“Sir, a significant market segment says we’re ignoring them.”
“Are they still giving us money?”
“Yes sir.”
“Then fuck 'em.”
“In which hole sir”
anti cheat with kernel privilege access? No, thanks
And here I am, not giving a fuck about competitive online PvP.
Casual games require it too
The lengths people go to prevent cheating in single player games is astonishing. I’m really glad Paradox finally allows achievements on modded installs of their games.
Sure. Harassing developers always works. I remember when everybody did it to CDPR about The Witcher 2 so they fixed all the issues and made a perfectly working Linux version of The Witcher 3. They definitely didn’t swear off Linux completely.
Witcher 3 does work perfectly on Linux.
After Valve fixed it.
I’m not sure extortion is the best way to get companies to support Linux. I think market share is the only real metric they care about.
I’ll settle for the old Rust approach, where you could still play on (or host your own) servers that didn’t have anti-cheat enabled.
We’ll sooner see linux supported anti cheat than we will server browsers.
We need the game publishers to face more consequences for neglecting a significant segment of the market
MacOS?
(please don’t hurt me, it was a joke.)
Yes, Apple should face consequences for making game development for MacOS so difficult.
As long as it’s not Android
If that segment of the market was significant, corpos we be bending over backwards for those dollars.
The only game I currently play is KSP. I’ve grown so tired of all the crap out there.
Every so often I have an urge to come back and play KSP for like a month straight. And it’s a blast every time.
Sometimes a nice single player sandbox is all you need.
I’ve been playing since alpha. I bought it the first day it was on sale. I bought it on steam a second time. When the expansions came out they gave me them on the first purchase. I will do a career run every now and then but most of my games are sandbox games with huge multi launch space stations. I’ve been playing this go round for a about three months and when I get bored I’ll park it on a drive for several months then I’m back at it. I still get a kick out of manual(No Mech Jeb) mun landing and returns.
I think you got into KSP ever so slightly before I did, but I remember buying it directly from them before the whole rigamarole of transferring it to steam.
Everything else I’m 99% on the same page on.
Though, I’ll very occasionally use mechjeb to handle accent to orbit from kerbin. Usually only if it is a big unstable rocket that needs lots of very fine adjustments. Something about seeing such a rocket fly stable is very satisfying.
Landing, transfers, docking, and accent from other moons/planets I always do myself though.
I recently played around with one of the warp bubble mods, it was a shit load of fun until the kraken ate my ship.
Is it more stable? I always ended up getting either a kraken or like 2 fps with a giant space station.
KSP 2 is a little better than its first release. I still main play KSP 1 in sandbox mode. If you have a problem with parts counts get a part fusion mod and combine parts to increase your FPS.
unfortunately for us, I don’t think we’re what they would consider “significant”
The steam deck be pretty popular these days.
I know, and game support has definitely increased since its release specifically because of the steam deck (dead by daylight comes to mind), but even so, we’re still a relatively insignificant chunk that isn’t worth the cost to most publishers
Bully for you.
When I eventually make the switch to Linux your efforts will make it even more seamless.
I’m fighting for you!
So, as a bazzite enjoyer what in particular need I do?
Based.
This is like the people who give recipes bad reviews because they swapped the eggs for banana and it didn’t bake right.
Yeah instead give it 0/10 cause checks random steam review Marver rivals crashing randomly.
But fuck linux users for rating a game bad cause developers made a deliverate descision to block their system cause “all linux users are cheaters.”
So, I imagine that the person you replied to would agree that’s also a bad reason to rate a game.
Indeed. If you buy something and it doesn’t work, or it’s shit, or contains greedy monetisation, that’s fair enough. Downvote away.
But the requirements say Windows, you can’t really complain when it doesn’t run on Linux. It’s complaining that a banana doesn’t taste like an apple. Indiana Jones isn’t out for the PS5, but I haven’t gone and given it a bad review because of it…
There is no reason to ever rate a game badly. If it runs poorly or not at all youre the moron for using banana instead of tomato. If you don’t like it cause the game is not good, its your own fault for making a dish following a curry recepie when you hate curry.
no reason to ever rate a game badly
Go and play Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing and then tell me that again.
