There's a great YouTube channel that focuses around that question. Not game reviews, but reviews of what it's like to live with someone who plays that game (and how enjoyable it is to backseat that particular game)
lol I loved her review of Sekiro where she said something like "as for the soulsborne series, the latest game, Sekiro, is actually IN COLOR!" that's always been my girlfriend's problem with the soulsborne series, they're so dull and depressing to look at. Sekiro looks lush and beautiful while still maintaining that environment of dread.
I don’t understand how this hasn’t been solved yet. The new Texas Chain Saw Massacre game has had massive cheating problems. How is it 2023 but people haven’t figured out anticheat yet? Also, how are game companies just not banning these users permanently when they are caught?
I’ve heard all kinds of rumors about how the server side doesn’t do any client traffic validation, et al. I’m a dev by trade so I’m not new to code, but game dev is all a black box to me.
I wonder if it's the cost of data processing the inputs on servers. The ongoing costs of having software handle it on the client machine is close to $0.
Though it feels like democratizing the checks could work. Like, everyone within a match together is checked by everyone else in real time since they're all handling the objects moving around anyways.
Though there are probably many good reasons why that doesn't work or is extremely hard to implement consistently. The idea just came to me
Computers are very fast these days, and if the only thing that computer is doing is data processing it seems like it should not be an overwhelming task. It honestly seems like the perfect use case for something like Kafka. Data stripped of its schema and encoded to be the smallest size possible. Encrypt that if necessary, maybe using some kind of session only encryption beginning at client server handshake, based on some value that’s generated inside the game binary.
I’m sure it’s difficult to engineer, but it shouldn’t be impossible. I’d love to understand what the current processes are and why things are failing horribly.
They fail because you can’t trust a machine that an adversary has in their physical possession.
Software running on an untrusted computer can have code and memory injected or modified without modifying the executable files. Binary executable files are by necessity readable and someone with enough time can parse through them to fully deobfuscate and figure out what they are doing. Anti-anti-cheat systems basically perform the same code as the anti-cheat but slightly modify the result to hide the cheating. This can be done either by code swapping in the anti-cheat or at a higher level. If the anti-cheat system is looking at which processes are running then have the system feed it the real list of processes with the cheat processes removed… etc.
Trusted computing requires hardware level monitoring, validated certificates, and zero vulnerabilities since the time the certificate was provisioned. In addition, current technology would also require those base certificates to be regularly rotated and device decertified if it didn’t rotate in time to prevent physical offline hardware attacks on the certificate data. Even game consoles don’t have this level of platform trust and are often physically modified to enable cheating/piracy.
The only successful way to prevent most cheating is to run the simulation entirely server-side and then only send data to each client according to what they should know. Even then you won’t be able to prevent assisted cheating like aim-bots or texture replacements.
I guess if you want to accurately want to do the checks on the server side you’d have to run the complete game on the server. You can cheat just by making a texture transparent so that you can see enemies behind it. To prevent that the server has to render the frames itself and to ensure that really only approved things are seen by the players the easiest would be to just send over the rendered frame instead of letting the players render it themselves. By that point you have basically invented game streaming again.
Still, I wonder what Blizzard games are doing. They work fine on Linux and I haven’t heard much about cheating on there.
You don’t have to send over the frame to fix it a bit, just less information. Minimize the info needed. One thing you can do is occlude to determine which entities should be rendered. Even applied, they could still get an advantage - being able to see an entire character instead of just the exposed part of their foot - but it would at least limit it more.
I love my Steam Deck. I do a lot of gaming on my regular PC. But I appreciate my Deck when I’m on the go. It’s a great portable gaming device and all the games I’m interested in have worked fine.
What might be beneficial to know in your face, since you have your family and want to be close is the “suspend” feature. In the middle of a PC game, you can simple click the power button to Suspend the game and when you’re done, just turn it back on and you’ll be right where you left it.
This, definitely this! The suspend feature is a lifesaver and really makes it so much more likely for me to stick with and finish a game that I truly enjoy.
To be honest I have plenty of games in my backlog to play. Buuuut if there are any really good deals on Tunic, Pizza Tower, Tetris Effect or Cult of the Lamb I maybe consider them.
I should probably reduce my backlog first though...
Got cult of the lamb in the last sale. Was really fun and ran well. A bit repetitive with managing the cult in my opinion. But there is an option to stop time while you are on crusade (and cooking without minigane. With that it was worth it :)
There’s an interesting issue here that shows Linux support is a cultural thing, not a business thing.
They’ve presented it as “it doesn’t make sense to financially support Linux due to low player count.” But they don’t need to provide official support, they just need to tick a box and say “yeah, we don’t support this, do it at your own risk.”
