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With Proton and Steam Play, many Windows games now work on Linux

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Re: With Proton and Steam Play, many Windows games now work on Linux

#161

Post by invokestatic »

devwastaken wrote: post #156
invokestatic wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fwiw, my solution does actually take advantage of remote attestation, and if that is validated, a large part of kernel integrity checks are skipped. The problem is that many “gaming” consumer motherboards don’t ship with TPMv2 or secure boot, and we still have to support those computers.

How does tpm or secureboot assist in anti cheat?

When you can remotely prove that the entire boot chain has not been tampered with, it’s much harder to load cheat software in the kernel layer. Of course, still possible, just harder and easier to detect.

Re: With Proton and Steam Play, many Windows games now work on Linux

#162

Post by inetknght »

I've been using Linux as my main (and, really, only) personal OS since Windows 7 went EOL.

I have an HTC Vive. There are many VR games that don't work at all even with Proton. There are many games that do work though.

The only game that doesn't work that I truly miss is Planetside 2.

But your typical big name games do work, even ones that aren't on Steam. Doom, Factorio, Kerbal Space Program, EVE Online -- these all work wonderfully. Space Engineers works "okay" -- it has an issue where the process threads will linger in the background even after you exit.

Blizzard's Battle.net games also work great -- you just have to start it with Lutris and do some magic to enable Vulkan. WoW and Diablo III work beautifully.

If I have one complaint about Steam is that clicking the blue button to tell Steam to kill a game doesn't work. Space Engineers and World of Warships both have to be manually killed sometimes and it would be real nice if Steam would do it so I don't have to open a terminal and find the relevant Wine garbage to do it myself.

Re: With Proton and Steam Play, many Windows games now work on Linux

#163

Post by pojntfx »

inetknght wrote: post #162

I've been using Linux as my main (and, really, only) personal OS since Windows 7 went EOL. I have an HTC Vive. There are many VR games that don't work at all even with Proton. There are many games that do work though. The only game that doesn't work that I truly miss is Planetside 2. But your typical big name games do work, even ones that aren't on Steam. Doom, Factorio, Kerbal Space Program, EVE Online -- these all…

Awesome to hear! May I ask how you've gotten Space Engineers to work?

Re: With Proton and Steam Play, many Windows games now work on Linux

#164

Post by q3k »

invokestatic wrote: post #9
anewguy9000 wrote: post #2

as i understand it the big roadblock for multiplayer AAA titles is anticheat, and dont see anyway that changes until linux eats into the MS marketshare (but it should.. linux is a joy!)

I have an anti-cheat startup, and Linux support is a big priority for us. The segmentation problem on Linux is a real challenge for us. It’s likely we will only ever be able to support the big distros, and we also are exploring using TPM remote attestation. Both of these things take away user freedom to tinker with their systems, an ability Linux enthusiasts enjoy. But with this freedom implicitly comes with the free…

> and we also are exploring using TPM remote attestation

I can already tell this is very likely not going to work fully, or even work for a sizeable chunk of Linux installations out there. Many platforms don't have TPMs, or have TPMs from unknown CAs. Or firmware that you're not aware of. Or even worse, people might just be running a Linux distribution that you don't know about. Or a patched kernel. Or a bootloader that doesn't measure the next stage into TPM. Not to mention, even the most popular distributions allow you to do anything with root access, things that you just won't be able to measure, but that might allow people to cheat.

TPMs really only make sense for _very_ controlled environments if you want to prevent hardware tampering at this level. The diversity of Linux distributions (and PCs in general) truly works against you here.

Re: With Proton and Steam Play, many Windows games now work on Linux

#165

Post by m-p-3 »

jasonjayr wrote: post #119
invokestatic wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now I'm biased because I'm an anti-cheat developer, but I really can't see how checking the integrity of your installed kernel device drivers is at all invasive.

It's none of the game's business what other software my computer is running. These checks have in the past been notoriously buggy, and can interfere with other operations. This kind of crud is what remote attestation is for, and Microsoft should be responsible for developing it, not every different gaming company competing with each other for kernel access.

I agree, but at some point you have to decide if the tradeoff between the freedom to run whatever you want is worth the invasiveness of having an anticheat software analysing your system in-depth for cheating softwares is worth it.

In a way, it's true that it's none of their business which softwares you use, but it's also their business to make sure the multiplayer experience is fair for the entire userbase.

I guess that's the beauty of games consoles, where the execution of softwares is tightly controlled to minimize piracy and cheaters.

