WEAKNESSES OF GAMING ANTI-CHEAT SYSTEMS: AN ANALYSIS OF CONTACTLESS AUTOMATION OF GAMEPLAY USING EXTERNAL DEVICES

Abstract

Software developers – particularly those working on Unity-based [1] game projects – rarely produce perfect implementations on the first attempt. Regardless of project scale, whether working in large teams or individually, they continuously check their code for correctness.Developers rely on many tools to support this process, including unit tests, debuggers, breakpoints, and specialized frameworks such as Selenium for automated testing. Among these, logging offers the most direct and widely adopted method for quickly analyzing code behavior.In Unity, developers use the Debug class and its Log method to output messages to the console [2]. Despite its apparent simplicity, this method is critical in rapid iteration and issue tracking during development. Although easy to implement, frequent logging can reduce performance, especially in mobile applications that generate log entries every frame. In large projects with many contributors, developers often introduce logging statements in hundreds or thousands of modules to validate code logic or monitor runtime behavior. These statements frequently exceed the practical limit of one log call per frame, which can degrade the user experience on resource-constrained mobile platforms. This study examines how active logging affects the performance of Unity applications on mobile devices. The research compares two conditions: logging enabled and logging disabled. The analysis uses several fundamental statistical techniques, including calculations of average frames per second (FPS), percentage differences in performance, and Student’s t-test to evaluate the statistical significance of the results. The methodology provides a practical foundation for evaluating whether Unity developers should retain or eliminate Debug.Log calls in final production builds for mobile games.