Anti cheat and safety

The risk

To measure a game, FrameLedger loads a small component into it ("hooking"). Anti-cheat systems can detect that and may warn you, block you, or permanently ban your account — and a ban can arrive days after the session. The developer cannot reverse a ban, recover progress, or speak to a game's publisher for you.

Use hooking for offline and single-player games. Switching it on for a game with online or competitive play is your decision and your risk.

What FrameLedger does to keep the risk small

• Hooking is off for every game until you switch it on for that game, after a warning.
• It looks for anti-cheat before it hooks a game and every 30 seconds while it is hooked. If it finds any, it refuses — or stops measuring at the next check — and turns hooking off for that game. There is no switch that overrides this, apart from the one narrow exception below.
• It never hides. It keeps its real name and does nothing to avoid being seen by security software.
• It never reads or changes the game's memory, its saves or your input. It only observes the graphics calls the game makes.

What it cannot promise

• Its list of anti-cheat systems is its own and can be incomplete, and a game can add anti-cheat in an update.
• Anti-cheat that starts in the middle of a session can be there for up to 30 seconds — in the worst case 65 — before FrameLedger stops.
• Some anti-tamper software (Denuvo, for example) can make a game crash when it is hooked, even offline.

The one exception you can make

Settings ▸ Capture ▸ User-mode exceptions (off by default). For a game whose only finding is one anti-cheat that runs entirely inside the game — no driver, nothing else found — you may allow hooking for that game after a separate warning. Its first two hooked sessions are a trial: one that does not go well ends the exception for good. FrameLedger still runs every check under it, and a ban is still possible. Kernel anti-cheat is never allowed.

Turning everything off

Settings ▸ Capture ▸ Disable all hooking stops all hooking at once, whatever each game's own switch says.

If FrameLedger missed a game's anti-cheat

Please open an issue with the Safety gap form on the project's GitHub page. That is treated as a safety bug, with the same priority as a security report. A fix reaches you with the next version you install.

The full statement of the risk is the Disclaimer, §2 and §2A.