From a purely financial point of view, Linux support is almost free. If you release your game, a bunch of developers off of your payroll will just add Linux support. You don’t even need to give them technical support because they use an unsupported platform.
To use business lingo, blocking Linux support is just leaving money on the table.
But I think a lot of companies feel like they have to have full control of everything. That everything they do most be fully supported and approved by them. That they are scared of letting the community take charge of things because it might tarnish your brand or whatever.
They are worried that there’ll be graphical bugs or something and that’ll make Fornight look bad, so it’s better for their brand image to just block everything they don’t have control over.
It’s a worrying pattern I’ve seen in a few places, including Mozilla of all things.
… Or maybe it’s just that Epic are too stubborn to accept help and contributions from anyone else, especially their “enemies”.
I have been wondering why they don’t just take Heroic launcher and add a skin around it to make an “official” launcher. It’s probably just because they are too prideful to support anything open source or Valve. They think that they need to make their own thing, rather than using existing code.
Sorry for the rambling post, but I think this situation is more due to an unhealthy company culture than “lol 2% market share” as they present it.
There is no “unofficial client” to exploit, there is an unofficial installer/launcher. Windows games run using proton run in exactly the same way they do on windows, the game itself is not modified in any way, that’s the whole point.
It allows you to run games, as if they were on windows. All these companies have to do, is fucking allow it.
Are you aware that Fortnite uses EasyAntiCheat which is already working on Linux with plenty of other games? It’s literally as simple as Epic Games allowing it. And yes the anticheat still works, so no it’s not about preventing cheaters. Read the news from earlier this year about EAC enabling it on Linux and how a whole host of games have already done so.
Epic already makes anticheat that supports Linux, and other games they own already run on Linux with anticheat.
They’re just holding out on fortnite because… actually I’m not sure why. Probably Sweeney’s personal thoughts on it. If they actually wanted it to run on Linux/deck I have no doubt they could without much trouble.
Sweeney is lying through his teeth here. From things he has said previously, it becomes very clear he hates the whole idea of linux. When steamdeck became a thing, it was clear he was salty about how it would shine a light on it as an alternative OS. With this interview, by now it seems he is beginning to bend under the pressure and at least pretending that “oh I have nothing against such and amazing platform, so sad we can’t support it” in order to not look like an ass.
Which is an out that will bite him in the ass, they can support it, so soon interviewers won’t be asking, “why can’t you support linux” but “why won’t you”.
Valve is guilty of the same crime, a billionaire can’t hire anyone to do CSGO2 Apple support. It’s never been about money or support. The CEOs are just being jerks.
Valve did purchase the for-profit MoltenVK layer and had it open-sourced under the Khronos umbrella, so they’ve already been happy to provide people a Vulkan-on-Metal solution for those who want to support Apple without an entirely separate rendering engine.
In the case of fortnite, this isn’t really true. The issue of fortnite is the anti cheat system is not designed to play nice with Linux and allowing Linux without having the anti cheat on point would lead to players getting mad at cheaters and the collapse of fortnite. It’s happened to several games in the past that couldn’t prevent people from cheating.
Easy anti-cheat stays on. Several other games have implemented it on Linux without problems. Easy anti-cheat made it as easy as the developer (Epic Games) checking a box to allow it to run on Linux. That’s what the person you’re responding to is referring to. It’s a recent development that happened earlier this year.
It’s happened to several games in the past that couldn’t prevent people from cheating.
And those games are…? There are plenty of games that have allowed anticheat to work on Linux and haven’t imploded, but I don’t know of a single one that has. Care to encourage enlighten me?
I don’t specifically mean games that used anti cheats that ran on Linux. I just mean games that couldn’t keep from too many people cheating and it ruining the online aspect of a game. A couple different Diablo games come to mind. COD:Warzone got pummeled for a while. Fall Guys had a very rough season 1.
It wasnt Marie Antoinette but Madame Victoire, a Louis XV’s daughter.
And apparently she didnt spoke about cake, but the dough used for cook paté. Instead to use a baking pan, they used dough for surround the paté and cook it.
A funny twist, is nowadays, we eat the paté with it’s dough. It is a paté en croute.
In my computer science class this week I was having an issue with a line of code throwing an error I’d never seen before, so I took my laptop up to my instructor for help. After looking at my code for a minute she very solemnly said “oh, I know what’s wrong. It’s your fault.” After we finished laughing I said “I know it’s my fault, but please tell me why so I can fix it”
If you're into horror, SOMA. It's got an amazing story you can digest together, and there's plenty of puzzles where she could help you figure out the answers. Or be a second set of eyes to look out for clues and the baddies.
steamdeck
Hot
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.