Re: With Proton and Steam Play, many Windows games now work on Linux

#166

Post by arilotter »

dghlsakjg wrote: post #123
invokestatic wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now I'm biased because I'm an anti-cheat developer, but I really can't see how checking the integrity of your installed kernel device drivers is at all invasive.

I use a generic xbox 360 wireless receiver for my PC. The device drivers are an unsigned version of microsoft's drivers. Should I really have to buy the identical dongle for double the price, so that developers can dig into the depths of my OS to confirm that I'm not using a clone receiver? I honestly see both sides of it, but at the end of the day, I am always hesitant to trust software with black-box functionality…

We're already there! See hardware like the EvilController or the ConsoleTuner Titan

Re: With Proton and Steam Play, many Windows games now work on Linux

#167

Post by offtop5 »

krajzeg wrote: post #126
offtop5 wrote: post #7

Unity actually exports Linux binaries so most developers could do Linux natively. The issue ends up being support cost vs sales. If 1% of your fan base runs Ubuntu, but they're 50% of your big reports, it's cheaper to not worry about them.

It's also not as trivial as just flipping to "Linux" in a combo box and re-exporting. Getting the game to run well requires work, from writing additional platform dependent code, through fixing issues caused by changing the graphics backend (unless you use OpenGL on Windows, which you probably don't) to a lot of additional QA needed to make sure your Linux build still runs after the latest changes. I'm a solo game de…

For your game did you open an LLC to publish it.

I'm debating doing that now, but it comes off as a ton of work where I don't particularly think I'll make money .

Re: With Proton and Steam Play, many Windows games now work on Linux

#168

Post by nightfly »

techelite wrote: post #104
bozzcl wrote: post #48

I switched back from Pop!_OS about a month ago, after nearly a year of using it exclusively. My previous laptop broke, so I got a new one. Of course I immediately created a Pop! partition and started installing stuff. I tried Doom Eternal... and it was running extremely slow for what you'd expect from a RTX 2080. Surely enough, I switched to my Windows 10 partition and the game ran smooth like butter over there. I sp…

I'm a bit skeptical of all the positivity here. Heck if I can't edit mouse acceleration with ease, how hard is it going to be to watch Netflix? Do I need to downgrade chromium to 30.4 just to install some plugin incompatible with the v32 chromium? These are real issues that you'd expect Ubuntu to have working from defaults. I'm not asking for every porn website to work, but all FAANG websites to work.

> Heck if I can't edit mouse acceleration with ease

Mouse/trackpad/trackpoint configuration can be one of the most painful things to do on Linux. Netflix and friends are easy (unless you want HD sometimes >.>)

Re: With Proton and Steam Play, many Windows games now work on Linux

#169

Post by La1n »

pojntfx wrote: post #163
inetknght wrote: post #162

I've been using Linux as my main (and, really, only) personal OS since Windows 7 went EOL. I have an HTC Vive. There are many VR games that don't work at all even with Proton. There are many games that do work though. The only game that doesn't work that I truly miss is Planetside 2. But your typical big name games do work, even ones that aren't on Steam. Doom, Factorio, Kerbal Space Program, EVE Online -- these all…

Awesome to hear! May I ask how you've gotten Space Engineers to work?

You might know already, but https://www.protondb.com/ has user reports for Proton games, the reports often include tweaks if a game doesn't work without tweaking.

Re: With Proton and Steam Play, many Windows games now work on Linux

#170

Post by dylz »

invokestatic wrote: post #155
dylz wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm guessing this is a mix of attestation and inspecting what they actually do instead of just blindly checking the certificate and that the signature is verified? I'm curious how well executed that works when it comes to less well behaved anticheats (like Riot's Vanguard generally stays hands off, but GameGuard will immediately heartbeat a "ban me" and intentionally cause a bluescreen to cause you to "lose any data…

I’m not going to comment on the specifics of what we do besides what I’ve already said. I will say that I’m really pushing to change the perception that all anti-cheats are bad and are user-hostile. I’m trying to build a product that shows that anti-cheats can actually respect user privacy and provide a positive player experience. And I’m trying to do it by better engineering. Vanguard I believe would intentionally b…

I appreciate that you are trying to do this with respect and hope you succeed.

I've done both sides (largely MMO-stuff as a kid), and for me, I'm done dealing with all this invasive garbage, and just spin up a fresh EC2 GPU instance when I want to play something, and simply don't play the games that choose to disrespect and abuse players to the point of not even allowing GPU passthrough (I can somewhat understand banning emulated GPUs; have dealt with people farming referral accounts a hundred at a time each queuing for games at <5 FPS).

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