Really makes you feel like
Well it certainly doesn’t make you feel like a trucker.
I dunno I went right out and bought a maga cap
You lost me at “no reason to rate a game badly”
Missing /s?
Or are you legitimately saying there are no bad games?
If it doesn’t run it’s your own fault?
If you think it’s badly designed, bland and uninspired, that’s on you?I was clearly stretching the analogy of the person I was replying to show how bad it was.
Dear friend, context clues should clearly indicate their comment is sarcastic.
Thank you.
I thought so, but I’ve heard even more deranged takes said with full sincerity
We need the game publishers to face more consequences for shoving BS kernel level anti-cheats and not focusing on where it actually matters, server-side.
(Which would also solve the Linux AC problem by extension)
Game publishers: but server-side anticheat is
more expensiveHARDDDDDDMost games I know about do both, but my understanding is it’s hard to stop some of the client-side stuff server-side.
Look, we’ve been here before. I’m not super invested in multiplayer stuff, so I don’t care that much, but I am old enough to remember when gamedevs would not even try crossplay and just let the PC be the wild west when it comes to cheating.
I didn’t necessarily hate it. I lived in a world of dedicated servers where moderation and security came down to some kid in his underpants being pretty sure he didn’t like you and kicking you out. I’m guessing there’s a bit too much money and too much of an expectation of free-form matchmaking for the mass market to go back to that.
But hey, I’m not a security software engineer and I’m not excessively involved in competitive shooters, which seems to be where most of the problem happens. My interest in this is having enough PC security for crossplay to make matchmaking in fighting games less of a hassle than it used to be in the Street Fighter 4 days. You sweaty FPS nerds can do whatever, as far as I’m concerned.
Cheating could potentially also include console players. All consoles have been jailbroken and all it takes is sufficient interest to have someone make cheats that could be injected on top of the running game.
I thought the Xbox didn’t have a full jailbreak this gen yet, but maybe I’m wrong.
In any case, yeah, absolutely once consoles get jailbroken they become a vector of botting and cheating. Which is one reason why I have very mixed feelings about it. I welcome news of jailbreaking consoles because we do need it for preservation and emulation, which are important long term, but it is a bit of an issue for multiplayer, so sometimes it’s fine if it starts happening a few years in rather than right away. It matters less since crossplay is a thing and you get all the PC stuff anyway, but still.
On the grand scheme, though, cheating is a numbers game. It’s one thing to every now and then encounter some scammer or overly dedicated nerd and another to have an army of twelve year olds cheating trivially on every session you play.
Of course when it comes to Linux support the question is whether you can get Linux/SteamOS to the former state, or whether the volume of players is not enough to trigger the latter. I don’t know, frankly. Each game probably has a different balance and figures out that math for themselves based on it.
You’re right on all accounts, I oversimplified for humor. Server-side IS more expensive and does exist in limited ways. Rolling matches on dedi servers are highly profitable, unfortunately the old school days of matchmaking are over for everything except indie companies that want to replicate the nostalgia
how do you actually tell in server side if a client is e.g. actually good at a game vs playing recorded moves with a bit of randomisation when you don’t have access to into on what’s actually happening on the client device?
as much as I love Linux this sounds like purposeful partial blindness from hopium/copium
One part would be to run a shadow client that takes the user’s input and sees how much the game state diverges. There will be a certain amount of it due to network latency, but if there’s some cheater using an engine mod/hack to fly around the map, this will catch that. Though something like that should be caught by a lower level check that makes sure the players are following the laws of physics in the game (like max speed, gravity applies, no teleporting).
Another one would be to see if the player follows things they shouldn’t be able to see. If a player hides behind something they can shoot through but can’t see through, do they somehow seem to always know they are there? Do they look around at walls and then beeline for an opponent that was hidden by those walls?
