Client side anti-cheat is absolutely needed in FPS/TPS. Without it, server side anti-cheat would have to do far more and quietly be much harder to do.
Those types of games are usually made by AAA studios. They have the resources to do server side anticheat despite it being more involved.
Depending on the implementation, client side anticheat isn’t needed at all. Take the game Speedrunners for example. There is zero need for the server to do anything other than accept player inputs, process them, and return them to the clients.
So if coded correctly, where the server trusts nothing and does the math itself, it is impossible to cheat while having zero anticheat on the client.
And that’s without there being any additional cost.
I’ve been working on a PvP game for the last few months.
Visibility checks aren’t needed in all cases. Most RTS/2D/2.5D games don’t have this problem, or it is minimal.
For games that do need them, they tend to be AAA FPS, which have the budget to make simple changes like lag compensation.
I’ve been preparing to run a TTRPG called Death in Space for my friends, and I have poured dozens of hours into map making for one of the bigger locations of the setting. It’s called the Iron Ring, and it is a giant orbital structure built around a yellow moon called Inaro.
This screenshot of the map is approximately 150,000 square meters. I plan to have about 5 more locations this size.
Starship 3000
As I remember it, it was a terribly written book about a colony on the moon with a water ocean, and an asteroid hollowed out to be a seed ship to travel the stars and colonize planets.
The first half of the book was the colony on the moon part, and it went into the physics of an ocean with very low gravity, and how massive the waves get as a result. That part was cool.
And the asteroid seed ship was also very cool, it was described as being an entire ecosystem with hundreds of square miles of earth-like terrain, with small towns sprinkled all over the place.
But the writing was so hard to follow. It was all abstract, pronouns and names were hardly used enough to keep track of what was being talked about. Reviews for the book follow a similar pattern.
I’ve had a mind to make game about the asteroid seed ship because I feel like the concept hasn’t been done justice.