyperion isn’t either. That’s why a person looks at every flag.
A person decides
Hyperion never bans anyone automatically. Every flag goes to a person.
Flag
Hyperion flags a moment
At review or alert level.
Review
A person looks
The aim data for that moment, alongside the clip.
Decision
The reviewer decides
Not the model. A flag is a reason to look, never a verdict.
Built to run lean
Hyperion runs on processors alone, with no graphics card, on a modest server with capped processing power and memory. Its models are loaded in a safe mode that can’t run code, so a model file can only ever be a model.
What’s next
Hyperion is in active development. 1.2R replaced 1.2RC, and testing on our own server continues. Garry’s Mod is the first game. Others may follow, but we won’t name games or dates until they are ready. We’ll post here when there is something new to show.
Get in touch
Run a Garry’s Mod server? We’d like to hear from server owners who would want to take part in voluntary, opt-in testing and data collection as Hyperion develops. Email [email protected].