Another one would be if their movement (view angle) changes when they are close to targeting an enemy or if they consistently shoot when the enemy is centre of target, then it’s a sign they are using a device that even kernel mode anti cheat won’t catch to cheat (it plugs in to your input between your mouse and PC, also plugs in to somewhere that would allow it to act as a video capture device, then just watches for enemies to get close and sends movement or clicks to aim or shoot for you). Though this one is pretty difficult to catch, due to network latency. But those mouse movements might defy the laws of physics if the user was already moving. Natural movement is continuous in position and its first derivative (always, by Newton’s f = ma, though sample rate complicates that), and the way we generally move is also continuous in the second derivative, but banging your mouse into your keyboard can defy that and it’s even more sensitive to sample rate.
Imo these techniques should be combined with a reporting system and manual reviews. Reports would activate the extra checks for specific players (it would be pretty expensive to do it for all players), then positive matches from the extra checks would trigger a manual review and maybe a kick or temp ban, depending on how reliable the checks are.
That said, I believe there will eventually be AI-based bots where detecting them vs other skilled players will be impossible. And those will be combinable with some infrastructure that allows players to take certain amounts of control, maybe even with an RTS-like interface that could direct the bot to certain areas. Though adding an LLM and speech to text and vice versa could allow it to just respond to voice commands, both from other teammates and from the player.
I think at that point, preventing cheating in online games will be impossible and in person tournaments will probably involve using computers provided by the organizers (tbh I’m kinda surprised this isn’t already the case and that some people have been caught using cheats during these kinds of tournaments).
You’ll never catch all cheaters no matter what you do. All the kernel access in the world won’t stop someone from having a secondary device hooked into the monitor output and faking a dumb keyboard and mouse.
A solid robust server-side solution and well architected server-client system will stop 99% of cheating. And no, Kernel AC is not part of a “well architected” system.
It’s, at best, a bandaid for a shitty server-client system that introduces a shit ton of privacy and security issues for everyone that uses it. Shit needs to stay out of the kernel unless absolutely necessary, and that goes for Linux, Windows or MacOS kernels.
Almost every blue screen/Kernel panic I’ve dealt with was traced back to some shit hooking itself into the kernel where it didn’t belong. And absolutely fuck third-party antivirus that hooks into the kernel too.
All the kernel access in the world won’t stop someone from having a secondary device hooked into the monitor output and faking a dumb keyboard and mouse.
I guess that’s true, but that’d be a lot difficult to program and expensive to use compared to a simple program that can read data straight from the game’s memory in machine readable format and send inputs straight into the system’s input framework. by raising the entry bar you’re effectively decreasing the amount of people that will cheat in the game
it’s ultimately the user’s decision if they want to sacrifice the purity of their kernel for a game like this, and I think it’s their problem if their kernel panics for them wanting to play slop made by AAA studios
I mean DMA (direct memory access) devices are only like 170 bucks now:
https://www.dma-cheats.com/dma-cards
These are almost impossible to do anything about even client-side because they operate on a hardware level.
In general state-reading hacks (like invisible walls and Gameworld state information hacks) are almost impossible to do anything about, to the point where when companies are able to find a way to defeat one of these things it’s huge news.
oh damn I didn’t know you could do direct memory access like that, that’s so wild
In addition to what @homicidalrobot@lemm.ee covered on the first part of your response
it’s ultimately the user’s decision if they want to sacrifice the purity of their kernel for a game like this, and I think it’s their problem if their kernel panics for them wanting to play slop made by AAA studios
That’s absolute horseshit, the average gaming consumer doesn’t know shit about the kernel, what it even is or the implications of running Kernel AC. They might know their game has AC, but chances are they won’t even know what kind to make this kind of informed decision.
This is becoming less true for FPS every month - the described method of cheating (off-device reading and input simulation) is becoming more accessible as more cheat makers are selling premade devices that do this. Huge problem even for new shooters like rivals - someone was already caught doing it in one of their ingame tournaments. It’s the primary way people cheat in League of Legends, and it would not surprise me to see evidence of it in dota 2(though I haven’t personally, I haven’t been paying attention to it for some years and it isn’t as frequent that a variety streamer or youtuber plays it compared to lol).
As mentioned before, kernel anticheat won’t catch these guys anyway, so it’s largely just a way to alienate your user base. There’s a new problem it does nothing special to solve.
