DExUS

Universal anti cheat, or in short UAC was created for the first time around end of year 2005, the inital name was SW4TCH and it was ment only for game SWAT4.

The anticheat was a form of IRC client that was able to send screens of the game play to “requester” and scan any user  on request. Detection system was very simple but it was functional to some extent.

First public version of SW4TCH was released at 13.feb.2006.

The SWAT4 comunity was full of cheaters so any kind of anti cheat was salvation. However SW4TCH did not grow popular and there were only 50-100 users who used this anticheat.

That was no showstopper for me, and I had grasped for more simple solution. Anticheat that did only screenshots.
That’s where UAC1 was born.
It was released at 19.apr.2006 and at the time, everyone liked it, it was simple and it provided the minimal protection of screenshots.

Soon it was not enough, at 13.jul.2006 UAC1 was transformed in to UAC4SWAT , it combined the user friendly GUI of UAC1 and detection system of SW4TCH.

That was the starter of the whole UAC project as we know today. Initial site of UAC was www.uac4swat.com.
Soon after release, UAC4SWAT was used in every existing SWAT4 league and grew very popular.

At some point in year 2006 I was contacted by Snipes who was league admin at Clanbase at the time and he did propose that he will create online database system that will log user logins, screentimes, ip’s etc.
At first it was only for informational purpose and players did not had any access to this database.
However due to vast usage (about 8000 users) we had gathered extreme amount of data.
Snipes  built a site that was displaying this data to all administrators and it did not contain any useful stuff, only time of scans , detections etc.

Approximately month after that, Snipes created pages for UAC where users needed to register (yes, all previous UAC’s were used without registration) and thus new site was started (www.uac4swat.net).

The site grew up to 15000 users, and there were many of updates and changes that made it almost perfect.

Site was active for 3 years, and I was continuously contacted by several leagues to create the same anticheat also for their game like Call of duty 2 and counterstrike. So we decided to build “Universal AntiCheat” for all games and not just SWAT4.

The development of UAC2 started around December of 2008, Snipes created new site and I created the application, with much better detection system and the same old well known interface.

The development  lasted around 4-5 months and we had apx.10 internal testers and translators.
Due to vast feedback from users, UAC2 was optimized and changed so all BUGS and twists that users hated about UAC4SWAT were removed.

1st public beta of UAC2 was released at 15.jun.2009 20:00 CEST , it was a blast !
Everyone started to use it, supported games portfolio grew exponentially (32 supported games).

New site was www.uac2.com
It was almost perfect.
Though due to vast use, we had stumbled upon some major issues.
Since our service was FREE of any charge and we want to keep the cost as low as possible, we had used all the time just basic commercial hosting that was not suitable for such vast usage.
Database was super slow after time, there was no space where to store the screenshots and server was easy overloaded if there were 100+ users online.

We switch several hosting companies and nothing had really solved our issue, we only avoided inevitable.
In september of 2010 hard drive of our server crashed, we lost almost all data, backups were around 1 month old.

At this time Snipes decided not to continue on UAC development due to personal issues and due to fact that it was extremely time consuming.
Nobody was up to the task to fix our site and database.

After a week or two, my friend and colleague had volunteered for the task, however he was not aware what is ahead.
It was shii, he fixed the UAC2 site and proposed several changes that inspired me to create UAC3, much more secure and tuned anticheat.
That’s where it started, shii had built a whole new site and we decided to move to cheap dedicated server hosting.
Development of UAC3 was fast, because it was reprogrammed UAC2 with additional detection system and functions and much more optimized for multi game use than UAC2 where 3-4 games were expected to be used.
At 4.dec.2010,we had started new site and 1st public BETA was released.

It was a major success, the improvements done were superb and UAC3 was accepted by many leagues and the user base has grown unexpectedly.

Also site and database was optimized to the extreme, and since we had dedicated server we had tweaked the OS of the machine to give us the needed performance so we can provide good and fast pages.

At first UAC3 had domain name www.uac3.com , however the numbering concept within the domain name is not practical so we moved permanently to www.uac.ac where also future UAC’s will have their homepage.

We do not stop here !

Over the time of UAC3 existence we gathered even more requests for functions, changes and many experience what players/admins want and need.
We designed very advanced detection system ever used in UAC series and from old detection systems only small fraction was left for the next generation since the new system used is so much better and accurate even for the most hard to detect cheats. And sadly I can’t show you any pictures of the next UAC due to copycats.

It was decided, work on UAC4 has started, with excellent results after 3 months of testing, the development did slow down and stopped.
That was partially due extreme amount of work needed around UAC3, our user base was doubled (around 200 000 users) and there are just to much things to deal with every day.

Does not sound much to you? well we are only 2 guys working on app that is used by 200 000 users… imagine the amount of work.
However the major slowdown is caused by me, I had many personal things to deal with.
Now it is almost over and rest assured UAC4 will be released even when there is no release date set yet.

[2013 update]

The user base grew +72 000 users (272 014 total) over the year 2012 , we had added support for 8 new games over the period of 12 months and updated the cheat definitions with over 200 new cheats definitions (all games together).

Since everyone is always asking about UAC4 , I have to tell you that it is still in works. I had already started to make definition files, for SWAT4 and CoD4 which are already finished, swat being my favorite and CoD4 the most popular.

There is yet a lot to be done regarding the definition files if we want to add support for all the games we are currently supporting, adding CoD4 cheats alone took full 7 hours, not to mention that we have to start to build whole new server side , with features like screens available directly on the website and many more.

if you did get to this point you must be a big fan of UAC since it’s just several lines of boring history 🙂

Sooooooooo, happy birthday UAC …

Here are some pictures from the last known version of the page: